I am professional translator and I liked my work because I have no boss and free schedule but I hate it now because I'm losing it. In two weeks I'll submit my last project and there it is. Ten years at the computer, payment in 45 days from EOM, no guarantee of work, all soon to be gone. And I am also too burned out to bother finding something new. It was shit since covid when hollywood filmmakers strike came. If I could be my own boss anywhere else and make 2-3x my country median, Id quit sooner. Going through the motions now. Deep inside I am probably devastated from the years of stress and this big change but for now on I just do my daily part and submit by deadlines. I have probably stopped living a while ago and am just going through the motions.
More than ever - it's a whole new ride. I feel like I'm on the new frontier once again, which is where I always want to be.
No, it's not the same work I was doing a year ago, but neither was that the same work I was doing a few years prior, and so forth, all the way back to the beginning of my career.
I feel the same, to be honest. I used to love crafting extremely "well oiled machines", and cherished code that was robust, architecturally sane and well documented. You would come back a few months on, and you'd find all sorts of little gems and documentation nuggets that would help you keep it going in a good direction. Also, it was a joy to finish your day and be proud of what you've built, knowing that you did your very best to deliver as much quality under the hood as possible, and not only the shiny bits on the frontend.
Now, no one seems to care anymore about quality, it's all about speed speed speed, churning out feature after feature. Code has turned into an unintelligible mush that only other agents can understand, and no one bats an eye. If it runs, it's push to main and deploy, and pick up the next feature. We're back at the rat wheel era, where the more PRs and the more slop you churn, the more "productive" you are
Mind you, I'm trying to be as diligent as I can with agentic coding. I ask for reviews, I have very thorough and looong conversations with the agents, trying to scrutinize every crevice of its investigation and context-acquiring process, in hopes to improve the outcome of what it's going to build, but never reaching the same levels of control and also understanding that we had before.
and I don't even have a choice, as I'm not a heir and I definitely don't have FIRE money yet. I must follow the current and prompt the day away, becoming more and more like a glorified meat proxy.
What a pitiful state of affairs compared to the golden days of software engineering.
I do most of the time. I work for at a startup plus have my own big side project, most things are fast-paced and AI fits well with the load and the pace. I still get the high when building big features, it's different but still gives me the kick
TBH I've struggled with enjoying work for years now. Prompting AI has actually recovered some of the enjoyment. I enjoy solving problems, not necessarily writing code, though that's fun too. Maybe reframing your enjoyment can help?
Mostly I just work to live. If I didn't have to worry about that sort of thing, I'd pour my hours into volunteer work. Search and Rescue is the volunteer "work" I enjoy most at the time being. I'm limited in my ability to do it as much as I'd like because it doesn't pay.
Takes like this are truly crazy to me. Why did you go into coding if you didn't enjoy the process? Every piece of advice I was given in life always traced back to one:
Whatever you do, enjoy the process not the outcome.
Yet here we are with tons of coders now admitting they never liked coding to begin with. Insanity.
Coding was the fun part to me. It was sitting down with a nice coffee and some music, and tackling hard problems. Writing by hand the lines of code that came together to produce something magical. That process of typing on a nice keyboard, and seeing a solution take shape, is what this job was all about.
Tone feels a bit harsh but I'll try to take it in the best light possible.
It's not that I never liked coding to begin with. I enjoy it, but at the same time I also enjoy solving problems. Coding is and was a means to an end: solving a problem. The argument/statement can also be extended to say "Why did you go into coding if you didn't enjoy binary?" (substitute "binary" with any appropriate level of complexity: OOP, C, Java, Python, Waterfall, Agile, etc).
Not only that but so much of my work is and always was not coding. Meetings, stakeholders, PMs, roadmaps, estimates, etc.
My volunteer work is also solving problems, they just happen to be very human-focused in the real world.
Also, "coding" (solving problems with tech) is a fairly low-risk way to make a living that I happened to be good at. I also spent time on a drilling rig. Could have probably made significantly more doing that than I was at the start of my tech career, however, it wasn't worth the risk. We all gotta eat and in our capitalist society, can't reasonably do that without having a job.
AI has made my job a lot easier and it feels like the fleeting interlude where expectations have not yet risen to match.
Actually using AI I think is a net positive. It frees up the drudgery and let's me think high level. I can try different ideas and throw out ones that don't work without expending much effort.
There's some loss with not being as hands on. But I feel like my impact is higher so I like the trade.
I actually do, but that's only because I am self employed. I can't stand it anymore, doing the same sh*t everyday. At my old job, the whole day consisted of small useless changes or bug fixes on existing systems. But actually building NEW systems is what I enjoy, and that's exactly what self employment gave me more of
At least I am more confident with my work now. I used to feel so much pressure when facing something I don't have experience about. I had to learn from scratch online. But now, things are much easier.
Man. You're very privileged to be in this position. Be grateful. For most other people in this world it's "either this or death." and they would kill for position where they all they have to do is "prompt AI".
To have a job where you actually enjoy your work instead of wanting to kill yourself every day is called being an incredibly lucky privileged bastard.
