I enjoy development as much as ever. However, the industry has changed and is behaving in ways that I find highly ethically objectionable. I have come to think that, on the whole, our industry is doing much more harm than good to people and the world at large. I cannot support that, so I'm absolutely exiting.
I do, actually, but that still means that I have to support the rest of the industry, just indirectly. Since I think the industry as a whole has become something that is harmful, even that much of a connection doesn't sit comfortably for me.
I like my job more now than I have for the entire 30 years I’ve been working.
Besides for four years in the middle of my career from 2012-2016, I’ve always had a direct line to the customer (B2B until 2020 across multiple companies and then consulting). I’ve always enjoyed the stakeholder interaction and design and found coding a necessary evil to get the design done.
During the last decade, my vision/responsibility has been larger than I could accomplish myself - until AI got “good enough”. It’s taken the part of my job I find to be drudgery away.
I can go from requirements -> vision -> implementation much faster.
As a senior+, I have autonomy on how I implement projects (again consulting) and I don’t have to play the promotion song and dance. There isn’t any place for me to be promoted to. I an assigned an implementation, I get it done on time on budget and it meets requirements either by myself or someone else working with me and everyone leaves me alone.
Oh and I have been working remotely for 6 years across three companies
I’ve got 15+ years in industry and still working full time plus routine consulting on the side.
The grass is always greener so I absolutely fantasize about doing much anything else. I also wonder if I can keep on until retirement or if I should seek an exit while I have good finances.
As a Senior+ I’m constantly in battle with god awful leadership. So that sucks, a lot, it’s not what I’m here to do. I’m here to build good software. I’m also here to mentor, that’s fun, but without good leadership it’s pissing into the wind. Also, if you’re not a FAANG type you get capped pretty quick salary wise. While most folks would kill for a 160k salary and benefits the hedonic treadmill is something of a reality and inflation is also cruel.
Still, I get paid to work in flip flops and a t-shirt from my house. Set my own hours (mostly) and do something adjacent to what I love. So it is what it is.
I've spent 20 years working and 8 in the industry. Definitely feel jaded and looking for an exit. The push to use AI whenever possible, the repetition of the work, the cluelessness of leadership, the rounds of layoffs, and the Return To Office even if it reduces productivity have all worn on me. The high compensation has kept me here longer than I probably should have stayed. A lot of my "issues" would be noticeably better if I worked at a startup instead of a megacorp, but then the compensation wouldn't be as good. Also ... just staring at a screen all day. I daydream about being in nature and find a lot of my senior coworkers do as well. Maybe a year off would help.
I do still enjoy it, but only because I'm so deep into it that I don't need to work all the time, and can pick and choose exactly who I work for, work with, and what tech I work on. If I were younger and less established, I would be seriously looking elsewhere.
I've enjoyed SW engineering always. It started as a hobby and I'm fortunate to do what I enjoy as a profession. Do I still enjoy it? I find the rise of AI mesmerising. It's delightful to me to use AI and build with it in the partner role. Doesn't mean I don't have misgivings or doubts about where we end up, but I've never been so enthralled with tech.
With AI, I can independently build my own products. I'm no longer confined to being a product manager; I'm a true developer. Thanks to my previous coding experience and entrepreneurial ventures as a product manager, AI has accelerated all my skills. Perhaps most of my skills were just starting out before, but with AI, they can quickly transform into productivity and rapidly improve in practice.
What I dislike is that the market has become more cutthroat. It requires more energy to build, build, build faster.
Yes, it's a lot of fun. I'm working on a core team at Google, and honestly i'd keep doing it even if I had 10M stashed away.
It is also very stressful and frustrating at times.
However, early in my career I had challenging and stressful jobs with shitty managers who always tried to crack the whip, where I made 80k a year.
Now at least my stressful job has me pampered between stresses and mostly my boss telling me I did a good job (with occasional critical feedback on how to improve).
