No doubt there are many like me who started as a little misfit kid, before the dotcom crash. Spend your days lurking on IRC, reading packetstorm.securify news every day and your passion was finding out how things work, and make it do 'more'.

I found my passion way earlier, when I was sat behind a computer at age 4 to play minesweeper at the school's Windows 3.1 computer. But there were so many more things to click on and discover.

Just before the dotcom cash I was making a little bit of money on the side already from the ridiculous per click/impression advertisement rates.

At about age 14-15 shifted to some odd jobs on rentacoder.com, was asked to build a website for a local restaurant my sister worked at. Built a guestbook for some website/forum, and the owner needed someone to port and maintain their ASP e-commerce store to PHP. Ended up working there a workday a week during high-school.

I'm used to being undervalued and the work taken for granted throughout my career, as you know... things like pre-emptive focus on security and scalability are a hard sell, while mock designs sell easily.

But there was always an appreciation for the work and the learning effort that was required to become a good software developer.

Now? to be honest, the amount of self-doubt is growing and it's because I'm fearful that while data-breaches are telling the truth, I'm afraid that people are becoming numb to it.

Thanks to COVID, we saw a spike in cyber-intrusions, as people working at home are an easier attack surface.
Politicians were waking up a little bit.
"Finally!" " They get it!".
Then the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened, and suddenly cybersecurity became one of the most important things there is, and it seemed that every previous AGILE Coach turned into a CISO.

Not long before GenAI came along, and it's not getting better, despite numerous warnings and huge breaches. The lawmakers are legislating it, but you know that enforcing it is not on the table, unless it's for an easy big grab for a company who can afford it and survives anyway.

I don't see anyone being fearful of producing and shipping unsafe software, nor do I see a reluctance to use it, and feeding it with personal information.

I'm afraid that the FOMO might have already reached a threshold where the market will no longer self-correct, as data-breaches might produce a temporarily dip in a company's stock, but it won't end up in a hole in the ground with a tombstone covering it.

No recourse, no correction.

No correction, no deviation.

No deviation, just regression.

Speed valued over quality.

No more weeding out the germs.

When non-coders create code, I find it outright insulting.

We're not talking about a non-coder creating a website/webshop through a builder of a trusted vendor, but non-coders actually becoming the vendor, and producing facades like they are a team of 50+ real engineers.

And at the same time not at all reluctant to ingest massive quantities of their user's data into their systems.

And why shouldn't I be upset or insulted? We would be the only profession not to be upset. Not because I'm afraid of losing work, but because what quality work entails is lost on others.

I always gave people pointers when they showed an interest in becoming a developer. I could smell if someone was seriously interested or heard about the pay, but wasn't interested in putting in the work.
Someone who is truly interested in doing this would figure it out.
Or after some guidance to someone who had a hard time with learning JS: "Thanks, but the rest I want to do myself".

I recently came across this person's her social's and was happy to congratulate her on starting her own company.

Now I see posts like this:
"can u explain like with what workflow , you will have what kind of results you will see. I have a good agent.md and docs structure for the agent but in what case which model will be better for me."

And they might ship a whole app tomorrow and ask money for it.

After 26 years of software development, herding some fkn sheep somewhere starts to sound better every day.