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This series, Engineer Formation in the Age of AI, explores what it means to become, and remain, a software engineer when AI tools are rapidly reshaping the profession.
We examine the cultural forces pressing against deep formation, make the case that technical judgment, professional identity, and personal responsibility are more essential now than ever, and offer a practical framework for how engineers can intentionally develop these qualities.
The series moves from diagnosis to conviction to action, with the goal of equipping engineers not just to survive an AI-accelerated world, but to lead in it with integrity and craft. We use the word constantly, so much so that we’ve nearly drained it of meaning.
“Professional” has collapsed into something like “competent and presentable,” a description of behavior or output quality, nothing more. You act professionally when you show up on time, do good work, and don’t cause drama.
That’s good as far as it goes. But it is far less than what the word once meant. To be professional once meant to be part of something important, something bigger than oneself. And it still does in some areas.
What the Older Professions Know
Consider medicine. Or law. Or architecture. These fields share something software engineering does not: an explicit, acknowledged obligation to form the next generation of practitioners.
The structure varies (residencies, clerkships, apprenticeships), but the principle is the same. Being a doctor isn’t just about seeing patients. It’s also about making more doctors. The attending who never teaches is understood to be failing the profession in a fundamental way.
They may be excellent clinicians, but that’s not enough.
A profession is a covenant: with a craft, with a body of knowledge, and with the people who will carry that craft forward after you are gone. You were formed by those who came before you. You owe that formation to those who come after. Not as a favor. As an obligation. And if you love your profession, it is a joy.
This Is What You Signed Up For
Forming the next generation is not an optional feature of a professional engineering career. It is not a personality type. It is not a management track. It is what distinguishes you as a professional engineer.
The stronger version: you cannot fully call yourself a professional if you are not, in some meaningful way, forming the next generation. This doesn’t mean running a formal mentoring program or taking on apprentices.
What it means is something more fundamental: a mindset. It means orienting yourself toward the people coming up behind you, accepting, not as an aspiration but as a duty, some share of the work of passing the craft on.
That is what a professional does. That is the mark.
A Trust, Not a Gift
Mentoring is often framed as generosity, the senior engineer giving time, attention, knowledge to someone who needs it. That framing isn’t wrong. But it allows the obligation to remain optional. Generous people mentor. The rest of us are off the hook.
Instead, consider a steward holding an estate in trust. They didn’t earn it. They were handed it with one expectation: return it intact, or better, to whoever comes next. The steward who consumes it all and walks away hasn’t just been ungenerous.
They’ve betrayed the trust.
What you received when you were formed, the judgment, the instincts, the accumulated wisdom of everyone who taught you and corrected you, was not a private gift. It was a trust. When you withhold that from the engineers coming up behind you, you are not simply failing to be generous. You are breaking faith with the profession that made you.
You Don’t Understand How Busy I Am
The most common objection is time. The sprint is full. The backlog is never empty. That mountain of technical debt is only getting larger. But “I’m too busy” is ultimately a statement about priorities, not capacity. Engineers who believe that writing tests is non-negotiable find time to write tests, even under deadline pressure.
The question is not whether you have the time. It is whether you believe formation is essential. If it is, you will find a way, imperfect, partial, never enough, but real.
What This Actually Looks Like
Many engineers hear “form the next generation” and imagine something more elaborate than what is actually required. Formation does not require a program. It requires an orientation.
It is the code review that takes an extra few minutes, not to nitpick style, but to explain the reasoning behind a design decision. It is asking a junior engineer “what were you trying to do here?” before you rewrite their code, because understanding their intent matters more than correcting their syntax. It is the conversation in which you tell a junior engineer about a mistake you made, what it cost, and what you learned.
The kind of story that cannot be Googled, cannot be generated by an AI, and can only come from the person who was there, in the room, when it went sideways. It is letting them drive, on a real task, with real stakes, while you resist the urge to grab the wheel every thirty seconds. It is the debrief afterward that turns an experience into a lesson.
None of this requires a formal program or a curriculum. It requires that you decide, in advance, that you are the kind of engineer who does this, that when the moment appears, in the margins of ordinary work, you don’t walk past it. That is all formation is. And it is what professionals do.
The Profession You’re Part Of
A professional is not merely someone who performs skilled labor at a high level.
A professional is someone who understands themselves to be a steward of a craft, responsible not just for their own work, but for the health and continuity of the discipline they practice.
The mark is not your certifications. Not your years of experience. Not the elegance of your architecture or the speed of your deploys. Those things matter.
But they are not the mark.
The mark is whether you are forming the next generation.
By that definition, and this is an invitation, not an accusation, are you a professional?
Next: The obligation is real, but so is the gift. One mentor, at the right moment, can change the entire arc of an engineer’s career.
