Ask HN: Losing motivation to work in the IT field, need advice | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Losing motivation to work in the IT field, need advice

23 pointstrowa15930 comments

Hello folks,

I am a senior Software Engineer working in the IT field for close to 16 years.

Before AI coding tools became prevalent, I enjoyed writing code, architecting software systems, and speaking to the stakeholders. These past 2 - 3 years, since companies have been using AI tools heavily, I noticed most of the work has been delegated to AI. It's just prompting it to do work while I monitor its inputs and outputs, then redefining the prompts.

This work flow really took away my passion and joy of writing and building software systems. I don't know where I am heading next... most of my friends either move on to work on their solopreneur journey or switch careers completely. I can say my passion for building software is definitely diminished due to heavy AI usage

Has anyone experienced this? How do you cope with it? Did you end up switching careers?

thanks for your comments :)

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I feel the same way. I miss the joy of creative flow that came with architecting and solving problems. I also feel the entire computer tech industry is headed in the wrong direction. We're creating systems that are too complex to understand, that lack human discretion when it's most needed, and then we're turning over control of whole organizations to those systems.

onion2k has a point. You can still write a lot of code by hand, or at least write the interesting code by hand, but your output may fall behind your peers.

After 27 years in the industry, I've cut down to part-time software dev work, and I've enjoyed learning and doing more hands-on work, including bicycle and motorcycle repair. It's actually really nice to get away from the screen and the constant reading of internet garbage during those down times when I'm waiting for tests to run or an AI bot to come back with a response. My mind feels less polluted. But I'm not making money at my new hobbies.

My answer to your question is I don't know. But often, if you can free up some time and mental space, you'll find you start to drift toward other things that interest you.

Good on you, man. I agree that the tech industry is headed in the wrong direction. AI creates the illusion that we are more productive than ever. If we look at Software back in the days ( 10-20 years ago, they were more reliable and less prone to bugs. Because Engineers actually took the time to architect and write code. Nowadays, it's all about Mass > Quality.

Doing physical work is important; the more we spend time in the digital world.. there is a weird feeling of detachment from reality. I don't feel like a WHOLE self, if you know what I meant.

Am thinking of switching to switch the part time basis, and working as a Snowboarding instructor(I have a license)

My primary motivation for work has always been to earn money for myself and my family. This enables me to do things that I want to do outside of work time. I have tried to align this with work that I find interesting or working with people I like, but this is not always the case.

If this is not an issue for you, then by all means find something else to do. Maybe look to move into a business domain you already provide IT/software for, or retrain to something else.

It's highly likely that many domains currently will be looking to maximise use of AI e.g. medical professionals, accountants, lawyers will not escape completely. Moving to something practical may be a better short term bet.

People who write code with AI are mostly just moving their time from coding to reviewing the output of AI. If you just keep coding you won't be seen as going any slower, and if your peers are bad at reviewing you'll look better than them because your output won't fail testing as much.

If you architected your code in a consistent way and are good in reading and reviewing code; AI can definitely help you move much much faster than if you write the code yourself, so while the AI is working on your current prompt you can move your focus on the next thing.

I consider myself a fast coder, but there is no way I can code faster than AI. But my rule is that even if AI wrote the code I still review and own 100% the code.

Good point. Some of my peers do run into issues where they managed to implement a bunch of features but had a hard time debugging or ended up with more bugs because they didn't spend the time to understand how everything worked.

Basically delegating thinking to the AI (Which is a super dangerous ACT...)

AI has allowed me to move more of my time from coding to solving problems and getting results. For my the point of coding isn’t the journey, it’s the destination, and AI helps me get to the destination faster. Maybe it’s because I own my own (2 person) company and the output is directly connected to me getting paid by clients.

> This work flow really took away my passion and joy of writing and building software systems.

With agentic development and senior experience you are now able to write and build systems that are 100x more complex and powerful. You’re no longer thinking about how to some mundane data massaging or crud - rather you can spend time thinking about how to solve actual problems that matter and have an impact - as a solo engineer!

Got a problem with climate change? Start brainstorming.

Want to model how a chemical factory works to simulate its IoT topology? It’s at your fingertips.

Think bigger. A lot bigger. Forget about the trees. Look for the forest.

Your decade plus of engineering experience combined with AI is a super power many other new comers to game would benefit from. Capitalize on it and do something cool.

That's true, and thanks for shedding light in a positive direction :)

"Forget about trees. Look for the Forest" - linesofcode

I should frame this on my wall

> Want to model how a chemical factory works to simulate its IoT topology? It’s at your fingertips.

Ambition combined with curiosity drive such a person to learn and do things that feel out of reach, but when everything feel within reach (at least to start), then nothing feels very compelling. Getting past that and continuing or bailing and moving away is proving to be tricky.

I'm working at a big tech company (not faang). I use agents (claude/codex) in 3 ways:

1. mainly for discovery and research. I clone all the repos I need and then I talk with the agent: "I need to work on service A which has dependencies on service B, C, D and E. How can I accomplish X? Oh ok it seems, B can offer that but only when Z happens, after that I should rely on C. Cool. And now we probably need to extend E. Umm, ok, but I think E's team won't like that. Hold on, I'll reach out to them. Give me a succinct paragraph explaining what we need from them. Alright I'm back, so we have green light but only if we implement it like H. So, give me a plan"

2. Implement the plan. So the agent spits out code that I need to babysit (e.g., perhaps the class is not in the best package, or perhaps we are adding too many e2e tests when unit tests could be enough, etc.)

