Our civilization runs on software

Despite its transparency, as Bjarne Stroustrup has observed, "our civilization runs on software." It is therefore a tremendous privilege as well as a deep responsibility to be a software developer.

It is a privilege because what we do collectively as an industry has changed and will continue to change the world1. It is a responsibility because the world in turn relies on the products of our labor in so many ways. In the context of that labor, software is perhaps the ultimate building material: it springs from pure thought and is intrinsically malleable, yet it can be made manifest in our hardware systems, limited only by our vision (and certain immutable laws of physics and software).

As software professionals, we seek to develop and deploy useful systems of quality in a manner that reduces the distance from vision to execution. That the fruits of our labor are transparent to the world is as it should be: users want results and value, not more technology. For this reason, the primary challenge of every software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity in the face of essential complexity.

Handbook of Software Architecture