Engineering doesn’t solve problems…

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Martijn Veldkamp

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July 10, 2025

We just trade them in for newer, more interesting ones. And that’s our real job.

You ever spend a week with your team fixing a critical system, finally push the fix live and feel that wave of relief? Only to get a Slack message two months later. “Hey, weird question. Ever since we deployed that one patch, the reporting dashboard runs… backwards?”

Of course it does.

This is a beautiful lie

We have a sacred belief that we are problem solvers. We take a messy world and make it clean with elegant logic. We’re not problem solvers. We are professional Problem Shifters. Think about it. We “fixed” monolithic backends… and created the 1,000-microservice headache that is only stable in the weekends as no one is deploying (Real story from Uber Lead Architect). We “fixed” manual server deployments… and created the 3000-line YAML file. Therefore we now need anchors and aliases.

It makes me think of the invention of the refrigerator. It’s a modern miracle. On the other hand, the cooling liquid tore a hole in the ozone layer.

That’s our job in a nutshell. We aren’t creating a utopia of solved problems. We’re just swapping today’s problem for tomorrow’s way more fascinating crisis. Yeah, I’m old and I was there to fix the year 2000 problem.

My PTO is coming up, and I was looking at books to take with me. Next to Bill Bryson’s a short history of nearly everything I also packed Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy by Douglas Adams. I’ve read them before, but never combined them.

I think it is safe to say that we have found the :

First Law of Engineering Thermodynamics

Problem energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed in form.

Saying this out loud is a bit cynical. But I think you can also make it into a superpower. If we are smart about our entire approach.

We need to Stop chasing “done.” And start chasing “durable.” The goal isn’t just to close the ticket. It’s to create a solution that won’t spawn five more tickets. Ask the “Next Question.” The most important question is “if we build this, what new problem are we creating?” Acknowledge the trade off upfront. Redefine your win. The best engineers aren’t the ones who solve the most problems. They’re the ones who create the highest quality of future problems. That did not come out right. It’s having less complexity and less problems.

Building stuff is easy. The same goes for adding quick fixes, work arounds or low hanging fruits. Building a maintainable future that’s the hard part.

What’s the best “future problem” you’ve ever created? Drop your best story in the comments.