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I just retired after 40 years writing code. The last year or so wasn’t fun - battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted. For a long time, I thought I

• CuriouslyC 4mo ago
  It's not AI or you, it's this late stage capitalist marketing firehose of bullshit and enforced productivity. Hype is out of control, nothing is real, it's exhausting.
  • ryandrake 4mo ago
    I think you're getting unfairly downvoted. A lot of people, across all salary ranges, are just vaguely tired of constantly Providing Maximal Shareholder Value™ to their managers day in and day out, having that One Purpose dominate their lives, and at the end of each day looking up and seeing nothing tangible to show for what they've done.
    • reactordev 4mo ago
      And being given an email and locked out of everything after a decade of doing so, on a whim, all because someone thought you were just an expense…
    • XorNot 4mo ago
      Its also the absolute assurance that we're all going to get screwed by a big crash circa 2028.
  • stavros 4mo ago
    Yep, this is the right answer. Everything is max money always, and you can't have nice things any more, you can only have things that extract all the value they can out of you.
  • mekael 4mo ago
    Ive paraphrased it before and i’ll paraphrase it again “If you’re looking for the villain, it’s capitalism. It’s always capitalism” - Brennan Lee Mulligan (and everyone else who’s tired of this shit).
  • Weebs 4mo ago
    Shhh no class consciousness on HN allowed
• add-sub-mul-div 4mo ago
  I made it 27 before I retired. I kind of wish I was older so I could have enjoyed more years of what was a fun career before it turned into... this.
  • ryandrake 4mo ago
    More and more I'm finding myself saying: "I got into this career because I liked technology, computers, programming, and so on. Not whatever this is!"
• ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
  I retired, after 30-some years. Actually, I was forced to retire, by folks that don't think us greyheads should be working. Fortunately, I had the means to retire. Those means had nothing to do with a FIRE strategy. I just saved, lived humbly, and stayed at a job for a couple of decades. But I have been doubling down on my tech work. Once the knuckleheads were removed from the soup, the flavor improved markedly. I love this tech stuff. Oh, and I have been using AI. It just helped me to find a nasty crashing problem, and I hope that it will help me to determine the best way to fix it.
  • pyrophane 4mo ago
    Yeah, I've realized that the things I don't like in tech have everything to do with the culture and politics. When I've been able to work with a small team of people I really like and respect, I've generally been quite content.
    • SlightlyLeftPad 4mo ago
      Any tips on finding this again? I had a great situation turn sour in exactly this way once growth and leadership change came.
      • skeeter2020 4mo ago
        nothing tactical from me, but I've fostered a strategic approach over the years that's lead to a deep appreciation for the real-time experience. You can probably recognize when it's good (and bad) once you've worked for a while, and you really need to consciously pause and remark "If this isn't nice, what is?"^1 at those times when it is good. A decade of consulting had me always ready to wrap my engagement at the end of any day, and (for better and worse) I carried this with me to future jobs. I always miss (at least some of) the people, but never the situation when it turns sour and I leave. The good news: you often get a chance to work with the good ones again (even if that's because you entice them away to your next gig). ^1 https://archive.org/details/ifthisisntnicewh0000vonn/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/ifthisisntnicewh0000vonn/mode/2u...
      • 4mo ago
• beached_whale 4mo ago
  More and more I have realized it was not the coding that I enjoyed, but solving problems/puzzles. This fits into the beautiful code not really mattering to more than myself but the solution for people, but that is hard to let go of.
  • bluGill 4mo ago
    We have long ago learned as an industry that code tends to live for a long time and so maintainable code is important. However for individuals your stance is just fine.
    • beached_whale 4mo ago
      Some code definitely does, but it isn't the product. People, outside the devs making it, don't value how good the code is, but how well it solves the problem.
      • salutis 4mo ago
        But there is no dichotomy, is there? Good code is code that solves the problem well. Today and sustainably into the future. What else would "good code" even mean in general context?
• adamddev1 4mo ago
  Honest question: if you didn't enjoy using AI, why not just write code without using AI?
  • yunwal 4mo ago
    At least in my work, this is sort of like asking "If you don't enjoy CI/CD or the cloud, why not do without it?" It's becoming integrated into every process at this point.
    • retired 4mo ago
      And many employers now require you to code faster, which is only possible with AI tooling. They don't understand that coding faster isn't always better.
      • amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
        Is this related to what business your employer is in? In other words, is their business producing code, or is code written to support some other business? Or is this just everywhere now?
        • retired 4mo ago
          Everywhere. Normally adding an extra endpoint to the REST API would take a sprint. Now PM expects you to do two. Only way to get that done is a lot of vibe-coding and delivering sub-par results.
          • necovek 4mo ago
            I am amazed that anyone ever needed a "sprint" to "add an endpoint". It usually speaks to the approach you are taking, but I also believe sprint-based planning leads development teams to make work fit into it instead of needing natural time to do it. Let's remember that all of have probably built full systems over a weekend. What organizational dysfunction has led to us needing a sprint is what needs fixing.
• creaturemachine 4mo ago
  Congratulations! Tech doesn't have to be the end goal. Personally I can't wait to shake this industry and find a new path in retirement.
