How To Start To Like Users And Enjoy Software Engineering

For some people software engineering is about the code, for me, software engineering is about the people. Here’s why I like it that way

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When I was in my primary school, I’ve started to get interested in programming. It was maybe not so fascinating as mathematics, but still there was something in it. Especially what I liked were algorithmic contests.

Such contests involved several tasks you had to solve with an algorithm. Moreover the algorithm should have low complexity and deliver answers in all cases with the minimal code and processing time.

For a quite a while it’s all I thought programming was about. The involvement of people in such algorithms was limited to providing data to a function from an expected range of approved values. So there was no expectancy of handle unexpected values e.g. strings rather than numbers.

It was all about algorithms. Life was beautiful and I really thought it’s what I would be doing when becoming someday an engineer. A vision interesting, challenging, but also kind of boring.

Just after a while during the education a new entity came to life, and came to life rather slowly, usually outside the main focus of any IT class I’ve been too.

This entity had a limited access to the system. In case of console apps, that entity was able to provide input and receive output.

Later during use case diagram building classes, that entity had also limited access. Moreover, even there that person was drawn outside the system. Not as a part of a system that’s build, but outside with a visibly limited access to the system, limited rights.

These diagrams of course make sense, user can be seen as someone who is served by the system. But it also gives that vibe that a user is an outsider, not very welcome. Someone who uses the system, but the system is in the center and is the most important part of the whole idea: