I feel development is not challenging anymore, is just “an obligation” for 9to5 survival.
Posted by greckzero@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 43 comments
My first experiences with development, more than 10 years ago, has been as simple as creating plugins for Wordpress.
Nothing revolutionary, for example table reservation system for a restaurant, an interactive map for locals of a franchise, small things that made you plan and learn new stuff, aside development, on how business work and it needs.
After some time other types of requirements appeared, data management (learning about stored procedures was a pain), asynchronous functions, errors prevention, integrations with sharepoint and other third party systems which not necessarily rely on APIs.
Fastforwarding to current days, I feel like with all the Frameworks, AWS components, even AI getting answers in miliseconds, all of the “fun” of development and learning is totally gone, and I feel the 9to5 became a survival on pleasing management rather than showing your capabilities and problem solving skills.
Actually the problem solving part, I feel is not valuable anymore, as we don’t solve anything. at all, just slap new features so the stakeholders see a company as a potential investment.
Also with the “ship as fast as possible” mentality, we dont really pause and appreciate the outcome of the code, becuase time not invested in a new development is lost time.
I just want to confirm it’s just not me, that development nowadays has nothing to do with the oldschool ways of working, and we probably will never get back that “feeling” of overcoming ourselves.
As always, have a good one!
pseudo_babbler@reddit
Yeah I'm a similar way, I read a comment on here that software development has lost whatever shiny reputation it used to have. Partly because people think we're all getting replaced, and partly because some people blame us as an industry for bringing about this AI apocalypse.
The reaction of people to me saying what my job is, is now oh right, oh ok so.. are you.. going to still be doing that? What's it like now?
Which is pretty funny. It means that my job went from really niche and "intelligent super nerd" in the late 90s, to "trying to make web apps that don't suck using the scraps and wreckage of browsers" in the early 2000s to "oh you make apps? I love apps!" In the early 2010s, to "app dev? My nephew did a 3 week boot camp in app dev, can you get him a job?" to now, which is "wow you must be devastated that you're career has ended". I wonder what will be next. Hopefully it just settles down, the gold rush aspect of dev dies down and those of us who actually enjoyed the craft can continue working.
ReformedBlackPerson@reddit
It’s pretty wild bc people should realize if software engineering is dead as a field then so will 90% of white collar careers within 5 years. If AI is so good anyone can make software to solve a problem then Sharon in marketing making powerpoints and spreadsheets every week is fired… accounting fired… HR 90% fired… data analysts fired… etc.
BusinessWatercrees58@reddit
The field as we know it is dead, but the field itself isn't going anywhere as long as we still need software. The question is where does this leave the current crop of developers. Some developers remind me of human computers in NASA from decades ago: Educated workers with a very valuable skill that most people couldn't do, but they eventually got replaced by computers. We still have space engineers though and still have mathematicians. But where did that leave the people who's chief skill was specifically computation, not engineering?
awakenDeepBlue@reddit
God creates man. Man creates AI. And AI optimizes man out of existence to improve shareholder value.
Cute_Activity7527@reddit
At one beautiful moment in history we created a lot of value for our shareholders.
CalmLake999@reddit
I'm rebranding my self to Software Business Expert now.
Cute_Activity7527@reddit
“Product Engineer”, “Products builder”
Cute_Activity7527@reddit
Some developers brought that on themselves… I mean how hard it is to learn to read cicd pipelines? Or pull logs from k8s.
Half of software developers have issues like that. 100% agent is going to replace them.
subma-fuckin-rine@reddit
If you work in a feature factory then yes this is totally true. Not all jobs are like that though. But definitely increasingly so
uber_neutrino@reddit
Sounds like you are working on boring scut work. Maybe find a more interesting place to work with more interesting problems?
Plenty_Line2696@reddit
Some stuff is a lot less challenging, or not challenging at all, but there's always more challenging stuff to work on.
PineappleLemur@reddit
This sounds like a role thing and less of an industry issue...
I'm in Semicon, Software/Firmware by title but quite a bit of mechanical/electronics as well. Working on CMOS based imagers.
I'm still learning new stuff every day, always have challenge, I design/program/fabricate/test a lot of the calibration equipment and other testing equipment we use as side projects.
It's a job I'd do for free if I didn't need money to live... This notion hasn't changed since I started this role 7~ years ago.
I'm invovled in anything from chip design, CMOS structures, lens and of course mainly the software/firmware.
Meanwhile I have no fucking clue what the "full" in full stack means, no clue about AWS or any of the words you said.. so there's that.
I use AI a lot mostly for prototyping and brainstorming and for production stuff where it fits. Have a lot of niche stuff, poor documentation and proprietary communication protocol makes it a bit hard to use AI for everything.
Not much "industry standard" in my area so a lot need to be figured out from scratch because it's either a secret you won't find online or simply no one has ever had to make it before.
Green0Photon@reddit
Nah, I feel it too.
Found this guy's essays that talks about this kind of thing. We've kinda always been like this. Though that post is from 2021. It's just gotten worse with AI and the AI psychosis that many people experience. So not only are feature slop glorified as usual, it's exponentially easier to produce slop than it used to be. Meanwhile, you already had people complain in this sub and elsewhere about those people that complete tickets ASAP by writing the worst code as fast as possible.
