I was not obsolete. A big company like Apple, there are always things that need taken care of.
I assumed with iOS, Swift, etc., maybe the guys on the Cocoa team were obsolete? Of course not. That code is still there, still needs maintaining, interoperability with the new languages, frameworks, etc.
I'm more surprised they want to stay on.
And that is in fact why I left Apple: the job had changed, the "career" had changed. The engineers were no longer steering the ship. It had been that way when I started in 1995 though. A "team", let's say the graphics team, would figure out what API to revisit, what new ones to add — perhaps how to refactor the entire underlying workflow. The "tech lead" (who would regularly attend Siggraph since we're talking about the graphics team) would make the call as to what got priority. Marketing would come around after the fact to "create a narrative" around all the changes to the OS. I hate to say it, but many, those were the good ole' days.
(And let's be clear, in the 90's, Apple's customers were more or less like the engineers, we also loved the machine for the same reasons they did — so we did right by them, made changes they would like because we wanted them too. You can't say that as convincingly for the phone, being a mass consumer device.)
Marketing took the reins long ago though — especially as Apple began to succeed with the iPhone (which, someone can correct me if I am wrong, but I think was an engineer driven project initially — I mean most things were up to that point).
I stuck around nonetheless though because there was money to be made and kids still to raise.
When the last daughter flew the coop though, so did I.
There's plenty of people who want to build that thing, and most of us have a good idea how it probably should be, at least at first. The problem isn't building it, it's funding it without selling out the user.
I'm too cynical to be a mentor, ha ha. I too aware of all the engineering-led companies that ultimately tanked. General Magic is the first one that comes to mind.
But no reason for me to mentor — really it's just let the engineers drive. Sometimes it works (or sued to in another era), sometimes it does not. Either way, it will be a fin place to work. ;-)
What I don't like is all the bullshit around it. Primarily now the barrier is that I don't have to work, so why would I put up with abusive hazing? I mean of course, hiring processes, which have only gotten worse over time (hallmark property of the cycle of hazing).
I'm not doing on-call rotations anymore. Either allow us to engineer the thing to be resilient, or pay off-duty people (a wonderful opportunity for offshore people that management is so desperate to use).
Finally, I don't want to code in Python or JavaScript. As a long time programmer, it is annoying that we keep going backwards and wasting more and more hardware power.
Nobody is producing anything exciting in software anymore. I can't think of a pure software company doing anything I would be excited for, because google and facebook and the like control the internet.
It doesn't even pay that well anymore, and AI is just another huge excuse to drop wages by management.
Apple is a fantastic example: operating systems are stagnant, hardware outside of the architecture switch is stagnant (and how much of that was simply priority access to the state of the art TSMC node tech).
>Nobody is producing anything exciting in software anymore.
They're not? Some of the newer programming languages seem very interesting, attempting to fix some of the mistakes done in older languages. Of course, most of the really interesting problems are already solved by existing solutions, but perhaps there's room for improved solutions instead of just using the incumbent.
>I like programming. I can still do it. What I don't like is all the bullshit around it.
If you have spare time (you sound like you might be retired), perhaps you should try getting involved in an open-source project that interests you (and isn't in Python or JS of course).
>I can't think of a pure software company doing anything I would be excited for, because google and facebook and the like control the internet.
Personally, I work in robotics and find it quite interesting. I would also find writing software for spacecraft interesting. Neither of those are "pure software", but still I think they're applications that will change the world, hopefully for the better, and don't already have some huge incumbent dominating the market.
> It doesn't even pay that well anymore, and AI is just another huge excuse to drop wages by management.
Can you expand on this? I haven’t noticed salaries going down where I’m at (only fewer open positions the last ~1.5 years due to the global economic climate - but I’m sure this is cyclical and will swing back soon enough).
I'm much earlier in my career than you are but have had serious thoughts about leaving the industry altogether for similar reasons. The interview processes are absolutely toxic these days, much of the industry seems like an outright scam (crypto, AI, etc.) and the trend is to casually waste resources.
Part of my motivation to go into writing code in the first place was that I noticed software getting worse and more user-hostile in the 2010s and I wanted to change that. Turns out the people making software worse think the stuff that makes it worse are "best practices" so you're fighting an impossible battle and nobody is going to dare allowing you to advance into a leadership position or often even get a job in the first place unless they think you're a true believer in the BS.
