Cause the median developer is now someone who went into it for the money. It's what happens when there's no other comparable growth careers/opportunities available.
Took me half a year to get them to value Sentry, lol.
I’ll just collect my check and go do something else.
Fighting the Product Manager, fighting the Designer, sometimes even fighting some micromanaging stakeholder that won't leave you alone.
It's definitely fights I can win, but do I even have the energy anymore? Development work involves more than meets the eye. While there are some folks who understand the technical intricacies, it's tiring having to join discussions you know won't go anywhere.
I wish it was 2000-2010 again, when my biggest problems were Sales promising features we don't have and then having fun with the other devs coding it.
I used to have a lot more mental bandwidth and energy to be "curious" and to tinker once upon a time. But now the world is so literally and figuratively on fire and every executive is so rabidly frothing at the mouth over AI that now I just want things to "just work" with the least amount of bullshit so I can just go home on time and forget about work until the next business day.
I just want this fucked decade to be over already.
World will not end if project is delayed by few weeks. You get time for your own tinkering (never tinker on company stuff, even if that would improve things, unless you are shareholder).
Apart from may be few core infrastructure primitives at public Cloud providers most of IT stuff today is API calling API calling API and so on.
It will be the case until Human is Out Of Loop from most of the IT work.
for me it feels like I have to spend all day fighting with folks who are constantly “holding it wrong” and using libraries and frameworks in really weird/buggy ways who then seem completely uninterested in learning.
In my free time I love working on my own projects because I don’t have to deal with this bullshit and I can just craft things finely without any external pressure.
Honestly some of my best jobs were at places that had a nicely balanced practice in place and the backbone to remind execs that if they interrupt makers daily with new shiny asks they will in effect get nothing (because nothing would ever be completed)...
But obviously we can both have worked at places with those labels with vastly different implementations and thus experiences :)
Any non-small company has plenty of people that need to justify their salaries.
Meetings is one of the most effective ways to actually pretend to be working.
Final straw for me was RTO. Silently quitting and getting my ticket punched (laid off) was the best thing for me.
As a teacher or many other professions? Forget about it. You need to either marry someone with a more lucrative career, or move somewhere more affordable.
Working on fixing our housing shortage has felt extremely meaningful to me.
I'd like to find some of that idealism in software again.
Disclosure: I work at govstream.ai - we work in this space [we're hiring!]
They have a business tax rate above 106% of profit[]. That is it is illegal for a business to make a profit.
Yet there is apparently a video out there of a black market cart seller selling wares right in front of the Argentine tax office, totally unbothered.
It made me wonder if this was just an allegory of what's in store for us.
[] https://archive.doingbusiness.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/...
I got started in the 1980s, and super-curious and technical people were the norm. We were incredibly strongly attracted to computers.
The first real growth in computers in that kind of era was Wall Street and banks. Wall Street in particular started paying huge bonuses to developers because it was clear that software could make huge piles of money. Then we started seeing more people joining in for the money who were not necessarily passionate about technology.
Then came the dot com era and bust, and then the rise of social media, FAANG, and absurd corporate valuations allowing ridiculous total comp to developers, and the needle moved even more towards money.
The net result is the curious and the passionate are still here, but our numbers are massively diluted.
I come places like here to find that passionate niche.
That's not entirely true. We (society, definitely US) pushed going to college HARD for the last 3-4 decades and glamorizing how much money you'll make. Now, we have an overabundance of people with college degrees and thousands of dollars in debt to those degrees.
There's plenty of career paths where you could make decent money that don't require a college degree.
We should have been pushing people to figure out what they wanted to do, not "Make lots of money", and figure out the path that gets them there.
The sad reality is that "everyone learn to code" was by and large a marketing distraction from the severe structural unemployment the fast and loose economy is in. No a coal miner can't just learn to code and get a job in WV, certainly not 1,000's of other miner sin the same position, not can the millions of people that corporate laid off over those same decades.
Coding was a way out of poverty, but for most people it was just a distraction to keep them from seeing how bad the economy is.
Americans are poor: PNC Bank's annual Financial Wellness in the Workplace Report shows that 67 percent of workers now say they are living paycheck to paycheck, up from 63 percent in 2024. https://www.newsweek.com/2025-rise-americans-living-paycheck...
It's wild how this site has turned into reddit over the last couple years.
My first trip through college I studied business and then the economy collapsed. Most people my age eeked their way through menial jobs (like me) and survived, found a way to break through, or, (like me) went back to school years later when the economy improved to try to find another opportunity. For me the choices were CS or nursing at that time, and I have always been good at math and with computers, so I chose that.
I wouldn't say I ever "loved" development, especially not the current corporate flavor of it. I've had some side projects when I get time and energy. But there's never really been a point in my life where I could ever have afforded getting the level of expertise I possess now just for the "curiosity" of it. Not everyone has a trust fund or safety nets.
Subsequent governments turned the profession into the captive market, where you can only realistically work for corporations who fix the wages by following so called "market rates" and you cannot create your own job if you disagree with the rates.
Jobs in London pay less than peanuts and if you earn six figures in the UK, income tax takes half of it anyway even if you go to FAANG.
The average university grad would be better off in law/finance/medicine by income in London. This isn't to stay the top software Devs don't get paid a lot, but it's a minority compared to the legions of high paid people in finance in London and the surrounding industries.
Many consultant friends I know and business owners have moved away from the UK to low tax areas in Portugal or UAE.
