I have a CS degree and have been a SWE for 13 years but never really developed a love of coding or software in general, I just happened to learn it and be pretty good at it in 2008. But even I have lost a bit of my identity, having one of the few things I have done most days for a decade+ be commoditized is pretty brutal no matter how I feel about software. For the past few years I've been trying to see where the puck is going (I've been leaning towards moving into management) but at this point I'm just trying to hold on until I reach financial independence. I assume my viewpoint is probably square in the middle of most folks in my position.
Of course, I just assume the responsibility for the output. I read everything and make changes all the time before I submit, but it saves me so much time source diving and finding entry points that I don't see myself ever going back.
I play Pro Drums mode on Rock Band 4 on my Roland kit. It's like...85% like real drums, which is close enough to when I just want to play along to something and turn my brain off. I'm probably top 100 or so and have been playing for about a decade now. It's a blast.
My network has gotten me every job over the past 10 years, and probably will get me the rest of the jobs I'll ever have. I am fortunate to have gotten into the industry when I did (2013), if I didn't have time to build a network I would genuinely be screwed.
I am when I have a deadline and tangible work to do. If I don't, I am incredibly lazy and have pretty bad executive function issues.
Right now I have some pressing tangible work to do, so I've pulled 50+ hour weeks for about a month straight. Once this is done I'll probably struggle to get to 40 for a while.
I turned off recommendations to try to reign in my screen time a bit and it's worked tremendously. My feed is exactly what I asked for, if I don't see a video worth my time then I close the app. It's better than ever in my experience.
This has been my thought all along, not sure why I don't see it more. I'm not scared about being left behind, none of the tooling looks crazy enough that a few weeks of dedicated learning wouldn't catch me up.
You will run into thundering herd/hotspotting/pre-warmed caching issues when you have to restart. There's generally not an easy to way to switch these sorts of systems on and off, especially a relatively new system that isn't battle-hardened.
I got nothing for the github outages this year though, that seems like incompetence.
I am employed (which, fair or unfair, seems to always look better to recruiters) but opportunistic. So far I have interviewed 3 times in the past year, every single one being a referral. It's definitely advantageous to have experience/a real network these days, as it must be a relief to all involved to not have to wade through a mountain of AI-generated resumes. I genuinely didn't know what to tell my intern last year when she asked me for advice on how to get a job. Telling her jobs were free when I graduated in 2012 is not useful, but because that was the case I don't know what to tell somebody without a network.
I work for a large video game company. I believe in escapism, it got me into computers as a child and ultimately into my career. I specifically left B2B big tech work and took a paycut just to sleep better at night. I find it difficult to imagine going back.
I've already been working at it for a few weeks now, but I want to swallow my pride and stay up-to-date on interview skills (thankfully I'm safely employed but want to make sure I'm prepared if I need to be.) I do 2-3 leetcode problems a day and at least try to fully understand each line when comparing against the answer. I'm still pretty bad at it but instead of being terrified/anxious in the future I'd like to be confident that I at least can do my best. And my best is being prepared as opposed to just hoping I magically intuit a whiteboard problem out of thin air.
I did _exactly_ this 3 days ago after I hit a random keyboard chord on accident and brought up CoPilot (which I don't recall installing). I had held on to Windows for gaming just because I didn't want to fuss with Linux, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back. Instantly installed CachyOS onto a USB stick and formatted my entire drive.
I use KDE Plasma and it worked just fine. In fact all of my games (including Arc Raiders) are working just fine on Proton 10, maybe running slightly worse. The only issue I've run into is getting battle.net working through Lutris; I ended up manually installing it through Proton 10 on Steam and it worked just fine. Wish I made the switch earlier.
I know the remote aspect is important to you, but having done this exact switch (general backend services dev -> backend dev for a big game company) this requirement is almost certainly going to hold you back. The field is bleeding jobs and there are plenty of people who will go ass-in-seat 5 days a week. Outside of that, there are a surprising amount of roles that generalist SWEs fit into that don't require any experience. It's been a very comfortable foot-in-the-door for myself, at least.