I also have no interest, at this point, in writing code unless I'm paid to do it. It's hard to find motivation to write code when I mentally associate it with all of the corporate BS and the grifting con artists of the tech industry. The one saving grace was that the money was good and it was possible to switch jobs for more money or because you're tired of 1 particular company's BS. Now, even that isn't possible anymore so what's the point?
I wonder how many other people were at Apple from the mid-90's until a few years ago, that's an incredibly long tenure. It seems like one of the more interesting places to be during several very interesting transformations.
I've had 3 jobs in the ~decade-long range. I was really ready to move on in each case. Partly I was ready for a change and partly the company had changed.
I started programming at 10 and now I'm 50, and right now it feels like I've reached this point -- it's boring, I have trouble keeping up, I feel the things work lets me work on are not important. Interesting work goes to younger colleagues.
The problem is, I have a family and finding fulfilling work that you have no experience in, in this country, at 50, is close to impossible.
So for now I consider myself lucky and try to rediscover the fun things in programming.
I'm a bit older, I don't really feel trouble keeping up but looking at the landscape it's just not that interesting anymore. So many "new" ideas are actually old ideas but the people pushing them are too young to know that.
I don't have any doubt in my ability to learn new languages and frameworks, but running in that hamster wheel just gets boring after a while.
The thing is ... The industry needs us. It's making a mess all over and valorizing complexity and novelty. Constantly. Programmers with experience in our age range have, I think, a better sense of how to manage this and encourage simplicity (partially out of necessity). But age and novelty bias in our industry means this knowledge doesn't pass on.
It's tough to tell younger engineers that have cut their teeth swimming in intricacies and edge cases and integration nightmares and constantly surfing on the edge of chaos, and managing it, that they're likely contributing to the problem, not fixing it. But someone needs to.
I can't remember details like I used to, things mark&sweep out of my brain much faster they used to. (Probably not just because I'm older but because as a parent, home owner, and spouse... I just have a lot to manage on top of it.) But.. really... a good system, a well-built system ... should be resilient to that, and people with experience.. that's hopefully what we build.
I have been lucky enough to have been the youngest person on every team until my mid 30s. I worked with some truly gifted engineers, who had almost no ego, over the course of my career they just were much older than me.
When I reflect I do cringe a bit at what I was zealous about and things I took way too far. But, I do think the discussion, sometimes debate, around the fancy/new vs tried/true resulted in much better results.
Now that I am old, but not that old, the younger engineers who are passionately discovering new tools and “new” design patterns keep me interested in software development. Being able to share where things come from then we can compare/contrast together. It is rarely a straight copy and it’s fun to see how things get better/worse with reinvention.
So, I think trying to get a mix of ages on a team is really beneficial. Passionate young engineers help prevent the old engineers from getting too jaded.
On the other hand, you have to guard against being that person who is in a perpetual state of "Benn there, done that. Didn't work the last 5 times we tried it." Because sometimes the circumstances/market/tech ecosystem genuinely are different.
I'm in the retirement age bracket.
My last experience as a consultant led to disgust with valorizing quantity of work as measured by an arbitrary metric susceptible to simple gaming.
That, and prioritizing "new" features over maintenance because the former were booked as CapEx work,
thus amortizable,
while maintenance was booked as OpEx,
combined with companies wanting to minimize CapEx ratio for accounting purposes.
Notice how little of what is measured and managed has anything to do with building working software to satisfy user needs?
Similar age point, the problem is not keeping up, is fighting the continuous push to management, which I don't plan to ever do, unless forced by life circunstances.
It appears that the only path left for us in many European countries, is to go freelancer, and I vouch for the same problem regarding skills, forget about having Github repos, or open source contributions, if the technology company X is looking for isn't the one we haved used in the last 5 years or so on day job.
I'm a European in my late forties and have been a freelancer for the last five years but I find it harder and harder to motivate myself to continue working. What really takes all joy out of working as a software engineer these days for me are the endless Scrum ceremonies almost all companies in my area have embraced.
