Why software engineers are grieving
dev.jimgrey.net
dev.jimgrey.net
I'm at a time in my life where I most probably have 15 to 20 years of gainful employment left in me.
Perhaps too little time to retrain; but definitely too much time to retire comfortably now.
A midlife crisis, coupled with an existential crisis.
I thought I had a clear route ahead. What do I do when everything I've learnt and dedicated myself to, is no longer valuable?
I'm a 52 year old software developer that spent my entire career purposefully trying to avoid being pushed into management so I could remain a direct contributor because the craft of writing software has always been my favorite part of the job.
I'm still employed in the age of AI but what used to be more passion than job has flipped to be more job than passion because the chunk of it that I was most passionate about is rapidly being devalued. On one hand, I should be (and am) grateful that my job was ever something I was very highly passionate about as not everyone gets to experience that, on the other hand its hard not to grieve when you've had that luxury and feel it slipping away.
I think that if I were a younger person I'd probably be thinking seriously of finding something different to do with my life in terms of career, but at the same time I'm sure people in that situation are also struggling because AI is making the future very murky for almost everyone in terms of what they can do that they will both be passionate about and for which human input will continue to be valued.
Maybe I need to spend some time finding myself and rediscovering what I want and need .. but I can't help feel pretty disheartened.
Mate, come on. Modern corporate hellscape America forces people say stuff like this. He wanted the job because you pay him MONEY which is required to EAT and not DIE OF ILLNESS, because employment is tied to if you get to see a doctor without going bankrupt.
I'm not sure when all this mission nonsense came in, but it's daft when you see it parroted around something as beige as SaaS. It's fine to want to make something good and make some money from it, but you don't have to pretend it's some kind of moral quest.
That largely turned out to be complete and utter hogwash. The instant capitalists realized they had extracted enough out of that myth to gain ultimate power and reassert dominance, they pounced. 2020-2026 has been a boiling-frogs-in-pots shift from collectivism to an extreme sort of New Oligarchy. Software engineers weren't making the world a more fair, creative, and democratic place. LOL! The exact opposite, in fact, has occurred.
Yes, of course we're grieving. But using agents to generate "code" isn't the issue. That's merely a symptom, one among many. The root cause? Societal systems based on pure greed and bigoted supremacy which were NEVER properly dismantled. The new leftism of tech? Nothing but a mirage. Millennials got played.
And wow did we fall for it.
My only hope at this point: Gen Z will succeed where we clearly failed. Our best hope is to listen to them, partner with them, help them channel their rage into action, and take control back from the tech moguls and oligarchs.
This "It's not (just) X, it's Y." pattern is so LLM-y it's almost hard to read it now.
The silver lining is that it's currently easy to recognize LLM blog posts and the "authors" never realize how bad they sound. This "author" probably removed em dashes and thought he was all set. These slop posts will be worse when LLMs are better at sounding human.
Then came the techbro, true nerds doing nerdy stuff got lost among the noise techbros created.
I don’t think it’s okay either, but we were kind of spoiled that we enjoyed doing something that was in high demand. This isn’t the case for most jobs.
All is vanity.