The whole point of engineering is to engineer yourself out of your current job? What? I think I must be misunderstanding you. Are people who engineer planes supposed to be engineering spacecraft or consider themselves failures or something? I'm confused.

They are supposed to engineer machines that engineer planes during their free time obviously

Good point. I meant us fake software engineering, not you real engineers with “PE” at the end of your name. My original comment has been clarified.

They engineered themselves out of their current job and still get paid for the job they don't have to do. Sounds like they engineered it pretty well.

I hate this mindset. I’m not trying to make my job and the job of others obsolete. I just want to get paid so I can fuck off and do some other shit I want to do.

There's always going to be people who don't care about/ take pride in/find meaning in their work. That's a totally legitimate way to approach it, but it's sort of an orthogonal discussion to the one we're having.

It's also pretty weird to "hate" that others have managed to find meaning in their work, and discuss the manner in which they do so. I don't get much enjoyment out of cars, but if I noticed that I _hated_ it when others talked about cars and insisted that they treat them only as generic conveyances, I'd probably want to do some self-reflection around my emotional state.

I think the judgmental language is a large part of the reason for the reaction, as the parent seems to be making a blanket judgement of those who aren't engineering themselves out of a job, saying they'd "view that as a personal failure". The blanket nature and talk-down tone of "You should always be engineering yourself out of your current job" is also not likely to win broad support.

To re-use your metaphor, it'd be like a car nut telling you your quality as a person is less for not liking cars as much as they do.

I'm not sure I follow this.

The initial comment was "to do your job well, you should do X". The response was "I hate this type of comment. I don't care about doing my job well".

That seems like a pretty bizarre reaction. If someone said "it's hard work, but you should focus on [XYZ] to ensure your code is well-tested", and someone responded "I hate it when people talk about how to make code more robust. I don't care about doing my job well", would you find that a reasonable response as well? Or in response to parenting advice, "I hate this type of comment. I don't want to have kids". It seems to me that the implicit context for how to do your job well is....people who care about doing their job well?

Most technical jobs aren't like engineering, where the work-product is the process/design and the assumption is that the engineer will be moving on to a new design afterwards. This sounds more like a technician improving their personal set of tools, to me.