In the old days (say until ~7-8 yrs ago) I didn't have to attend very many meetings but of those I had to go to most were useful/necessary. These days I could probably count the useful meetings I attend in a year on one hand but the amount of Scrum-worship-meetings per week requires two hands.
The same amount of actual work I could do in a week in the old days would now take several months because it needs to be planned in detail. And no, not any technical detail, but rather discussions on how to divide it into stories but without doing any proper technical analysis and then straight ahead to story point guesstimates, yay! Then after a brief period of actual coding it's stuck in code review for weeks because no one will look at a PR unless prodded with a stick.
While I do think that code reviews can some times be beneficial, most of the time they are (in my experience unfortunately) pretty useless. Most comments (and I have to admit I'm guilty to this as well) are more bike-shedding than bug-preventing. Complex bugs are rarely found in code-reviews in my experience.
While these are my experiences during the last 7-8 years or so, it's more or less the same on all the half a dozen companies (or so) I've worked for during that period (which is also a very big reason why I've worked on half a dozen companies in that period).
I am 63. Canada based. Have no problems keeping up with tech. I am on my own since 2000 and mostly develop new products for various clients. Have couple of product for myself that bring some dosh. The range is very wide. Microcontrollers, Enterprise Backends, Desktop, Multimedia, Browser based, etc. etc. It is not programming per se that keeps me going (I find it boring enough) but designing systems and interactions from scratch and then watching it work.
I’m in a similar positions (in my 50s with a family to support). For the most part I can get my boring corporate work done fairly quickly. Then I spend some time each day working on personal programming projects where I get my true satisfaction.
These two perspectives are not incompatible. 49 here and still love programming. But only discovered that after quitting my Google job and spending a year working on my own things. Then housework wasn't getting done because I was writing code instead, and I realized I just love doing it, still, and I'm a far far better programmer than I ever was 20 years ago. I can do things I only dreamt of back then. And faster!
but that's not the same thing as enjoying writing the dreck that many employers want, and keeping up with their endless stack of messy JIRA issues, planning meetings, poor design docs, and management shenanigans....
Are you involved in the still-thriving C64 demo scene at all? Possible way to reconnect with the magic if not. Especially by attending (in-person, ideally) one of the many demo parties around the world.
There are also parallels with embedded device and FPGA work that I personally find thrilling.
Plus we on the VICE (open source Commodore emulator) team are always looking for devs.
Same age. Got started on a ZX-81 and a university mainframe.
I still enjoy writing code or shall we say solving problems via code. I still get excited about new things. I'm also a manager and I enjoy helping others. What I enjoy less is the politics.
Building things is fun, I don't think this goes away, it was always fun and is still fun.
For personal projects I make heavy use of LLMs now and coding is still fun when I do it with the latest and greatest tools. I'm about 5X as productive as I would be if I had to crank out code myself.
I'm used to verifying code with a compiler/interpreter and a unit test -- not by going through my code line by line and declaring to an interviewer "yes I think it's correct". My way of doing things is to just run the damn thing with the right tests and it will tell me if something is wrong.
Unfortunately job interviews these days are still hellbent on whiteboarding Leetcode problems. I'm past that. Unfortunately they aren't. It's this kind of BS -- not being allowed to use the best tools that exist -- that makes me not want to code for work anymore.
I respect the OP's vulnerability and the advice. I've felt like it was "time to go" before, but as a young man I just assumed it was burnout, treated it that way, and got back in the game once I had renewed desire.
Right now I feel like I'll never want to stop making things, but that if I were rich enough and good enough at creating in a different medium other than code, I completely understand the desire to walk away from the terminal and never look back. Few things have been as frustrating to me as programming. Yet since few things have been so rewarding, I persist.
It's a great article because it's making me think about my own life. I'll keep pondering. Thanks for posting it.
I mean that sometimes I get so sick of the constant problems and churn and breakages and errors and mistakes and bugs and weird behaviors that I feel like doing something completely different.
If you never feel that way, I'm very happy for you!
Kinda similar to how Kobe Bryant knew it's time to retire from the game of basketball. He said in an interview (https://youtu.be/Ya8hY0S-8t0?t=54) that he knew it's time when during his morning meditations, his mind will not drift to basketball anymore.