Ok, if thats true then WHY are people procreating at all? You're telling me most people hate the thing they spend most of their time doing, and yet they choose to bring another person into the same world? Please, do explain this insane paradigm.
I enjoy writing TypeScript applications but I don’t enjoy doing it for work.
There are a great many people who write in that language for work while struggling to do more than populate text on the screen using React. The mere presence of someone who can actually program is like kryptonite for the permanently insecure imposter. It gets old.
SWE work for me feels worse than ever but so far it’s still a decent deal overall. I could be making a lot less money to do more demanding work basically.
That being said I greatly miss collaboration with colleagues. We don’t talk shop like we used to and a lot of times when we do talk it involves someone pasting something into Claude.
I miss feeling accomplished by building things.
The pace of code change is both dizzying (generation) and slow (review). it seems like most are just rubber stamping PRs sometimes after ignoring them for days (because who wants to review 2000 lines of slop and ridiculous unit tests).
i made my hobby my job early on and after few years honestly it wasnt enjoyable anymore. prompting makes it easy and laidback. its easy money and thats alright.
think about all the othet shit jobs you could have. i worked really dreadful stuff in factories before i made that hobby my job and i often reflect back on that time to realise it is not so bad even if i now just type a few lines and press 1 and 2.
no more 90 degrees ambient temperature nexto a steel oven
no more freezin -21 in some meat freezer 'de icing'
no more 5 years rotted catfood to clean up while colleague is vomiting nexto me in a bin...
The other option is to go sit at the beach forever. That's boring though. After a week of that I was right back at my computer, dicking around with some shit in Linux. Couldn't help myself.
After 6 months of unemployment, I am starting to enjoy it again. I don’t use AI.
But I know that if I want to find employment again, I’ll have to eat dirt and get on with the times, or abandon my 20 years old career as a software engineer.
It’s too difficult of a choice for me to make still. Back to hiding my head in the sand, and enjoying my personal projects while savings last.
I am professional translator and I liked my work because I have no boss and free schedule but I hate it now because I'm losing it. In two weeks I'll submit my last project and there it is. Ten years at the computer, payment in 45 days from EOM, no guarantee of work, all soon to be gone. And I am also too burned out to bother finding something new. It was shit since covid when hollywood filmmakers strike came. If I could be my own boss anywhere else and make 2-3x my country median, Id quit sooner. Going through the motions now. Deep inside I am probably devastated from the years of stress and this big change but for now on I just do my daily part and submit by deadlines. I have probably stopped living a while ago and am just going through the motions.
More than ever - it's a whole new ride. I feel like I'm on the new frontier once again, which is where I always want to be.
No, it's not the same work I was doing a year ago, but neither was that the same work I was doing a few years prior, and so forth, all the way back to the beginning of my career.
I feel the same, to be honest. I used to love crafting extremely "well oiled machines", and cherished code that was robust, architecturally sane and well documented. You would come back a few months on, and you'd find all sorts of little gems and documentation nuggets that would help you keep it going in a good direction. Also, it was a joy to finish your day and be proud of what you've built, knowing that you did your very best to deliver as much quality under the hood as possible, and not only the shiny bits on the frontend.
Now, no one seems to care anymore about quality, it's all about speed speed speed, churning out feature after feature. Code has turned into an unintelligible mush that only other agents can understand, and no one bats an eye. If it runs, it's push to main and deploy, and pick up the next feature. We're back at the rat wheel era, where the more PRs and the more slop you churn, the more "productive" you are
Mind you, I'm trying to be as diligent as I can with agentic coding. I ask for reviews, I have very thorough and looong conversations with the agents, trying to scrutinize every crevice of its investigation and context-acquiring process, in hopes to improve the outcome of what it's going to build, but never reaching the same levels of control and also understanding that we had before.
and I don't even have a choice, as I'm not a heir and I definitely don't have FIRE money yet. I must follow the current and prompt the day away, becoming more and more like a glorified meat proxy.
What a pitiful state of affairs compared to the golden days of software engineering.
/rant
I didn't enjoy work before AI and I dont enjoy it now either.
I do most of the time. I work for at a startup plus have my own big side project, most things are fast-paced and AI fits well with the load and the pace. I still get the high when building big features, it's different but still gives me the kick
Find something you love and you'll never work a day in your life.
TBH I've struggled with enjoying work for years now. Prompting AI has actually recovered some of the enjoyment. I enjoy solving problems, not necessarily writing code, though that's fun too. Maybe reframing your enjoyment can help?
Mostly I just work to live. If I didn't have to worry about that sort of thing, I'd pour my hours into volunteer work. Search and Rescue is the volunteer "work" I enjoy most at the time being. I'm limited in my ability to do it as much as I'd like because it doesn't pay.
Takes like this are truly crazy to me. Why did you go into coding if you didn't enjoy the process? Every piece of advice I was given in life always traced back to one:
Whatever you do, enjoy the process not the outcome.