He does have a book about this which I intend to read, but there's no silver bullet that makes people care and makes it not a problem. Although everyone on your team, along with your manager, reading that might help, the problem is your team is under pressure to produce slop from upper management and other stakeholders.
So much of being on a team and trying to accomplish x y z really ends up as not caring about users of the product. I just think about my own team, where it's kind of especially bad. But even aside from making features that make stakeholders happy, we're all under pressure nowadays to prove that AI investment is useful. And the only way we get paid, before that happened and after, is by new features created, not good user experience and user problems being solved.
Anyway, this guy, Baldur Bjarnason has a bunch of stuff talking about LLMs causing problems, too, in this sense. The two worlds of programmers who disagree about it, the LLMentalist Effect, and even a whole book, the Intelligence Illusion.
His essays have already helped me better understand this industry, hopefully it might help you? There's a whole lot of other good ones there.
x-jhp-x@reddit
You started with wordpress and you're posting this? People were saying the same things about wordpress back then. People were complaining that wordpress was so easy, it was taking a lot of the problem solving out! "Also with the “ship as fast as possible” mentality" wait, isn't that also wordpress? "9to5 became ... pleasing management rather than showing your capabilities". It became that like 70 or more years ago though? companies weren't hiring you because they wanted to show your skills, they were hiring you to complete a task that would make them more money.
"that development nowadays has nothing to do with the oldschool ways" hmmm, this sounds a lot like a bot, or at least, someone who gets all of their information/news/thought from a bot. If you're not a bot, I'd recommend stepping away from reddit for a year or two.
greckzero@reddit (OP)
yea maybe it's a good idea to step out, the toxicity here sometimes can be overwhelming :-), and I don't mean that just by your post, just other people that think their truth is the truthiest of them all.
zuilli@reddit
This is not toxicity brother, he is just telling you truths. Ever heard the phrase "work with what you love and you'll never love anything again"?
Seems like it happened to you, working a 9to5 sucks and it took all the joy you had in coding, it also happened to me but it pays well and I'm good at it so I just keep pushing.
x-jhp-x@reddit
I guess it did come off as a bit jerkish, I'm drinking my coffee now! What I meant was, I find it amusing that you're posting almost identical stuff to what people said about wordpress 10 years ago. I think wordpress was great though.
greckzero@reddit (OP)
Wordpress was good for what it was designed for, blogs and business website for contact information/services. Obviously it affected all the "Webmaster" position, which got deprecated quickly. But I always feel that anything that required a bit of logic / heavy maintenance, it was too limited. And later when people noticed that a decision from Wordpress overlords might affect the whole project, just going full Symfony/Laravel was the new default.
x-jhp-x@reddit
there can be only one
mxldevs@reddit
Working for others has always been just getting stuff done. Maybe you might have some feeling of personal accomplishment, but your employer enjoys all the money that your accomplishment makes.
If you want challenge, start your own business, there are plenty of challenges and learning opportunities waiting for you.
SemaphoreBingo@reddit
I have an alternate diagnosis, it's called "you're 10 years older than you used to be".
nasanu@reddit
Idk, today I started on a new project, making changes to an app that is only 2 years old which was a complete remake because the first one was bad. Nothing but errors on npm install. Need to use legacy peer deps. Then need to turn off ssl. Then 452 errors. Ok fixed them (tons of them just lint --fix). Then I can get to the login screen. Press login, 404 cannot find your-url-here.com.. What is that? Nobody knows. Need to guess... I switched to the other project I have. Today I needed to upload the entire app in a zip file to another app and give someone the ID so I just simply see my code running (build an entire app blind... thats fun). But I go to upload... 400 CODEBASE.01. Ok... I use a different method to zip it... 400 File Missing. Cool. What do any of those errors mean? Who cares, I lost the battle ages ago to make the API team give errors that mean something. Why do I get different errors just by switching which program I use to zip it? A mystery never to be solved.
Tell me dev isn't challenging....
But yeah I agree on the nothing of value bit. I literally destroy sites with some tickets, forced by management. Always the "we don't have time" excuse, even though I outline how to do a lot better in a faction of the time. Its always, no time, nope, just do it. Even when I say "you realise I what I just proposed is faster right?" And its "yeah yeah but we have no time, we just need to do this". Sure.
But its all specific companies, I am sure there are still many workplaces that are decent.
xpingu69@reddit
It's like the internet, it was better when it was a niche. Before smartphones
magichronx@reddit
Professional development has always been an exchange of dollars for solutions now, with basically zero time afforded for appreciation of elegant engineering.
If you want something 'challenging', maybe try your hand at developing an emulator for some retro game console; you'll learn a ton and it's a very rewarding experience
BoringBuilding@reddit
This is happening in more industries than just development. There us a specific flavor of it here because of the nature of the technology we use, the general sentiment of dissatisfaction with pressures from management around your workload is not a new or unique complaint for corporate culture.