It's not an easy job though. I see a fair amount of coworkers counting their pennies so they can quit. Honestly I think you have to be a little bit crazy and enjoy tangly stressful problems to like this job.
If you don't like messing with tech, digging in, feeling confused and lost for hours and days before an 'aha' moment, then its' going to seem like a slog.
Not so much, and I really don't know if it's me getting older, or the workplace that has changed. When I was younger, I really wanted to learn and I had a romantic view of coding and computers.
Nowadays, I'm mostly concerned about my next evaluation cycle, and whether my job will still exist in 1-2 years. Also, piloting AI to produce slop is really not fun, and fighting fire even less.
I love coding but absolutely hate all the corporate shenanigans. Endless meetings and no-use, multiple and multi-stake status updates suck the creative part and the joy of coding/building out of you completely. Take those away and Im happy. AI assisted coding has been a blessing so far (not full vibe-coding though.. at least not yet).
given I've been in a digital-mind-reading-stalker concentration camp - I dislike my career and find continuation of it impossible without jeopardizing any future employer
I've been in this game a long time and I've seen a lot, but this AI hype cycle is exhausting. Like no technology before it I've watched extremely smart and capable engineers fall into AI like it's a cult. I've had colleagues and friends I've known for years drop head first into this shit.
At first I was interested in the tech, I deep-dived into it. Understood as much as I could. I understand how an LLM works and what it can and can't do. So, I realised pretty quickly that their use is limited. I figured it would blow over in a few years, the real use cases would be weeded out, and we'd all move on to the next thing like normal.
What I didn't account for is how addictive this technology is. The moment something "feels" like a person it's ascribed magical qualities, and people fall for it. Anyone can, doesn't matter how smart you are.
For the past six months I've felt nothing beyond a deep melancholic sadness. Not that my industry is changing, it isn't. Not really. These models will not replace people, and anyone who thinks they can is either trying to sell you something or is delusional. The readjustment and the end of the hype cycle will come eventually. But, I fear many people will never be able to let it go. I'm saddened that we're going to lose a generation of brilliant people to fiddling with token predictors, and many of them will never recover from it.
AI will set the industry back twenty years. Not because we will be replaced, but because so many people will be dragged into psychosis and addiction or waste decades chasing the future on a lie.
And there's nothing any of us can do about it now.
I (36) feel simultaneously as old and as young as I've felt since being an actual fresh grad / student.
Old because I can see behind the curtain now. Things feel different than they did when I first started working in tech around 2006-2008. So much of the fixation on recurring revenue, rent-seeking, optimization at all costs, dark patterns, manufactured addiction... I watched the industry as it slowly stumbled into these ideas, leaned in, and ultimately perfected them. But when I read accounts from people older than I am, they all have their version of this comment. The early days of the PC era and browser wars had no shortage of dark shit. It's not like corporate fuckery wasn't rampant in the 80s or 90s. I was just too young and dumb and optimistic to understand most of it. I've gotten much more cynical in the last ~15 years.
I feel young because AI tech actually feels new and promising and exciting in ways I haven't seen since the dawn of mobile and web2.0. There's suddenly this vast new surface area for innovation, a bleak geopolitical landscape, and a palpable rush to create. 2008-2012ish kinda sucked, economically. The fallout from GWOT + GFC, OWS, snowden leaks, etc. The nerdosphere had this collective feeling that the jaws were tightening around us. And yet the technology was moving so fast, was enabling whole new ways of interacting between people and machines. You could tell that the future was going to be completely wild, but it was early enough that it had to be built, and there was a frenzy of excitement, like we'd just been set loose across the louisiana purchase to figure out what was possible in a whole new kind of environment.
It was an oasis. A refuge from everything else that felt broken in every other part of the world. You could just duck down and build shit nobody had ever seen before in a week, and people would take it seriously because there was this shared understanding that nobody knew what the new rules were yet, and the next big idea might come from anyone.