What I wonder is how did Kobe know this was a sign that he was done. Why didn't he think he was just burned out and maybe just needed a break before returning to the game? How can you tell when you're burned out vs. just being completely done with it all?
I think because he was already 37 or 38 at that time, and was suffering from injuries, too. There was no point continuing if both his body and mind are not the way they used to be.
I retired in 2017 and sometimes I think I got out at just the right time, or close to it. In the past 7 years we’ve had the pandemic, remote work then the clawback to the office, and so. many. JavaScript frameworks and changes. And now layoffs all over the place and having to keep up with AI to stay relevant, AI and LLMs are changing faster than React and its ilk.
Instead I now program in a great language, Elixir, working on projects that I want, and reading books that I’ve been putting off for decades.
> I still write code every day in support of my generative art practice. The code is much more complex than anything I did previously, and much of it does not have anyone else doing it, so it's a lot of invention, which is fun.
Can relate. I've been "retired," since I was 55, and SV was nice enough to let me know that I was too old to play in their pool.
Pissed me off, something fierce, but, in the long run, it's the best thing that ever happened to me.
I could have made millions -for other people- maybe for me, as well, but I have never really been interested in that kind of thing. The work and the technology has always fascinated me.
I've found that what I really enjoy, is making UI tools for nontechnical folks. That's what I do, these days. I make free software for folks that can't afford the kind of stuff I do.
I’m in my late 50’s, and I still love making software, maybe even more now than when I was younger. What’s happened to me over decades as a professional is that I’ve totally lost any interest in “career” or the large corporate entity that employs me. Once any organization grows beyond about 20 people, it starts to become dysfunctional, so I’ll be retiring the day I can convince my spouse we have enough money. That will give me more time to work on things I care about, including software.
A large org is a totally different beast from a small org, and yet they seamlessly transition into each other. So, a large org is dysfunctional when viewed through the lens of a small org. A large org is also dysfunctional when it is run like a small org, as is a small org when it's run like a large org.
Hopefully people will tell me why I'm wrong, but right now programming is just feeling like a bit of a dead end in general? The demand seems to be for AWS gurus, data analysts, low-code, prompt engineering etc. I'm not against learning new things to stay employable, but the new things that are in demand don't really seem to be programming. I learned a bit of Rust because it's kind of new(ish) and exciting, but apparently there's a massive glut of Rust devs. Whereas 15 years ago I learned Python and my employment prospects rocketed.
The nature of the majority of programming work now is not enjoyable IME.
Seems the majority of work is overly complex (in terms of "system design") CRUD stuff that uses whatever constellation of "Services" are cool this month, and "solving problems" that Ruby on Rails or ExpressJS solved like ten years ago, but now with way more yaml configurations and and other imposed complexity for dubious gain and benefit.
The new hyper focus of LLM chatbot hype isn't helping either.
There's two things going on. One is, yes, I think the quality of work mostly sucks all over.
But the other is it's a down part of the cycle and there's just a glut of us all, and a bit of disrespect from employers as well.
It's been a long time since we had one, and many people either didn't work through one before, or have forgotten.
That part will bounce back. In 5 years it'll be a crazy job market again, and having Rust on your resume will be valuable.
(To put it in perspective, I learned and wrote Python in 1996, 1997. And I really liked it. But nobody even knew what it was, and nobody would hire for it. I moved on, and lost my taste for dynamically typed languages, and then all the sudden Python was huge, and if I'd stuck with that, it would have been a big thing for me, I guess. I suspect a similar thing will happen with Rust, etc. At least I hope so, since Rust is my day-job :-) )
Work is work and always has it's plusses and minuses.
But, yes, even if the tech cycle isn't terrible at the moment (e.g. dot-bomb nuclear winter) it's definitely down. I somewhat regret effort and money I put in a couple of years ago to get myself setup to do various stuff post "retirement" because, while I haven't exactly been beating the bushes, opportunities haven't been falling off trees either.
> Programming for the sake of "writing code" is probably going to miss the target.
Why do you have to be so demeaning?
I'd argue almost nobody is "writing code for the sake of writing code". In my case I love solving problems with code. Not by clicking through AWS' terrible website. Not through taking a deep breath and trying to reformulate a ChatGPT prompt for the 17th time.
