Programming stopped feeling fun for me once MBAs and bean counters took over. There's rarely time to write thoughtful code anymore. Even convincing management to invest in a sane architecture feels like an endless uphill battle.
Engineer teams are nothing but an annoying expense on the balance sheet and the goal is to cram as many features, as quickly as possible to get the sale.
That's exactly why I'm happy to use every tool available to get the work done efficiently. To this end, LLMs have been great for me, especially when dealing with large amounts of boilerplate code.
It's still fun for me. But a lot of my day right now isn't "coding". But playing the job market game to get stability back in life while juggling other part time work.
Of course, I know the next layoff will come. So I simply want to use the next time of stability to make sure I can be that artisan the next time industry kicks me out. But baby steps for now.
Y’all were having fun? I always had fun making things, but the coding part was always a means to an end for me, and one that caused endless frustration at times. I never have to debug regex or write a single date format line by hand ever again, and I will never ever miss it.
Every bit of coding that did anything other than give me meaningful progress on features on the thing I was actually trying to build, which at times was 80%+ of it, was always terrible.
Engineer teams are nothing but an annoying expense on the balance sheet and the goal is to cram as many features, as quickly as possible to get the sale.
That's exactly why I'm happy to use every tool available to get the work done efficiently. To this end, LLMs have been great for me, especially when dealing with large amounts of boilerplate code.
Long gone the days of crafting artisan code.