It feels like the best time in a long time for technologists who thrive on curiosity, optimism, and inventiveness. We've finally got a gold rush for experimental tinkerers! Crypto is just grift tech, NFTs were transparently stupid, AR/VR has mostly felt like a gimmick, etc. AI is already so useful, and it's only the beginning.
The market's delusional, the US government is horrific, megacorps are squeezing every drop out of anyone they can stuff in their mouth... but did anyone really think we had a future where that doesn't happen? That snowball's been rolling since long before I was born. I'm just stoked at the chance to get to experience technology as magic again for a little while along the way. Maybe that's a cope. Or escapism. IDK, fuck it. So far, it's nice. The bad shit I've been expecting for many years. The good shit surprised me.
Do you feel optimistic about employment in the future?
I suppose that I agree to a certain extent - I feel less exhausted at the end of each day, I think, because a lot of the tedium of dealing with boilerplate and implementation details can be smoothed away with AI. I do enjoy my current position more than I have ever before.
But I don't know if I'm optimistic about the future. I think software engineers are still essential, or at least that the skill of software engineering is still essential, but I don't know if the market will have fully internalized that knowledge soon enough.
One hint I will give you is to prepare for 2030. If I were you, I would focus on the core essentials of CS and truly understanding what you are building, even with AI.
Ignore both the AI boosters and the doomers on either extreme side of this as they are both wrong and have incentives to hype at investors.
So to answer your question:
> Do you feel optimistic about employment in the future?
Of course.
Employment will change, but to separate yourself is to know what needs to be built rather than just building for the sake of building because you can with AI.
I enjoy development as much as ever. However, the industry has changed and is behaving in ways that I find highly ethically objectionable. I have come to think that, on the whole, our industry is doing much more harm than good to people and the world at large. I cannot support that, so I'm absolutely exiting.
very interesting perspective, something that several people I speak with have touched on. I wish you all the best!
Why not just work at a company that is doing good then?
I do, actually, but that still means that I have to support the rest of the industry, just indirectly. Since I think the industry as a whole has become something that is harmful, even that much of a connection doesn't sit comfortably for me.
I like my job more now than I have for the entire 30 years I’ve been working.
Besides for four years in the middle of my career from 2012-2016, I’ve always had a direct line to the customer (B2B until 2020 across multiple companies and then consulting). I’ve always enjoyed the stakeholder interaction and design and found coding a necessary evil to get the design done.
During the last decade, my vision/responsibility has been larger than I could accomplish myself - until AI got “good enough”. It’s taken the part of my job I find to be drudgery away.
I can go from requirements -> vision -> implementation much faster.
As a senior+, I have autonomy on how I implement projects (again consulting) and I don’t have to play the promotion song and dance. There isn’t any place for me to be promoted to. I an assigned an implementation, I get it done on time on budget and it meets requirements either by myself or someone else working with me and everyone leaves me alone.
Oh and I have been working remotely for 6 years across three companies
I’ve got 15+ years in industry and still working full time plus routine consulting on the side.
The grass is always greener so I absolutely fantasize about doing much anything else. I also wonder if I can keep on until retirement or if I should seek an exit while I have good finances.
As a Senior+ I’m constantly in battle with god awful leadership. So that sucks, a lot, it’s not what I’m here to do. I’m here to build good software. I’m also here to mentor, that’s fun, but without good leadership it’s pissing into the wind. Also, if you’re not a FAANG type you get capped pretty quick salary wise. While most folks would kill for a 160k salary and benefits the hedonic treadmill is something of a reality and inflation is also cruel.
Still, I get paid to work in flip flops and a t-shirt from my house. Set my own hours (mostly) and do something adjacent to what I love. So it is what it is.
