Somewhere in your company there is a spreadsheet with macros in it that reconciles something important. One person maintains it. Two departments depend on it. It has never been reviewed, backed up or tested, and if that person leaves, several weeks of somebody's life go with them.
You already knew about that one. What is changing is how many of them there are, and how much they can do. The automation somebody in operations built in a workflow tool. The form that writes straight into a database. The assistant answering customer questions that marketing set up in an afternoon. They were built by people who do not call themselves engineers and never will, and the tools have quietly become good enough that the distance between wanting something and having a working version has collapsed.
That is not going to reverse, so it is worth deciding now how you want to meet it.
Start by not sneering, because the instinct to is strong and it costs you everything useful here. That spreadsheet is the most accurate requirements document in the building. Somebody built exactly what they needed with the only tools they were given, and every workaround in it is a precise description of something your systems failed to provide.
Expect to be called in. More of what you are asked to fix will be software you did not write and cannot read in the normal way. The first questions are not about the bug. Who built this, what feeds it, and what is now depending on the output.
And understand where the real engineering work moves, because this is the part that will matter for your career. It becomes building safe roads. A sanctioned way to get at the data. Somewhere to run things that survives a laptop being replaced. A review that takes a day rather than a quarter. People route around a no, every time. They will happily use a yes that comes with rails on it.
The person who can map that layer, and who the people who built it are willing to talk to, ends up knowing what the company actually runs on. There will not be many of them.
Monday: find the spreadsheet everybody depends on and ask its owner to walk you through it.
– Asael Shinder
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