I'm turning 50 in a few months. I still enjoy coding; and I expect to be coding for another few decades.
One thing I figured out early on is that your choices in languages and tech really matter. There are only so many things you can learn and you have to make some educated bets on things getting traction or not. And if you make the right bets, it's easier to keep your skills fresh and relevant.
Some things look fancy and nice and then five years later it's all outdated and obsolete. And some other things go big. Java was one of those things and in 1995, when I was in university, they decided to use it for teaching programming to first year students. So I ended up being a teaching assistant and now have nearly thirty years of experience with the JVM ecosystem.
I recognized the signs of the platform and language (especially) going a bit stale about fifteen years ago. It's becoming the Cobol of my generation (plenty of work but not the kind that gets me excited). I realized I needed to move on if I wanted to stay relevant. Since then I've touched a lot of languages. Right now, I do a lot of Kotlin but I keep an eye out for new things. Kotlin was a bit of a bet ten years ago. I fully committed to mastering it six years ago. And at this point it's starting to feel like a good bet. The language is modern, has a lot of momentum and there's lots of interesting stuff happening with the language, compiler, tools, etc. Particularly multi-platform is opening up a lot of possibilities.
I've dabbled with other things along the way but never really got the feeling that mastering that stuff was worth my time. E.g. Ruby was interesting but it's now mainly used by people in their forties (i.e. my age). Younger generations seem to not be interested in it. Same with things like Scala. Lots of stuff still happening with both of course but it seems that they are both a bit past their peak.
Python on the other hand keeps surprising me by not getting replaced with something else. I kind of like the language and have done some things with it over the years. And I like that they are clearing out technical debt (like the GIL) and keeping the language fresh. I work with some twenty year old interns that know and love it. People will be doing Python long after I die. That's a bet I didn't make but it would have been a good one. And not too late obviously. I know enough python to be able to jump in a project and use it. I've done so on a few projects in recent years. It's a very approachable language; kind of by design.
> [Java] I recognized the signs of the platform and language (especially) going a bit stale about fifteen years ago.
Java has become a lot better. It was always a boring, but easy to write, easy to debug, easy to build with language, on purpose. That was the selling feature, so that finding developers was easy. It purposely didn't move quickly, or adopt the latest fasions, waiting them out to see what stuck and adopting later.
Ok, so what? Well, Java has started to evolve more quickly with the new development cycles. I still write Java. We easily deal with null safety, we have a good build system, we have a monorepo, we don't (often) have dependency hell. Most of our code runs on ZGC and we don't think too hard about garbage, because ZGC is so damn fast. Our hotpath is different. We think very carefully about GC and memory access etc on the hotpath. And we have one language, covering both types of coding, in the same repo, the same build, the same tooling, the same monitoring, deployments, etc etc.
Java is a real workhorse and is becoming nice to work with too.
Readit News
I was not obsolete. A big company like Apple, there are always things that need taken care of.
I assumed with iOS, Swift, etc., maybe the guys on the Cocoa team were obsolete? Of course not. That code is still there, still needs maintaining, interoperability with the new languages, frameworks, etc.
I'm more surprised they want to stay on.
And that is in fact why I left Apple: the job had changed, the "career" had changed. The engineers were no longer steering the ship. It had been that way when I started in 1995 though. A "team", let's say the graphics team, would figure out what API to revisit, what new ones to add — perhaps how to refactor the entire underlying workflow. The "tech lead" (who would regularly attend Siggraph since we're talking about the graphics team) would make the call as to what got priority. Marketing would come around after the fact to "create a narrative" around all the changes to the OS. I hate to say it, but many, those were the good ole' days.
(And let's be clear, in the 90's, Apple's customers were more or less like the engineers, we also loved the machine for the same reasons they did — so we did right by them, made changes they would like because we wanted them too. You can't say that as convincingly for the phone, being a mass consumer device.)
Marketing took the reins long ago though — especially as Apple began to succeed with the iPhone (which, someone can correct me if I am wrong, but I think was an engineer driven project initially — I mean most things were up to that point).
I stuck around nonetheless though because there was money to be made and kids still to raise.
When the last daughter flew the coop though, so did I.
