So little actual software development in software engineering roles

[Mark Woodward]

I have been looking around for positions having had my last project 
canceled. I'm so tired, it seems like "software development" is more 
"software integration" these days. Maybe I'm old and washed up. I don't 
know, but jeez, I LOVE writing software. I mean, I love it. Problems 
wake me up in the middle of the night with rapturous solutions. I mean, 
seriously, I don't care what kind of software I'm writing, just be 
something that does something.

In the past few years, I've kept in touch with various high profile 
colleagues, hoping against hope that something interesting would show 
up. Sadly, no.

Venture Capitalists should no longer have the initials VC, it should be 
more like "vC." I know times are tough, but the whole VC deal is 
supposed to help you develop a product. The new deal is that you more or 
less have to have it developed. Worse than that, it needs to be fully 
buzzword compliant. While this is not an entirely new thing, it has 
become much worse.

Then, don't get me started on cloud computing. I mean, really, "cloud" 
computing. Talk about a buzzword. OMG then there's SaaS! None of these 
things are rocket science, and in many ways, they offer really powerful 
solutions to previously difficult or expensive problems, but not 
everything NEEDS to be cloud based. SaaS is a billing model, not an 
architecture, just ask skype.

Lastly, for various reasons, I'm a generalist. That means I have a 
pretty wide exposure with some really deep experience in a few areas 
like low level C/C++ and OS stuff (Windows, Linux, BSD). I could write a 
book on the various programming issues: threads, processes, 
synchronization, memory management, I/O, DMA, compilers, algorithms, 
pseudo-AI expert systems, databases, SQL variations, optimizations, and 
on and on.

What's the point?