When you’ve been leading engineers for a while, you see some funny things. One archetype I come across frequently is the engineer/business expert. These people worked at the intersection of software and their business area so long that the lines of software engineering and business domain blurred. One coder was so deep into accounting, they were part of the business definition of accounting projects and they were integrated into routine processes. Another had become a leading tax SME within their company. A third was the only one who understood the business definition of a particular customer metric.
What they had in common was that they were no longer just software engineers. What they also had in common was that they were invaluable to their orgs.
Seen in the other direction, this is clear. No team believes they need a programmer to write Excel formulas, even though the references, nesting, and lookups can reach code-level complexity. Finance, accounting, business development, and other quantitative roles are expected to know how to formula, and their value is in their functional skill and their business expertise.
Similarly, SQL was pushed out of the domain of software engineering. It’s either incorporated into the expectations of a technical role, like engineering or data science, or it’s become the role of business intelligence teams or data science teams. These latter teams are aligned to business units and build deep knowledge of their business area.
This is where software engineers are headed. In a world where code becomes easier to create, the value is more on function and business. The role of the future is less fungible SWE and more payments SWE or data compliance SWE.
None of this is shocking. Some realms, like gaming, already have dedicated SWE roles. For any SWEs reading this, it isn’t a bad thing. Another commonality of the E/BEs described above is that they were all undervalued. Because the current role definition of SWE doesn’t include being a business expert, none of them were getting sufficient credit for their expertise when I met them.