3. Answer product questions like: "Why is button K disabled in this screenshot? What are the potential causes? Afaik, I have the permissions A, B and C, and I have enough Z, so why is still disabled?", "How does the flow for endpoint 'api/a/b/c/ work? Where are the entry points? Dependant services? Tables touched?"

I could live without the agent generating the code, but not anymore without their help for discovery and research. I dislike using agents for coding (I feel the same as you), but not for research (I actually use them as a sort of improved "google for everything")

yeah, that's a great way to use AI as an assistant to understand complex projects. I was using AI in a similar fashion to you before, but then the management started to push for more features and put pressure on the team.

I pushed back really hard on this and gave them the arguments that

1. To Meet their expectation, we had to let AI compose code in a complex system (Tokenmaxing) 2. They don't have the engineering background to propose policy like that because in their mind, AI is supposed to supercharge developers

What I have learned while coding with AI, is that it can do certain tasks really well, while it really struggles with others. If you consider the complexity and ubiquity (ranging from proprietary/rare to open source/common knowledge) the complex & specific tasks are difficult for AI, while it shines in the opposite simple & common tasks.

I work in high tech and AI actually helped me to let me focus on the core business logic. Maybe instead of switching careers, find a company/team that works on innovative and unique projects?

I had been in a similar boat towards the end of my last job a few months ago. I'm taking a sabbatical to study full time for year. It's a massive pay cut, but will be useful and so far very rewarding. I still love programming and plan to keep doing it (and am working on hobby projects in my spare time now), but with fresher eyes.

You know the best way to deal with this feeling? Design and make your own apps and systems. With all the AI stuff going on users are appreciating human-made things more. If you truly love building stuff then AI shouldn't stop you doing that.

There's plenty of places that still don't use any AI for coding - I work at one of them. There's far too many lies and nonsense out there, with "research" stating that 90% of software companies are using AI for most of their programming. This is clearly bollocks.

yeah, I felt some of this research is sponsored by the AI companies

As a developer building a custom 64-bit OS completely from scratch on bare-metal C and assembly, I feel your pain to 100%. Prompting an AI to write a kiddy "Word clone" or boilerplate web apps is the ultimate passion killer. It makes software engineering feel like monitoring a factory assembly line. The only way I found to escape this AI-slop burnout is shifting your focus entirely to low-level or complex domains where AI models constantly halluzinate and fail. When you orchestrate raw hardware registers, write custom USB-HID or xhci stacks and handle direct MMU paging without any framework safety net, AI stops being a driver and becomes a basic typing assistant. You can't vibe-code a stable OS kernel 'cause if you don't understand every single byte in the RAM, the CPU will just triple-fault and instant-reboot. Don't let corporations turn you iinto a prompt manager. Switch to systems programming, compiler dev, or bare-metal embedded stuff. Go back to where you have to understand the machine, not just nudge a model. That's where the real joy of building lives. If you need such a project, try to write a bios-like system for microcontroller like the esp32 'cause there you have to save resources for developers who want to write an os for your bios-like embedded system. No AI just you and the hardware.

AI is coming for hardware. I’m 2 weeks into working with ESP32 devices using nothing but AI and my intuition to build new firmware for the type of hardware I want to build. Haven’t touched electronics for 10+ years since uni.

Could be producing a bunch of slop but that’s where the decades of engineering experience comes in to still find a way to ship reliably.

yeah, its like coaching a kid

Yeah, I was trained in C and C++, writing low-level communication protocols back in college, and it was so much fun to write efficient, memory-optimized code.

Then because the whole industry was into Web 2.0, with strong hardware, no one cared about optimisation or writing clean, beautiful code. This situation only got worse with AI.

Signn, I should look for a job in a field similar to yours.., but my past 12 years have all been working with Web and Crypto related projects.. with only 4 years with embeded system.. gonna need to build a porfolio for that

what kind of software do you work on?

there are a lot of software engineers working on boring ass-tier software like some shitty accounting systems or banking software.

this is the best time to go build something cool that YOU care about. i'm sure you have hobbies which could benefit from good software, or maybe you wished there was some cool protocol that existed that would make other devs lives easier.

This is the way. I left corporate IT and started solving interesting problems myself. I started doing this about 10 years ago but it was slow going since I had to do engineering, sales, support, etc all myself. AI has allowed me to get all this done the way I first imagined, and I feel that I’m only scratching the surface.

great

Software has been in the toilet for years before AI and for years before Covid.

Software is fully unregulated which means it’s full of liars and pretenders who should never be anywhere close to any kind of machine. The result is a saturated job market full of cry babies, both in management and individual contributors, that need just a little helping hand to do absolutely anything. This why at any large employer 20% of the developers deliver 80% of the value.

When it comes to looking for a job you are a needle in a giant haystack. Maybe you are an excellent developer, but you are still a needle in a haystack and most employers really don’t care how good you are. The goal is asses in seats, which really means you need to be over achieving at the minimum qualifications more than all the other minimal qualified applicants.

I used to think I was forced to do this nonsense because it’s my professional experience. The reality is that the industry relies on this. Just go do something else. You might take a financial hit at first, but you will likely be happier.

Go work in another field for awhile and see if your motivation returns?

ya, was thinking of only working part-time in tech and teaching snowboarding (I have a license) part-time to balance it out a bit

I feel we should accept the change and try to move on from writing code manually. Instead we should build guards around AI coding..

Totally agreed. Burying head in the sand which a bunch of the industry seems to be doing is a recipe for disappointment and dissatisfaction with the changing tides.

Try to ride the wave rather than being swept under.

yes. At the end we paid to solve the problems thats it.

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