I like your comment I think this is a pragmatic way to see oneself
I've spent 20 years working and 8 in the industry. Definitely feel jaded and looking for an exit. The push to use AI whenever possible, the repetition of the work, the cluelessness of leadership, the rounds of layoffs, and the Return To Office even if it reduces productivity have all worn on me. The high compensation has kept me here longer than I probably should have stayed. A lot of my "issues" would be noticeably better if I worked at a startup instead of a megacorp, but then the compensation wouldn't be as good. Also ... just staring at a screen all day. I daydream about being in nature and find a lot of my senior coworkers do as well. Maybe a year off would help.
I do still enjoy it, but only because I'm so deep into it that I don't need to work all the time, and can pick and choose exactly who I work for, work with, and what tech I work on. If I were younger and less established, I would be seriously looking elsewhere.
What does looking elsewhere mean? Like not software, or not computers?
Other than it brings food to the table and pays back debts, no.
I would rather losing sleep hacking ancient Linux kernel with the help of ChatGPT, knowing that exactly one person is going to use what I code.
I've enjoyed SW engineering always. It started as a hobby and I'm fortunate to do what I enjoy as a profession. Do I still enjoy it? I find the rise of AI mesmerising. It's delightful to me to use AI and build with it in the partner role. Doesn't mean I don't have misgivings or doubts about where we end up, but I've never been so enthralled with tech.
I'm both fond of and repulsed by it.
With AI, I can independently build my own products. I'm no longer confined to being a product manager; I'm a true developer. Thanks to my previous coding experience and entrepreneurial ventures as a product manager, AI has accelerated all my skills. Perhaps most of my skills were just starting out before, but with AI, they can quickly transform into productivity and rapidly improve in practice.
What I dislike is that the market has become more cutthroat. It requires more energy to build, build, build faster.
Yes I absolutely love it.
Yes, it's a lot of fun. I'm working on a core team at Google, and honestly i'd keep doing it even if I had 10M stashed away.
It is also very stressful and frustrating at times.
However, early in my career I had challenging and stressful jobs with shitty managers who always tried to crack the whip, where I made 80k a year.
Now at least my stressful job has me pampered between stresses and mostly my boss telling me I did a good job (with occasional critical feedback on how to improve).
It's not an easy job though. I see a fair amount of coworkers counting their pennies so they can quit. Honestly I think you have to be a little bit crazy and enjoy tangly stressful problems to like this job.
If you don't like messing with tech, digging in, feeling confused and lost for hours and days before an 'aha' moment, then its' going to seem like a slog.
Not so much, and I really don't know if it's me getting older, or the workplace that has changed. When I was younger, I really wanted to learn and I had a romantic view of coding and computers.
Nowadays, I'm mostly concerned about my next evaluation cycle, and whether my job will still exist in 1-2 years. Also, piloting AI to produce slop is really not fun, and fighting fire even less.
I enjoy automating everything possible.
I love coding but absolutely hate all the corporate shenanigans. Endless meetings and no-use, multiple and multi-stake status updates suck the creative part and the joy of coding/building out of you completely. Take those away and Im happy. AI assisted coding has been a blessing so far (not full vibe-coding though.. at least not yet).
given I've been in a digital-mind-reading-stalker concentration camp - I dislike my career and find continuation of it impossible without jeopardizing any future employer
I've been in this game a long time and I've seen a lot, but this AI hype cycle is exhausting. Like no technology before it I've watched extremely smart and capable engineers fall into AI like it's a cult. I've had colleagues and friends I've known for years drop head first into this shit.
At first I was interested in the tech, I deep-dived into it. Understood as much as I could. I understand how an LLM works and what it can and can't do. So, I realised pretty quickly that their use is limited. I figured it would blow over in a few years, the real use cases would be weeded out, and we'd all move on to the next thing like normal.
What I didn't account for is how addictive this technology is. The moment something "feels" like a person it's ascribed magical qualities, and people fall for it. Anyone can, doesn't matter how smart you are.