Yet here we are with tons of coders now admitting they never liked coding to begin with. Insanity.
Coding was the fun part to me. It was sitting down with a nice coffee and some music, and tackling hard problems. Writing by hand the lines of code that came together to produce something magical. That process of typing on a nice keyboard, and seeing a solution take shape, is what this job was all about.
Tone feels a bit harsh but I'll try to take it in the best light possible.
It's not that I never liked coding to begin with. I enjoy it, but at the same time I also enjoy solving problems. Coding is and was a means to an end: solving a problem. The argument/statement can also be extended to say "Why did you go into coding if you didn't enjoy binary?" (substitute "binary" with any appropriate level of complexity: OOP, C, Java, Python, Waterfall, Agile, etc).
Not only that but so much of my work is and always was not coding. Meetings, stakeholders, PMs, roadmaps, estimates, etc.
My volunteer work is also solving problems, they just happen to be very human-focused in the real world.
Also, "coding" (solving problems with tech) is a fairly low-risk way to make a living that I happened to be good at. I also spent time on a drilling rig. Could have probably made significantly more doing that than I was at the start of my tech career, however, it wasn't worth the risk. We all gotta eat and in our capitalist society, can't reasonably do that without having a job.
AI has made my job a lot easier and it feels like the fleeting interlude where expectations have not yet risen to match.
Actually using AI I think is a net positive. It frees up the drudgery and let's me think high level. I can try different ideas and throw out ones that don't work without expending much effort.
There's some loss with not being as hands on. But I feel like my impact is higher so I like the trade.
I actually do, but that's only because I am self employed. I can't stand it anymore, doing the same sh*t everyday. At my old job, the whole day consisted of small useless changes or bug fixes on existing systems. But actually building NEW systems is what I enjoy, and that's exactly what self employment gave me more of
At least I am more confident with my work now. I used to feel so much pressure when facing something I don't have experience about. I had to learn from scratch online. But now, things are much easier.
Man. You're very privileged to be in this position. Be grateful. For most other people in this world it's "either this or death." and they would kill for position where they all they have to do is "prompt AI".
To have a job where you actually enjoy your work instead of wanting to kill yourself every day is called being an incredibly lucky privileged bastard.
Ok, if thats true then WHY are people procreating at all? You're telling me most people hate the thing they spend most of their time doing, and yet they choose to bring another person into the same world? Please, do explain this insane paradigm.
What? People are stupid, that's why they fuck and procreate. It's not my fault.
Why do you equate fucking and work, are you okay?
Agree. We’ve enjoyed an incredible run. Few professionals get to enjoy ikigai the way software engineers have, especially after 2008 or so.
The ZIRP era was better for us than we deserved, which has made the recent “creative destruction” caused by AI feel so much worse.
I enjoy writing TypeScript applications but I don’t enjoy doing it for work.
There are a great many people who write in that language for work while struggling to do more than populate text on the screen using React. The mere presence of someone who can actually program is like kryptonite for the permanently insecure imposter. It gets old.
SWE work for me feels worse than ever but so far it’s still a decent deal overall. I could be making a lot less money to do more demanding work basically.
That being said I greatly miss collaboration with colleagues. We don’t talk shop like we used to and a lot of times when we do talk it involves someone pasting something into Claude.
I miss feeling accomplished by building things.
The pace of code change is both dizzying (generation) and slow (review). it seems like most are just rubber stamping PRs sometimes after ignoring them for days (because who wants to review 2000 lines of slop and ridiculous unit tests).
I don’t know where this ends.
I never really enjoyed the work I was doing, but at least there was a glimmer of chance at something better before.
Now, not so much.
I enjoyed building with AI https://github.com/web3cryptowallet/drive-py
And I've spent 14 years handcrafting https://www.acpul.org/
Both are fun projects!
i made my hobby my job early on and after few years honestly it wasnt enjoyable anymore. prompting makes it easy and laidback. its easy money and thats alright.
think about all the othet shit jobs you could have. i worked really dreadful stuff in factories before i made that hobby my job and i often reflect back on that time to realise it is not so bad even if i now just type a few lines and press 1 and 2.
no more 90 degrees ambient temperature nexto a steel oven
no more freezin -21 in some meat freezer 'de icing'
no more 5 years rotted catfood to clean up while colleague is vomiting nexto me in a bin...
things can be much worse dude.
its a state of mind. hone it
> prompting makes it easy and laidback. its easy money and thats alright.
If it's easy there is probably no moat.
In most European countries, job security/moat is inherent from the employment law.
The other option is to go sit at the beach forever. That's boring though. After a week of that I was right back at my computer, dicking around with some shit in Linux. Couldn't help myself.
Don't get stuck cuckcoding.
After 6 months of unemployment, I am starting to enjoy it again. I don’t use AI.
But I know that if I want to find employment again, I’ll have to eat dirt and get on with the times, or abandon my 20 years old career as a software engineer.
It’s too difficult of a choice for me to make still. Back to hiding my head in the sand, and enjoying my personal projects while savings last.
It sucks and I hate it.