Comment by epolanski

My biggest grief, among many, is that the field is just no longer enjoyable to work in.

I cannot deny the impact of AI for my daily tasks at this point.

But I just don't enjoy the field anymore. With increased productivity, also coming from my stellar coworkers, it feels like we're rat racing who outputs more.

The quality is good, and having very strong rails at language and implementation level, strong hygiene, etc helps tremendously.

But reality is that the pace of product vastly outpaces the pace at which I can absorb it's changes (I'm also in a very complex business logic field), and the same might be true about my understanding of the systems which are changing too fast for me to keep up.

I feel mentally fatigued from a long time, I don't enjoy coding no more bar the occasional relaxing personal project where I can spend the time I want without pressures on architectural or implementation details.

I'm increasingly thinking of changing field, this one is dying right under our eyes.

I often read comments about HN users still delving at their place with technical details or rewriting AI code to their liking.

I'm increasingly sure that these people live in happy bubbles where this luxury still exists. But this methodology of work is disappearing across the industry, team by team.

Of course SE will not disappear over night, but the productivity expectations, the complexity ballooning are raising the bar where only incredibly skilled and productive engineers will be still able to practice SE properly, and as long as they meet stakeholders expectations or keep living in those bubbles.