But no reason for me to mentor — really it's just let the engineers drive. Sometimes it works (or sued to in another era), sometimes it does not. Either way, it will be a fin place to work. ;-)
What I don't like is all the bullshit around it. Primarily now the barrier is that I don't have to work, so why would I put up with abusive hazing? I mean of course, hiring processes, which have only gotten worse over time (hallmark property of the cycle of hazing).
I'm not doing on-call rotations anymore. Either allow us to engineer the thing to be resilient, or pay off-duty people (a wonderful opportunity for offshore people that management is so desperate to use).
Finally, I don't want to code in Python or JavaScript. As a long time programmer, it is annoying that we keep going backwards and wasting more and more hardware power.
Nobody is producing anything exciting in software anymore. I can't think of a pure software company doing anything I would be excited for, because google and facebook and the like control the internet.
It doesn't even pay that well anymore, and AI is just another huge excuse to drop wages by management.
Apple is a fantastic example: operating systems are stagnant, hardware outside of the architecture switch is stagnant (and how much of that was simply priority access to the state of the art TSMC node tech).
Nobody makes good solutions for anything anymore.
They're not? Some of the newer programming languages seem very interesting, attempting to fix some of the mistakes done in older languages. Of course, most of the really interesting problems are already solved by existing solutions, but perhaps there's room for improved solutions instead of just using the incumbent.
>I like programming. I can still do it. What I don't like is all the bullshit around it.
If you have spare time (you sound like you might be retired), perhaps you should try getting involved in an open-source project that interests you (and isn't in Python or JS of course).
>I can't think of a pure software company doing anything I would be excited for, because google and facebook and the like control the internet.
Personally, I work in robotics and find it quite interesting. I would also find writing software for spacecraft interesting. Neither of those are "pure software", but still I think they're applications that will change the world, hopefully for the better, and don't already have some huge incumbent dominating the market.
Can you expand on this? I haven’t noticed salaries going down where I’m at (only fewer open positions the last ~1.5 years due to the global economic climate - but I’m sure this is cyclical and will swing back soon enough).
Part of my motivation to go into writing code in the first place was that I noticed software getting worse and more user-hostile in the 2010s and I wanted to change that. Turns out the people making software worse think the stuff that makes it worse are "best practices" so you're fighting an impossible battle and nobody is going to dare allowing you to advance into a leadership position or often even get a job in the first place unless they think you're a true believer in the BS.
I also have no interest, at this point, in writing code unless I'm paid to do it. It's hard to find motivation to write code when I mentally associate it with all of the corporate BS and the grifting con artists of the tech industry. The one saving grace was that the money was good and it was possible to switch jobs for more money or because you're tired of 1 particular company's BS. Now, even that isn't possible anymore so what's the point?
I've had 3 jobs in the ~decade-long range. I was really ready to move on in each case. Partly I was ready for a change and partly the company had changed.
The problem is, I have a family and finding fulfilling work that you have no experience in, in this country, at 50, is close to impossible.
So for now I consider myself lucky and try to rediscover the fun things in programming.
I don't have any doubt in my ability to learn new languages and frameworks, but running in that hamster wheel just gets boring after a while.
It's tough to tell younger engineers that have cut their teeth swimming in intricacies and edge cases and integration nightmares and constantly surfing on the edge of chaos, and managing it, that they're likely contributing to the problem, not fixing it. But someone needs to.
I can't remember details like I used to, things mark&sweep out of my brain much faster they used to. (Probably not just because I'm older but because as a parent, home owner, and spouse... I just have a lot to manage on top of it.) But.. really... a good system, a well-built system ... should be resilient to that, and people with experience.. that's hopefully what we build.
When I reflect I do cringe a bit at what I was zealous about and things I took way too far. But, I do think the discussion, sometimes debate, around the fancy/new vs tried/true resulted in much better results.
Now that I am old, but not that old, the younger engineers who are passionately discovering new tools and “new” design patterns keep me interested in software development. Being able to share where things come from then we can compare/contrast together. It is rarely a straight copy and it’s fun to see how things get better/worse with reinvention.
So, I think trying to get a mix of ages on a team is really beneficial. Passionate young engineers help prevent the old engineers from getting too jaded.
