Software Engineering Talent is Gold Right Now

…but not for the reasons you think.

The job market for software engineers is in a pretty bad place. It's nowhere near what it was like when I graduated from college. Despite this, software engineering talent is unique in its ability to provide extraordinary leverage and productivity today.

If you're an experienced software engineer with a maverick attitude, you're deadly right now.

Ever had a tedious task you wished to automate? Are you the type of person to actually automate it?

Or have you ever encountered a workflow that was formulaic, but couldn't be automated because some of the steps required human input?
Now you can automate it. And the answer to the burning question — is it productive on the net to automate it? — is now almost definitively, almost always, "yes."

For example…

I'm working on a startup, but that's not the point of this post, so we won't talk about what exactly it is. The point here is that I need to get more customers, and the way that I get more customers is by marketing the thing. How do I market it? By trying a bunch of different approaches, looking at the data, and leaning into the sources of users that are profitable to acquire.

Finding a profitable source of customers is very hard. I don't have a magical formula. I don't think anyone does. If they did, they'd be a successful serial startup founder, or they'd be bored of business and making money because they've had enough of both already.

If you do have a source of customers that pay you more in revenue than you pay XYZ in advertising revenue, then you're gonna want to put a lot of eggs in that basket. What does that mean? Usually, it means creating advertisements, "content" (sigh), something of direct value, or something that's a signal to your potential customers that your product or service could be of value to them.

For me, that means creating 2d video game assets, sharing them for free, and promoting them. It turns out itch.io is a really good distribution platform for sharing video games, tools, and assets. I make one new sprite pack every single day and share it for free on itch.io. This has gotten me most of my customers.

What I do is actually very formulaic: I have already precomputed a list of sprite pack themes that I want to release. I use my startup's flagship service to generate the sprite pack. Then, I go to itch.io and create a page for the sprite pack. itch.io lets you intricately customize the page for your project: you can change the color of the background, the second background, the text, the buttons, the headers; you can select any font from Google Fonts for the headers and a different one for the body text. There's so much you can customize. You also need to provide a short description and long description. And tags. The list goes on. Each of these things considered individually, and their sum considered holistically, matters. It matters because it affects 1) how pleasing your sprite pack is and 2) ultimately how many people view it, download it, and use it. As a rational person, you want to maximize those two things. As an ethical person, you want to hold yourself to a certain standard such that you don't just shit out rubbish into the ether.

Since this process is so formulaic, I've automated much of it with ChatGPT. Sure, that's all fine and dandy. Yes, people already knew about that. But there's more! I've gone on to automate the process of creating a fully-fledged sprite pack showcase video with thematic music and narration! And I did it in like an hour! And it's actually not just flinging rubbish into the ether! I actually feel good about putting this content out because people like it.

If you have software engineering skills right now, you can take any really annoying problem that you know could be automated but is too painful to even start, you can type up a few paragraphs in your favorite human text editor to describe your problem in a well-defined way, and then paste that shit into Cursor with o3 MAX pulled up and it will one shot the automation script in about 3 minutes. This gives you superpowers.

I'm not just a technical founder. Now, I'm also an entire marketing department. That's pretty cool. What can you do? I bet you can do a lot!

– Tom, Creator of GameTorch