Stop Pretending You're An Engineer

THE MYTH

You believe your six-figure salary means you are a creator. A builder. An engineer. You think that because you can stitch together a React frontend with a Firebase backend, you are practicing a high-level craft. This is a comforting lie. You are a technician. A digital plumber connecting pipes that smarter people built.

THE PAIN

This delusion makes you fragile. Your entire career is built on a framework that will be obsolete in five years. Your 'skill' is your knowledge of a specific API's documentation. You are infinitely replaceable. A cheaper developer from another continent, or a purpose-built AI, can do your job. You are a commodity, and the market is about to correct its overvaluation of your role. You are not building leverage; you are renting it.

THE RED PILL

The system doesn't pay you for your intellect. It pays for your speed in assembling pre-built components. You are a cog in a feature factory. The math is brutal: The supply of API gluers is exploding. Bootcamps churn them out daily. When supply exceeds demand, value plummets. Your high salary is not a reflection of your worth; it is a temporary market inefficiency. You are being paid to follow recipes, not to invent them. The real engineers built the APIs you call.

Prove me wrong. Justify your title. What have you truly engineered from first principles this year, versus simply connecting services A, B, and C? The comment section is open.

THE ESCAPE

You can escape the factory floor. But it requires pain.

1. Master the Abstract. Stop learning frameworks. Start mastering the concepts they hide. Computer science fundamentals. Networking protocols. Database internals. Build the engine, don't just drive the car. This is hard. It doesn't provide instant gratification. Do it anyway.
2. Destroy Problems, Don't Build Features. Look at your backlog. See past the Jira ticket. Identify the root business problem. Is the goal to reduce server costs? Is it to increase user conversion? Propose solutions that don't involve writing more glue code. Maybe the solution is to delete code. Become a problem-solver, not a code-assembler.
3. Build Your Own System. Stop working on other people's disposable products. Build a system, however small, that generates leverage for you. A SaaS. A popular open-source tool. Anything that separates your time from your income. Own the pipes, don't just connect them.

👁️ The 1% Knowledge

Systems they don't teach in school.

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