Yes I think your experience sums up about >95% of all dev experience. I am doing about same thing as you for last 8-10 years or so. I guess it is about same time where Agile took hold of IT/Software industry.

Apart from may be few core infrastructure primitives at public Cloud providers most of IT stuff today is API calling API calling API and so on.

It will be the case until Human is Out Of Loop from most of the IT work.

> stand-ups and scrum and SAFE

Honestly some of my best jobs were at places that had a nicely balanced practice in place and the backbone to remind execs that if they interrupt makers daily with new shiny asks they will in effect get nothing (because nothing would ever be completed)...

But obviously we can both have worked at places with those labels with vastly different implementations and thus experiences :)

I was at the same place you are for a while until I realized my obsession with doing everything "right" was killing my enjoyment of programming. I read through Let Over Lambda a couple of months ago and was blown away at how deeply unmaintainable some of his code examples are, but I got inspired to start letting myself do weird unmaintainable shit while programming instead of constantly acting like my code has to pass a code review and I've found its a lot more fun.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Any non-small company has plenty of people that need to justify their salaries.

Meetings is one of the most effective ways to actually pretend to be working.

This right here is how I feel about this too.

I used to have a lot more mental bandwidth and energy to be "curious" and to tinker once upon a time. But now the world is so literally and figuratively on fire and every executive is so rabidly frothing at the mouth over AI that now I just want things to "just work" with the least amount of bullshit so I can just go home on time and forget about work until the next business day.

I just want this fucked decade to be over already.

Interesting.

for me it feels like I have to spend all day fighting with folks who are constantly “holding it wrong” and using libraries and frameworks in really weird/buggy ways who then seem completely uninterested in learning.

In my free time I love working on my own projects because I don’t have to deal with this bullshit and I can just craft things finely without any external pressure.

To be candid, even though my jobs have time to tinker, I don’t want to fight with Product or Management to get improvements into prod.

Took me half a year to get them to value Sentry, lol.

I’ll just collect my check and go do something else.

At least you're not sitting there patching Y2K bugs

Exactly the same sentiment here.

If you don't have energy, then you are doing too much. Pace yourself. If you think something can be delivered in 5 days, say it needs 10 days. Otherwise this is just a road to burnout and exploitation.

World will not end if project is delayed by few weeks. You get time for your own tinkering (never tinker on company stuff, even if that would improve things, unless you are shareholder).

The larger the environment, the more brain power it takes. Microservices didn't help with that

damn this was me for a few years. I hate corporate work environments so much. Then they hire bottom of the barrel contractors and expect you to get them up to speed in less than a week or so.

Final straw for me was RTO. Silently quitting and getting my ticket punched (laid off) was the best thing for me.

Oh, I am so here for "housing theory of everything" comments! That is, in my other comment on this post, precisely my "interest in local politics".

Working on fixing our housing shortage has felt extremely meaningful to me.

I'd like to find some of that idealism in software again.

This is the root of it all. 8-10 years of experience with an above average pay rate means you can just start to afford a starter home in any of the tech hubs.

The single biggest determinant of people's cost of living, and the single biggest driver of backsliding living standards in many of the most productive cities in the US.

When math starts falling from the sky, generated by AI of course and proved with theorem provers, then everything will start falling from the sky. There will be a way to have more houses than anyone would ever need, for every person on the planet.

It's not just housing. Imagine you want to start a business. There is not much commercial property available and if there is something, it is too expensive and wildly taxed.

We did push people into what they wanted to do: make money.

The sad reality is that "everyone learn to code" was by and large a marketing distraction from the severe structural unemployment the fast and loose economy is in. No a coal miner can't just learn to code and get a job in WV, certainly not 1,000's of other miner sin the same position, not can the millions of people that corporate laid off over those same decades.

Coding was a way out of poverty, but for most people it was just a distraction to keep them from seeing how bad the economy is.

Americans are poor: PNC Bank's annual Financial Wellness in the Workplace Report shows that 67 percent of workers now say they are living paycheck to paycheck, up from 63 percent in 2024. https://www.newsweek.com/2025-rise-americans-living-paycheck...

We should have figured out how that get some of the benefits of productivity gains to go to workers. We were promised a rising tide lifts all ships, but now that the tide rose and is started to go back out, those that promised didn't deliver but keeping hoping we won't notice.

So if only you could have kept your mouth shut, this would have never happened.. Burn the witch!

And it's all a consequence of the dollar being so worthless by now that you need a six-figure income and still may not be able to afford a middle-class lifestyle in a growing number of places any more :\

I was always under the impression that high level UK engineers tend to become freelance consultants so as to get paid an appropriate amount - is this not true (anymore)?

Tons of high paying jobs in FAANG and similar in London. What are you even talking about?

Funny thing being is that doing that exploring and tinkering is what makes them more money. Otherwise you're just stuck with trying to make a thinner iPhone and that doesn't seem to be going all that well...

The best model I've seen is the 3M-style "10% Time"

Under that model, 10% of your time is completely up to you (within reason) to work on things that aren't your main project or scope.

Works out well for R&D or more open ended positions, since you can have the flexibility to explore hunches without having to justify a whole project around it.

People doing it now for money aren't the same as you likely doing it for the money in the old day.

When I went into comp-sci, it wasn't the cool path to riches it's been marketed as for the past 15 years.

EDIT: you graduated around the same time as me. Sure everyone wanted jobs. But there were easier paths to getting a good job in '95/96 that cramming late night comp-sci work. Almost everyone in my class had grown up in the age of hacking around on Apple IIs, their first PCs, etc. No one just randomly ended up in the Comp Sci part of the university because they just wanted a job to make money.

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