I don't understand why you're being downvoted, you're not wrong. I think Suno being successful bums me out, I really hate it, but people that are not me love it. I can't do anything about that.
My knee-jerk reaction is "No" if your goal is an easy-mode career that will give you a high salary right out of college, I think that dream is (largely) dead. If you really do love CS/related fields, I think there is plenty of room for you still, but it's no longer a free ride.
I graduated with a CS degree in 2012 so I fully benefited from the tech boom. If I were a senior in high school in 2025 knowing what I know now, I would probably go into Civil Engineering.
I have 13 years of experience and a Senior title, but I'm not sure if that means much. Really I have just worked on web-related problems for the last 10 years (first 2 were LinuxRT USB drivers, which I think more and more fondly of these days) and have hit the same crossroads as OP. The main difference for me I'd say is that I'm actually very serious about moving into management; being an IC these days feels like I am on a never-ending treadmill of boring work. Add AI to the mix and I have never been less motivated than I am now to continue writing code.
So I guess the answer to the question of how I evolved is that I evolved rapidly until my ceiling, which was probably ~6-8 years into my career. I haven't learned much since, nor have I had to. Only now do I feel a stronger urge to look where the puck is going and skate towards it, so to speak.
My team ships with a multi-hour CI pipeline that works 50% of the time and effectively zero local development. It's awful in almost every way developer experience-wise, but rock bottom is deeper than you think!
This is awesome. It also brought back some anxiety from >10 years ago in college that reminds me that computer graphics and my brain do not agree whatsoever.
Golf. I understand the image it has, and it's somewhat well-deserved, but the munis are teeming with fascinating people from all walks of life. I've made more friends in the past 5 years since I picked the game up than I did in the previous 10+ years of my post-college life combined. I love the ego check it gives me while rewarding real practice and patience. I also carry my clubs every round which makes it effectively a 5-7 mile hike each round.
In my experience: definitely not, still plenty of the same leetcode tech screens I've seen over the past decade. But I could see more in-person interviews + white boarding coming soon, it's the only surefire way to keep people from cheating.
Credible in terms of respected by people who want to pay you money for work: yes, absolutely. The reality is a random person who watches too much youtube who thinks college is useless now (not saying this is you OP but it's a real subset of people) is not special enough to overcome the advantage that having a degree gives you.
Well I suppose in my current position there isn't much that is cognitively heavy, it's just...a slog. In previous jobs I had a bit more financial motivation when I worked on difficult things, but I made a change last year to migrate to an easier workload.
Depends on the adversity. If it's slogging through the work week (which is my main adversity these days):
My toxic tendency to remain completely independent is about all that motivates me to work. I don't have any real motivation anymore since I have built so many safety nets (financial or otherwise) for myself to handle that vast majority of professional failures.
I wish I hadn't worked 2 jobs while getting my CS degree. I have lots of acquaintences and friends in my mid-30s, but no friends from college or earlier. I have a lot of memories that I can't really share with anybody who was also there, and it's only sort of showing up now that I don't have any really deep friendships, and it mostly started from me doing nothing but work or study during the time when I should have been growing socially.
Making friends at work over the past 10 years. I know HN loves (in general, anyway) the transactional nature of work done as remotely as possible, but the more human side of work has benefited me in spades moreso than any technical work. Whether this is deserved or not is up to you, but in the end, for the most part, we aren't doing much more than tying various libraries together. Who you know if much more important than what you know.
YMMV, but I've noticed an uptick in recruiter messages, probably get 2-3 a week since the new year. But I have no idea about the market as a whole, and I'm sure it's still terrible for new grads.
I think the negative spin of the title is indicative of what you ultimately need to do: try not to be above corporate beaurocracy and red tape, or do your own thing where you control what the process is like.