The other parts read like you are burned out and bored. This is a normal thing to happen after ten years. Ten years is a long time, a non-trivial portion of every year you will ever live. You will naturally experience repetition in that time, as that feeling of familiarity (for good and ill) will become even more common over time.
I would be curious for you to really sit with and analyze how much of gloss is really you being enamored with where you were 10 years ago, personally in a new industry, personally in a new workable, personal solving new problems (because you were new.)
There is no doubt software jobs have been getting wise for quite a while, we have been through many phases of degradation, scrum madness, offshoring, pick your poison. I would encourage you to step back and reflect on your own satisfaction and priorities though. You may need something as simple as another company or a pivot to another type of development work.
Perfect-Campaign9551@reddit
Why are people looking for "fun" by focusing on the low level shit? I love Low level stuff but come on it gets old dealing with it. Modern situation is your get to solve the really big problems instead
Cristiano1@reddit
A lot of development now feels more like product assembly under deadlines than actual engineering/problem solving. The old “figure it out and build something meaningful” feeling got replaced by shipping velocity and stakeholder pressure.
OverclockingUnicorn@reddit
Yeah the problem solving aspect has changed.
But, imo, it's less about problems with the code (for most of us working on crud apps and fairly satandard stuff) and more about solving business problems with technology.
As in, we have to create this report, currently it comes from these sources via these spreadsheets, then a python notebook then some manual work to put it into a PDF. Now you can just focus on building a solution to that problem, how do we gather the data, storing it, the mechanism for processing it, the underlying infra, how are we gonna make sure it scales well because now it's automated people are gonna want this report daily not monthly. Can we make this extendable enough to create other reports?
Those sort of problems AI isn't that good at solving, require a lot of talking to stake holders, translating needs into technical requirements and solutions. For me at least, that's the bit of the job I love. Writing code is fun, but the stuff around it is better.
wobblydramallama@reddit
people that got into this work only because they like to code suffer the most and will continue to suffer. writing code is a bottleneck that is gradually getting removed (higher level code, saas, now ai) So our job gets distilled to solving hard tech problems and everything else is trivialized.
putin_my_ass@reddit
Even with that bottleneck getting widened a bit, there's still a bottleneck.
I am working on a personal project with a few other folks as the lead dev and I got busy with some real life stuff afk, so some bugs have sat for a week or two as I take care of business.
In the mean time they tried solving some of those bugs on their own and they did manage to do so but still the tougher bugs eluded them for days on end. Even after bringing in their "AI expert" to try and resolve a bug they still couldn't figure it out.
When I got time back in my schedule I sat down to resolve that tough bug. Less than two hours.
You can't beat experience, even with all these new resources and tools.
xDannyS_@reddit
I don't think that has much to do with AI tbh, I think it has more to do with there having been no new yearly inventions like it was in the 2000 and 2010s. No new inventions, no new problems to solve. Right now the new stuff is AI, and if you're working on that then you definirely have a bunch of new problems to solve.
Smart phones and the mass adoption of the internet brought new problems worth nearly 2 decades. We haven't had anything like that since.
chuch1234@reddit
"no new problems solve"
Just like every new technology, AI solves some problems and introduces a whole new set of problems: how do i balance performance and cost; how do I reliably constrain the AI; RAG, which requires learning about vectors; how to implement MCP; etc.
RandyHoward@reddit
Dissentient@reddit
Always has been.
I can imagine having fun writing code for personal projects.
I can't imagine how anyone could ever have fun writing jobslop.
s1renetta@reddit
Sorry, I like my jobslop. 😬
Just that small moment of awareness of how far something has come, when you're deploying the second iteration of your product because the users wanted some specifics. And they reached out to you about it themselves.
Because you know how it started: management pushed some objectives on your department, so you sat there coming up with some vague ideas and started gathering input from those same users, who at the time didn't know why they should even care about the thing you're asking them to consider, let alone feel like they needed it.
I guess that means I'm fully ingrained into the soulless corporate production belt. But on the other hand, it also sucks when you spend 6 months putting effort into something, and it ends up not getting used at all.
Dissentient@reddit
There's also an upside to products that no one uses in that they don't generate bug reports and feature requests.
s1renetta@reddit
Ah yeah, we know that one as: "No need to put alerts on daily job runs, otherwise we have to look at why it crashed multiple times per week"
4dr14n31t0r@reddit
"jobslop" I love that word.
PressureHumble3604@reddit
Engineering culture has collapsed in the last 15 years, it was better when it was less advanced, because now we have advanced tools and we pretend they are all we need.
QuitTypical3210@reddit
Just work on open source or the low level stuff that builds up the abstraction to the high level stuff
greckzero@reddit (OP)
I'm actually thinking on switching from web development/marketing to something more IoT/Robotics related, something not as digital anymore.
markvii_dev@reddit
at this point i have no idea what reality you guys live in - I use the highest models on the company plan every day and have to correct and manually manage the code in 90% of interactions.
Stellariser@reddit
That corrosive anti-engineering mindset has been normal in enterprise forever. Scrum made it that much worse, and it’s reasonable for a lot of enshittification in the industry. AI is now pouring fuel on the shittiness bonfire.