Is it increasingly hard to be a good engineer?

I don't think so generally. I've been doing this for a few decades, and it seems to me that overall it's no more difficult or easier than it ever has been. All of the points you make have always been the case, at least during my career. Engineers even older than me tell me the same was true before my career began as well.

In the zoomed-in view, there are some things which are definitely harder and others which are easier. But overall? I don't see a difficulty difference.

In general, being a good engineer means being able to cut through the hype and just deliver real solutions that solve real problems.

So you don't need to keep up on everything to be a good engineer. On the contrary, the best engineers I know stick to one thing long enough to know it deeply, while keeping a light eye on what is new in order to understand when it is worth learning a new skill. It is OK not to do everything. And best practices are not as clear as that term makes it seem - "best" is subjective. Different projects have different needs, so it is good to know what worked for others, but you still need the deep knowledge to make your own decisions.

I don't think the work is any harder now than it was a couple decades ago. But there are a lot more distractions now, so being comfortable with prioritizing where you want to spend your energy is a bigger task that it used to be.

I think it's tougher because the standards for good software are significantly higher.

20+ years ago, if you had a website that let people make comments and upload a low-resolution image for others to see, that was seen as pretty freaking cool.

Today, you need to create software that does something like have a 3d VR interface to order pizza, provide real-time maps of where your pizza is at all times, have perfect AI customer service agents that will answer any question instantly, and get it to you in under 5 minutes to barely raise an eyebrow about your tech.

The way I see things, the bar is lower than ever to be a good engineer. You put in some minor level of effort and you're 80% above everyone else.

Now, if you scope it to the top 20% of engineers and ask the same question, I'll give you a much different answer:

After you became a decent generalist, I'd refer you to concepts like "invest in yourself, not your job"[1] and just-in-time learning[2].

1. https://critter.blog/2023/10/05/invest-in-yourself-not-in-yo...

2. https://critter.blog/2020/08/14/learning-a-technology-you-do... (coincidentally, by the same fellow as in link #1)

What can be done with software is pretty immense now, but I think we tend to underestimate how much code being written in the industry is aimed at the maintenance of applications with only mild to moderate complexity.

If you're a decent generalist, maintenance of pretty much anything isn't that hard unless you're jumping into something low level like C++.

Architecture / building major applications from the ground up is harder, but this isn't that common of a task, and if you're building something mission critical and important, odds are you have a team. Or at least you should.

Not by any reasonable standard of "good", which is to say "marginally better than the median engineer".

I think it's more difficult because of #1. I would add that DevOps has mostly turned out as a way for companies to combine the jobs of two people into one, which creates enormous scope and only increases the context switching.

The #1 barrier in front of me for being a good engineer in my career has been my employer :)

They arrange things in such a way that all other options other than "shitty engineering" are thoroughly eliminated.

Many companies are not interested in good engineering. At least if they admitted it I'd be way less bitter about it. The insult to the injury is when they insist on pretending like they are into engineering.