That, and prioritizing "new" features over maintenance because the former were booked as CapEx work, thus amortizable, while maintenance was booked as OpEx, combined with companies wanting to minimize CapEx ratio for accounting purposes.
Notice how little of what is measured and managed has anything to do with building working software to satisfy user needs?
It appears that the only path left for us in many European countries, is to go freelancer, and I vouch for the same problem regarding skills, forget about having Github repos, or open source contributions, if the technology company X is looking for isn't the one we haved used in the last 5 years or so on day job.
In the old days (say until ~7-8 yrs ago) I didn't have to attend very many meetings but of those I had to go to most were useful/necessary. These days I could probably count the useful meetings I attend in a year on one hand but the amount of Scrum-worship-meetings per week requires two hands.
The same amount of actual work I could do in a week in the old days would now take several months because it needs to be planned in detail. And no, not any technical detail, but rather discussions on how to divide it into stories but without doing any proper technical analysis and then straight ahead to story point guesstimates, yay! Then after a brief period of actual coding it's stuck in code review for weeks because no one will look at a PR unless prodded with a stick.
While I do think that code reviews can some times be beneficial, most of the time they are (in my experience unfortunately) pretty useless. Most comments (and I have to admit I'm guilty to this as well) are more bike-shedding than bug-preventing. Complex bugs are rarely found in code-reviews in my experience.
While these are my experiences during the last 7-8 years or so, it's more or less the same on all the half a dozen companies (or so) I've worked for during that period (which is also a very big reason why I've worked on half a dozen companies in that period).
I still get enjoyment out of some coding - C++ on Linux for enterprise applications - but I do miss the “magic”.
but that's not the same thing as enjoying writing the dreck that many employers want, and keeping up with their endless stack of messy JIRA issues, planning meetings, poor design docs, and management shenanigans....
There are also parallels with embedded device and FPGA work that I personally find thrilling.
Plus we on the VICE (open source Commodore emulator) team are always looking for devs.
I still enjoy writing code or shall we say solving problems via code. I still get excited about new things. I'm also a manager and I enjoy helping others. What I enjoy less is the politics.
Building things is fun, I don't think this goes away, it was always fun and is still fun.
I'm used to verifying code with a compiler/interpreter and a unit test -- not by going through my code line by line and declaring to an interviewer "yes I think it's correct". My way of doing things is to just run the damn thing with the right tests and it will tell me if something is wrong.
Unfortunately job interviews these days are still hellbent on whiteboarding Leetcode problems. I'm past that. Unfortunately they aren't. It's this kind of BS -- not being allowed to use the best tools that exist -- that makes me not want to code for work anymore.
Right now I feel like I'll never want to stop making things, but that if I were rich enough and good enough at creating in a different medium other than code, I completely understand the desire to walk away from the terminal and never look back. Few things have been as frustrating to me as programming. Yet since few things have been so rewarding, I persist.
It's a great article because it's making me think about my own life. I'll keep pondering. Thanks for posting it.
What do you mean, this is the best part of the job, the part I look forward to most each day.
If you never feel that way, I'm very happy for you!
Instead I now program in a great language, Elixir, working on projects that I want, and reading books that I’ve been putting off for decades.
AI has mostly been a nice benefit to - Copilot really makes writing code more pleasant. I haven't really seen any downsides to AI in my work.
I'm almost always remote, and mostly like that, too.
This, at least for the time being, seems more a thing that people worry about than a real phenomenon.
Can relate. I've been "retired," since I was 55, and SV was nice enough to let me know that I was too old to play in their pool.
Pissed me off, something fierce, but, in the long run, it's the best thing that ever happened to me.
I could have made millions -for other people- maybe for me, as well, but I have never really been interested in that kind of thing. The work and the technology has always fascinated me.
I've found that what I really enjoy, is making UI tools for nontechnical folks. That's what I do, these days. I make free software for folks that can't afford the kind of stuff I do.
I guess if that's the way absolutely everything functions then perhaps dysfunction is actually just function.
Seems the majority of work is overly complex (in terms of "system design") CRUD stuff that uses whatever constellation of "Services" are cool this month, and "solving problems" that Ruby on Rails or ExpressJS solved like ten years ago, but now with way more yaml configurations and and other imposed complexity for dubious gain and benefit.
