I love computers, but I'm tired. I spend all day doing stand-ups and scrum and SAFE and then trying to build microservices that talk to other microservices that other teams have built and I just want to get it done with the minimal amount of explosions and call it a day. I can't afford to tinker at my job, and I have no energy at night. I made my hobby my job and it killed it.

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.