Some people work in a system, and some people work on a system.
Like, you can be the person who washes the dishes, or the person who installs and maintains the dishwasher.
You can be the person who assembles the reports every week, or the person who automates that report assembly. (Jacob Stoebel told this story on >Code #148 today. That’s how he got into software development.)
You can conform to a system, or you can participate fully — part of serving the system is changing the system to better serve you.
Developers are inherently system changers. That’s what we do. No wonder we’re hard to manage!
No wonder software communities are full of turmoil and rabble-rousing and shifting technologies: we are a whole industry full of system changers.
Also on >Code today, we talked about personal automation. Chante Thurmond remarked on the tools that exist today to let people (not just developers!) customize, tweak, and automate their work. We can all craft the systems we operate in. More and more system changers.
This is the real change software makes in the world.