For the past six months I've felt nothing beyond a deep melancholic sadness. Not that my industry is changing, it isn't. Not really. These models will not replace people, and anyone who thinks they can is either trying to sell you something or is delusional. The readjustment and the end of the hype cycle will come eventually. But, I fear many people will never be able to let it go. I'm saddened that we're going to lose a generation of brilliant people to fiddling with token predictors, and many of them will never recover from it.
AI will set the industry back twenty years. Not because we will be replaced, but because so many people will be dragged into psychosis and addiction or waste decades chasing the future on a lie.
And there's nothing any of us can do about it now.
I (36) feel simultaneously as old and as young as I've felt since being an actual fresh grad / student.
Old because I can see behind the curtain now. Things feel different than they did when I first started working in tech around 2006-2008. So much of the fixation on recurring revenue, rent-seeking, optimization at all costs, dark patterns, manufactured addiction... I watched the industry as it slowly stumbled into these ideas, leaned in, and ultimately perfected them. But when I read accounts from people older than I am, they all have their version of this comment. The early days of the PC era and browser wars had no shortage of dark shit. It's not like corporate fuckery wasn't rampant in the 80s or 90s. I was just too young and dumb and optimistic to understand most of it. I've gotten much more cynical in the last ~15 years.
I feel young because AI tech actually feels new and promising and exciting in ways I haven't seen since the dawn of mobile and web2.0. There's suddenly this vast new surface area for innovation, a bleak geopolitical landscape, and a palpable rush to create. 2008-2012ish kinda sucked, economically. The fallout from GWOT + GFC, OWS, snowden leaks, etc. The nerdosphere had this collective feeling that the jaws were tightening around us. And yet the technology was moving so fast, was enabling whole new ways of interacting between people and machines. You could tell that the future was going to be completely wild, but it was early enough that it had to be built, and there was a frenzy of excitement, like we'd just been set loose across the louisiana purchase to figure out what was possible in a whole new kind of environment.
It was an oasis. A refuge from everything else that felt broken in every other part of the world. You could just duck down and build shit nobody had ever seen before in a week, and people would take it seriously because there was this shared understanding that nobody knew what the new rules were yet, and the next big idea might come from anyone.
It feels like the best time in a long time for technologists who thrive on curiosity, optimism, and inventiveness. We've finally got a gold rush for experimental tinkerers! Crypto is just grift tech, NFTs were transparently stupid, AR/VR has mostly felt like a gimmick, etc. AI is already so useful, and it's only the beginning.
The market's delusional, the US government is horrific, megacorps are squeezing every drop out of anyone they can stuff in their mouth... but did anyone really think we had a future where that doesn't happen? That snowball's been rolling since long before I was born. I'm just stoked at the chance to get to experience technology as magic again for a little while along the way. Maybe that's a cope. Or escapism. IDK, fuck it. So far, it's nice. The bad shit I've been expecting for many years. The good shit surprised me.
> After a few conversations with seniors, several of them feel jaded and are looking for an exit from this industry altogether.
Why? This is the best time to be in this industry.
Never been a better time to join.
Do you feel optimistic about employment in the future?
I suppose that I agree to a certain extent - I feel less exhausted at the end of each day, I think, because a lot of the tedium of dealing with boilerplate and implementation details can be smoothed away with AI. I do enjoy my current position more than I have ever before.
But I don't know if I'm optimistic about the future. I think software engineers are still essential, or at least that the skill of software engineering is still essential, but I don't know if the market will have fully internalized that knowledge soon enough.
What do you think?
One hint I will give you is to prepare for 2030. If I were you, I would focus on the core essentials of CS and truly understanding what you are building, even with AI.
Ignore both the AI boosters and the doomers on either extreme side of this as they are both wrong and have incentives to hype at investors.
So to answer your question:
> Do you feel optimistic about employment in the future?
Of course.
Employment will change, but to separate yourself is to know what needs to be built rather than just building for the sake of building because you can with AI.