The new hyper focus of LLM chatbot hype isn't helping either.
But the other is it's a down part of the cycle and there's just a glut of us all, and a bit of disrespect from employers as well.
It's been a long time since we had one, and many people either didn't work through one before, or have forgotten.
That part will bounce back. In 5 years it'll be a crazy job market again, and having Rust on your resume will be valuable.
(To put it in perspective, I learned and wrote Python in 1996, 1997. And I really liked it. But nobody even knew what it was, and nobody would hire for it. I moved on, and lost my taste for dynamically typed languages, and then all the sudden Python was huge, and if I'd stuck with that, it would have been a big thing for me, I guess. I suspect a similar thing will happen with Rust, etc. At least I hope so, since Rust is my day-job :-) )
But, yes, even if the tech cycle isn't terrible at the moment (e.g. dot-bomb nuclear winter) it's definitely down. I somewhat regret effort and money I put in a couple of years ago to get myself setup to do various stuff post "retirement" because, while I haven't exactly been beating the bushes, opportunities haven't been falling off trees either.
Programming for the sake of "writing code" is probably going to miss the target.
For example "analyst". My take is that is where it all started. Someone looking at numbers and needing computers to help making sense of them.
Why do you have to be so demeaning?
I'd argue almost nobody is "writing code for the sake of writing code". In my case I love solving problems with code. Not by clicking through AWS' terrible website. Not through taking a deep breath and trying to reformulate a ChatGPT prompt for the 17th time.
One thing I figured out early on is that your choices in languages and tech really matter. There are only so many things you can learn and you have to make some educated bets on things getting traction or not. And if you make the right bets, it's easier to keep your skills fresh and relevant.
Some things look fancy and nice and then five years later it's all outdated and obsolete. And some other things go big. Java was one of those things and in 1995, when I was in university, they decided to use it for teaching programming to first year students. So I ended up being a teaching assistant and now have nearly thirty years of experience with the JVM ecosystem.
I recognized the signs of the platform and language (especially) going a bit stale about fifteen years ago. It's becoming the Cobol of my generation (plenty of work but not the kind that gets me excited). I realized I needed to move on if I wanted to stay relevant. Since then I've touched a lot of languages. Right now, I do a lot of Kotlin but I keep an eye out for new things. Kotlin was a bit of a bet ten years ago. I fully committed to mastering it six years ago. And at this point it's starting to feel like a good bet. The language is modern, has a lot of momentum and there's lots of interesting stuff happening with the language, compiler, tools, etc. Particularly multi-platform is opening up a lot of possibilities.
I've dabbled with other things along the way but never really got the feeling that mastering that stuff was worth my time. E.g. Ruby was interesting but it's now mainly used by people in their forties (i.e. my age). Younger generations seem to not be interested in it. Same with things like Scala. Lots of stuff still happening with both of course but it seems that they are both a bit past their peak.
Python on the other hand keeps surprising me by not getting replaced with something else. I kind of like the language and have done some things with it over the years. And I like that they are clearing out technical debt (like the GIL) and keeping the language fresh. I work with some twenty year old interns that know and love it. People will be doing Python long after I die. That's a bet I didn't make but it would have been a good one. And not too late obviously. I know enough python to be able to jump in a project and use it. I've done so on a few projects in recent years. It's a very approachable language; kind of by design.
Java has become a lot better. It was always a boring, but easy to write, easy to debug, easy to build with language, on purpose. That was the selling feature, so that finding developers was easy. It purposely didn't move quickly, or adopt the latest fasions, waiting them out to see what stuck and adopting later.
Ok, so what? Well, Java has started to evolve more quickly with the new development cycles. I still write Java. We easily deal with null safety, we have a good build system, we have a monorepo, we don't (often) have dependency hell. Most of our code runs on ZGC and we don't think too hard about garbage, because ZGC is so damn fast. Our hotpath is different. We think very carefully about GC and memory access etc on the hotpath. And we have one language, covering both types of coding, in the same repo, the same build, the same tooling, the same monitoring, deployments, etc etc.
Java is a real workhorse and is becoming nice to work with too.