I interviewed many people from top universities and they absolutely scream "I couldn't care less about the field, I'm just here to maximize the compensation".
At the same time I get 19 year old self taught kids who are miles better at programming, learning and are genuinely passionate.
Under that model, 10% of your time is completely up to you (within reason) to work on things that aren't your main project or scope.
Works out well for R&D or more open ended positions, since you can have the flexibility to explore hunches without having to justify a whole project around it.
Unfortunately this is the consequence.
This has been happening since the 2008 financial crash when a lot of people would have normally gone into careers on Wall Street, but the shrinking Wall Street job market led people into tech as a high-performant, decent paying career..... (U.S. biased opinion, of course)
Sure I was a hobbyist in the 80s programming in assembly language on four separate architectures by the time I graduated college in 1996 in CS. But absolutely no one in my graduating class did it for the “passion” we all did it because we needed to exchange money for food and shelter.
The people jumping into tech during the first tech boom were definitely doing it for the money and the old heads I met back then programming on Dec Vax and Stratus VOS mainframes, clocked in, did their job and clocked out.
When I went into comp-sci, it wasn't the cool path to riches it's been marketed as for the past 15 years.
EDIT: you graduated around the same time as me. Sure everyone wanted jobs. But there were easier paths to getting a good job in '95/96 that cramming late night comp-sci work. Almost everyone in my class had grown up in the age of hacking around on Apple IIs, their first PCs, etc. No one just randomly ended up in the Comp Sci part of the university because they just wanted a job to make money.
And most of the people in my class had their first exposure to computer programming at my state school in south GA was in college.
I had a focus on programming languages in my undergrad studies and went into an academic R&D programming job, basically making tools for computational sciences. I've basically spent my whole career using and writing open source software.
I've definitely seen a kind of culture shift where the frontier nature of our old R&D culture is getting drowned out by boring process. To me, it is largely the influx of cybersecurity compliance that is killing the old culture. The bureaucratic compliance overhead is antithetical to the small team prototyping approach that drove progress during most of my career. It inspires a sort of cargo cult risk-management process that seems more about appearances and plausible deniability than actual secure systems.
Most developers from the beginning worked at banks, government, defense etc doing boring enterprise work. That has always been the case.
They weren’t doing “research” writing COBOL for banks and the government.
In 30 years, I’ve worked at 10 jobs for startups, boring big enterprise companies, BigTech and I’ve been working in consulting (3 of those were working full time in AWS’s consulting department) for five years working with developers from startups, enterprises and government.
I think my exposure to a wide swath of the industry is a little bit more than working in California for 30 years…
Even when I was younger and single, all of us would hang out after work - males and females and go to the bar, the club, the strip club (yes the women too - it was their idea they were mostly BAs and one programmer), and just really enjoy the money we were making. We were all making $50K-$80K back when you could easily get a house built in the burbs for $150k-$170K.
Even as I got older, and change jobs in my mid 30s, by then my coworkers were mostly involved with other hobbies and our families. We weren’t even thinking about computers after work.
But, I do think HN has a cultural fixation on the fabled Silicon Valley experience. This includes an attachment to (nostalia for?) the old university/startup axis. This used to be a more fluid exchange, rather than just the regular enterprise hiring pipeline.
The tech startup scene was a thing between the mid 90s and 2000 with the first dot com boom and even most of them outside of the hardware companies like Sun, Cisco, Intel and software at Netscape were not doing cutting edge for the time development. The startups were throwing dumb (or some premature) things at the wall with no business plan backed by VC money. The people at startups were definitely there for the money. No one had a “passion” to deliver pet food or groceries (Webvan) or early web advertising.
Tech before the mid 90s were programmers building software on mainframes mostly doing boring things.
You had the dark days between 2001-2008 before mobile, web apps, SaaS and high speed internet took off where all most people really could find were boring enterprise jobs. Back then, I was living in Atlanta and the dot com bust didn’t affect the local market at all. The banks, the airlines, the credit card processing companies were hiring boring Microsoft devs and Java devs like crazy.
I’ve just seen too often where 90% of the devs who spend their career at boring old enterprises don’t have any idea what it’s like for those who are in the top 10% working at BigTech and adjacent while at the same time those 10% can’t fathom the fact that there are “Dark Matter developers” living their lives in tier 2 cities with their big houses in the burbs treating a job as just a job and most people always have.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...
I’ve been on both sides (and now in the middle doing strategy cloud consulting). I had my first house built in 2003 for $170K and even my second house built in the “good school system” in the burbs of Atlanta in 2016 for $335K. We moved and downsized three years ago.
There was also a Small World effect where we kept in touch across these various R&D spaces. I don't mean to sound grandiose, but I think my cohort built up a lot of the open source that props up the current web world. I don't quite agree with the article this HN post links to, as I know a lot of that open source was written on salary. It wasn't all hobbyists in moms' basements. Whether we worked in government, university, or corporation, we had figured out ways to work on these things we wanted to work on and release to the world and be paid a wage to do it.
I do feel like our microcosm is dying out. I'm not sure if it is a net change where the tech world is reverting to just the dominant corporate tech you describe, or if there is some replacement microcosm bubbling into existence and I'm just out of the loop now.
And whether startup founders had passion or not, once they took outside funding, money was all that mattered.
Just the bar is so high now, so much competition, so many cargo culting startups that only do bad leetcode interviewing.
It's very hard to both find and get hired at places that want more than a coding monkey to just blindly move Jira tickets.