July 5, 2026
Craft wars: now with extra eye-rolls
Neoengineers
A fancy new label for caring about your work sparked instant eye-rolls, soul-searching, and revolt
TLDR: A writer pitched "neoengineer" as a new name for people who respect the craft of building things and focus on being effective, not just busy. Commenters immediately split between "this is timeless common sense," "this is corporate self-optimization propaganda," and "why is the website fighting me?"
A blog post trying to popularize the term "neoengineer" — basically, someone who deeply cares about the craft of building things and solving hard problems — should have been a calm philosophy chat. Instead, the comment section turned it into a mini culture war. The author argues people should stop obsessing over fuzzy buzzwords like "productivity" and instead ask a simpler question: what would a truly effective engineer do? That means learning deeply, planning properly, and not taking shortcuts just because a chatbot can spit out code fast.
But the community was not ready to just nod along. One camp got instantly existential. "God I feel old," sighed one commenter, arguing engineering has always been about responsibility, not trendy rebranding. Another went straight for the corporate jugular, with the hottest take of the thread: trying to become the "most effective" worker just means becoming a better "slave" for a company that would replace you tomorrow. Ouch.
Then came the classic internet side quest: someone ignored the philosophy entirely to complain that the website itself was a nightmare, calling it a "horrific site" with an "abusive antihuman filter" and back-button hijacking. Meanwhile, skeptics picked apart the logic, asking why "productivity" is supposedly too vague to define, but "effectiveness" somehow gets a free pass. So yes, the big debate wasn’t really about the word. It was about identity, burnout, corporate loyalty, and whether this is timeless wisdom or just old ideas in a shiny new box.
Key Points
- •The article defines a “neoengineer” as a person who respects the craft of engineering and likes solving hard problems.
- •The author argues that focusing on “productivity” is less useful because it is treated as an unquantifiable measure of output.
- •The article says misjudging value can make people overestimate low-value output or underestimate useful planning and research.
- •It proposes evaluating tools, habits, and actions by asking whether an effective engineer would use them.
- •Examples in the article include learning algorithms deeply, avoiding overreliance on ChatGPT for code generation, and giving careful code review feedback.