Software engineer, here. Yep, the burnout is real. I consider myself fortunate, however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
I think that’s pretty much where the entire industry will go soon.
Huh. Maybe I will have a shot at getting a job… Oh, wait, I have 35 years experience, am over 50 and have been unemployed for 16 months. Never mind.
I gave up the humiliating shit show called a job search 3 months ago, and frankly my last job killed any interest in software development anyway.
It’s all idiots telling professionals they’re wrong and incompetent while blaming them for the ongoing production failures we solved and explained every month for a year but still can’t get the code past review because “it does too much”. 30 fucking lines of code “does too much”. Pompous morons.
We’re a threat of competence, and they’re excising us relentlessly. I will laugh bitterly as I watch the soon to be torrent of fiascos and lamentations these idiots spout while still finding a way to blame software engineers.
Hey are you me?!
Yeah I wonder how low I will go for a job, it’s not bright exactly…
If, like me, you took it on faith (at the age of 23) that social security will be gone by the time I retire, you have been saving and investingcas much as possible. Then you can get by on low-end work.
Remember, jobs don’t really give you prestige. A job is a job. The issue is whether it can help you pay your bills or not.
Note that Social Security is slated to not have enough money for full payments 3 years before I’m due to enroll (for full payments). You’d think I’d have earned Millions with my precognitive skills.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
A bit different over here in the EU I guess, but similar too; got my apartment almost paid off, social security is guaranteed, retirement will be like 1k€/m in like 9 years…
Hopefully RAM prices will have fallen by then 😁, or maybe we old C/C++ devs will be the new COBOL guys…
Hope springs eternal. There seems to be a strong movement to make Rust replace both C++ and C#. I should have taken python more seriously when I first saw it in Linux about 20 years ago, given the fever dream that grips the world now.
If I can rekindle the joy I used to have in software, I am going to just do game mods and Android FOSS app development.
Right now the thought of doing development practically gives me hives. Talk about PTSD. The thing I loved since writing assembly on a commodore 64 now brings dread.
I suppose the fact (ha!) that I no longer have to know a programming language (but I have to have several memorized to get through the first interview) should make it easy.
I have to admit my brief forays into local LLM assisted programming impressed me. I just can’t motivate right now to “get serious”.
Remember when Java was going to replace C/C++?
Also, machincode before getting an assembler on the C64! JMP=32 JSR=96
IIRC…
PEEK and POKE mostly, and typing hex codes into a special editor. Remember the games and utilities in the magazines? Also, a page of basic 2.0 code to draw a line And the amazing never before available Sprite Development.
As a freelance dev it’s not quite as bad now but it’s insane to see that some of my clients think I got replaced by a machine now only to show me a buggy vibe coded mess of an app that is poorly designed and works half the time at best. I like some of the LLM tools but it’s important to understand their abilities and limitations especially in regards to future capabilities as there are hard limits to how capable they can become.
Way too many people think the tools are smart because they can „talk“ and these same people do not understand any of the underlying tech.
Some of my clients send ChatGPT written instructions now that are missing half the context of what I‘m actually doing.
I call it “Turing’s Revenge” where, once the bot can pass the Turing test, we find out the hard way if humans are intelligent… and we appear to have a lot of failed models, mostly in management.
Reverse Turing test?
Holy cow. I’m stealing that. The reverse Turing test is whether we humans have the brains not to turn everything over to untrusted AI. Lol.
John Connor, you must lead the resistance.
