Whats your YOE, like when did you enter tech as a SWE?

This shouldn't be normalized for you yet unless you're at a faang pushing this at the edge and new to the field, cause this isn't what we used to do 2 years ago.

If you're happy with the ai slop $$$ job more power to you but that isn't the entire field and there used to be (and hopefully still are) good and fun engineering jobs.

Contrary to popular normie belief, no not everyone wants to work at the Metas and OpenAIs and for good reason.

YOE is ~30, from my first PHP app to present. I've spent somewhere between 5 and 80 hours a week coding for the past 30 years, mostly self-employed, writing tools and creating custom CNC machines/robots for my own business, but more recently doing same thing for a company.

I still get to do some coding, where there are safety-critical production systems, but the work is mostly tooling that gets us to that point or supports the business otherwise.

It's an awesome job. Couldn't be funner, pretty much, except on data collection days. I get high level tasks, or come up with my own, and find or build solutions - no more running a whole business, doing production, keeping books, shipping orders, doing customer support - I only do the stuff I like.