You come to a point where you realize that you're not doing anything that creative, or nothing you haven't done hundreds of times before, maybe every few years you switch to whatever new tech stack has gotten popular, but it's fundamentally all the same. And you start to realize that everything you do has a lifespan of a few years, and then you (or probably someone else) will re-do it.
As retirement starts feeling like it is something that will happen sooner than later, you look back and see that almost nothing you've built is still in use, or will be for very long after you're gone.
I hope to retire in about two years. At that point, I plan to not be using any technology or computers in my life for a while, or as little as possible. Maybe at some point I'll rediscover some of the fun I used to have writing programs for myself, but I suspect I'll need a long break before that happens.
So true!
But it's interesting that, from the perspective of someone in the middle, neither near the beginning or end of my career, I am (now, after a period of sadness) experiencing AI as a reinvigoration of fun in the work. But it's a very different kind of fun. I had totally lost the fun of clean code and figuring out new technologies and approaches and abstractions, just like you describe.
But now I'm experiencing the joy of thinking about what I can build, now that it's so much faster and easier to try ideas. I think this is actually getting back to an earlier version of my joy with computers. I can (vaguely) remember in my early years being like "wow! cool! I can make stuff that shows up on a computer screen!". But then it turned out to be ... pretty damn hard to actually do that, which led me to more excitement about all the ideas and technologies and techniques for managing the complexity of software engineering. But then that started feeling more tedious and samey, but I still had to put lots of time into it, there wasn't any other option.
But now all that is so much easier, and I'm rediscovering the fun of "wow cool, I can make things!", but now also with the whole benefit of the time I have spent doing the work of software engineering.
Software development has more in common with agriculture than architecture. The code always needs maintenance.
Legal marketing specifically. Weirdly, my work had more impact, respect and longevity there than the place where I'm a much more senior engineer supposedly directing the work of a whole organization of engineers. I had it better where I was a 1 of 2 than a leader among hundreds.
But honestly I've stopped being excited to type out code in my personal projects anymore either. I've become much more excited by what I can accomplish on my own in a small number of hours squeezed between work and family. I still experience this as a loss, but I'm no longer so sad about it, and moreso feel invigorated by the possibilities and opportunities that have been opened up.
A way that I have come to think about this is: I used to always be curious about the product management role. How exciting to come up with ideas and validate them with users. But I always demurred because it would be so frustrating to have to rely on other people to bring those ideas to fruition! On balance, I always preferred being the one executing ideas to being the one generating and validating them. But now I can properly do both things! (In my hobby time, that is, at work we still have this idea/execution split, at least for the time being.)
> Jeb: "If everybody's got one of these auto-whatsits, does anybody code anymore?"
> Doc Brown: "Of course we code. But for recreation. For fun."
> Jeb: "Code for fun? What the hell kind of fun is that?"
Then they announced that they removed the limit/making further request just cost extra for them. That's when I started using it as I did for my personal projects I pay subscriptions for...
Then Copilot increased their pricing. Announced in April I think? But took effect this month. This Monday they announced that the limits are back in effect. So I guess I'll be going back to hand coding next week, as my tokens are about to run out ಥ ‿ ಥ
Corporate is always so silly. I mean I know how it happens: everyone just wants to get their bonus, so different management roles try to coerce the employees to do whatever best serves their bottomline - rarely related to whatever is good for the corporation... But it's always silly to live through it.