  • kamaitachi 4mo ago
    Thanks! I’m one of the lucky ones who really loved my career. I was lucky enough to avoid roles or companies that would suck the life out of me:-) 5/5 would recommend :-)
• azangru 4mo ago
  > battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted What I am selfishly curious about is: is it possible to remain a software developer, and ignore AI? To write code the same way we did before 2022? I understand that there are many companies in which managers demand more of workforce — but are there still places where people are satisfied to not rush ahead and do business same way they did three or four years ago? In other words, is it possible to not battle with AI trying to get it what we want? Were you forced to do this by your employer, or was this entirely self-inflicted? Asking for a friend.
  • __lain__ 4mo ago
    Yeah go to a niche market C++ shop
    • randusername 4mo ago
      I'm banking on this. I don't really know anyone younger than me at the moment that writes C++. Best-case scenario I'll be in-demand. Worst-case when my grandchildren visit me at my cardboard box I can tell them spooky bedtime stories about SFINAE.
    • OnionBlender 4mo ago
      What niche market? I work for a hardware company writing C++ code and my company literally has a dashboard for managers that shows employee's token usage. My manager warned me that my low usage will reflect poorly on me during performance reviews later this year.
  • sevenzero 4mo ago
    >is it possible to remain a software developer, and ignore AI? To write code the same way we did before 2022 Yes if it's your own company or if you're self employed and can compete.
  • jasonkester 4mo ago
    Yeah, of course. I’ve only ever been disappointed by ai, so I don’t use it. I run my own shop, so I can do what I want, but I’m happy with my pace (which I’ve noticed is quite fast compared to folks I’ve worked with), and I don’t find “speed of writing code “ to be a bottleneck. When and if it gets good, I’ll hop in. But for the time being I don’t get the sense that I’m missing out on anything.
• pipes 4mo ago
  The battling ai bit you mentioned. This is my life right. Ai is both amazing and shit. I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives. Meanwhile I am going insane with stress because I've burnt so much time trying to wrangle it on a team I've just joined. My productivity has not been good. I half feel like I am being gas lit by YouTubers and half feel "no I'm just doing it wrong"
  • ssfrr 4mo ago
    Don't compare your inside to other people's outside.
    • chrisweekly 4mo ago
      great advice
  • rootusrootus 4mo ago
    > I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code and having amazing lives That is when I realize I'm spending too much time on HN. Because it is really only here that this vibe is so strong. My impression is that there is a lot of motivated reasoning in the folks that frequent HN. It may also be that I work a boring job. If I turned up our code output by 10x it would not improve anything about our product. People who are pumping out dramatically more code have to be in an entirely different world. Or, you know, they're full of shit.
  • dlev_pika 4mo ago
    You are not crazy.
  • ilaksh 4mo ago
    The leading edge models are pretty good but we are still at the "rain man" stage so it's "jagged" intelligence. It may be three years or so before the new compute-in-memory devices fully make it out of the lab and increase efficiency by about 100 times, allowing us to deploy models with human level complexity (100T vs current 10T SOTA) at scale.
• Devasta 4mo ago
  I have definitely found my enjoyment of coding in my spare time is lessened now that AI is on the scene. I know very few if any were going to use the code, but it felt like working on a classic car, the act of working on it was fun even if the final results seem like the effort could have been used more productively. Now, I just feel like I am transcribing a phonebook.
• retired 4mo ago
  Retired as well. Hated that dealing with AI was a big part of my job. Hated how half my time was spend clicking through portals, scrum boards, devops tooling. I just wanted to code. Haven't touched code since I retired unfortunately. Just don't feel like it. Don't need it either.
• jjice 4mo ago
  I'm not near retirement, but I have found that the side projects I work on have diminished quite a bit since AI took over coding. It used to be that writing a library for something like parsing ICal files was something I could spend time on, write, build out, and then other people could use. But now anyone can throw together a working version of it in a little bit. That's a good thing, but also it removes the fun of spending the time implementing it and creating something for others.
  • quinnjh 4mo ago
    This makes me think of how boxed cake recipes decided to leave out the eggs because people liked to still feel like they were "cooking" for people.
• baggachipz 4mo ago
  Man I really want to retire. I've gotten a couple stark reminders recently that life is fragile and short. I'm trapped by the golden handcuffs of the software industry, but I console myself by saying it's a means to an end (early retirement). I really hope that becomes possible in the near future, because whatever this is now is not sustainable.
  • sunsetSamurai 4mo ago
    I also can't wait for the day I retire, I got laid off recently, so that sets things back for me for now, but as soon as I get another job, it's all about saving to escape this damn rat race. I hope you can retire soon too.
• ItsBob 4mo ago
  I'm hoping to retire in the next 12 months (52 years old). When I do, I'll be buying a Chromebook. Any and all PC-related shit is being sold off. I will quite literally never write a line of code again... with any luck!
  • rootusrootus 4mo ago
    Same age, but I gotta hang on a little longer. I'm a little too anxious about sequence risk in the market environment we're in now. But otherwise I'm with you, when I retire I may well dump nearly all of my technology and go back to stone tablets, metaphorically speaking. Sometimes I get so tired of it. Ironically, though, my work environment is pretty good, it's everything we're doing in tech outside my office work that gets me down.
  • reylas 4mo ago
    Just curious, what are you doing for healthcare. I can retire money wise soon, but healthcare is an issue. May have to work 10 more years just because of that.
    • SoftTalker 4mo ago
      If you don't have much income, healthcare.gov plans are pretty cheap. Some people will just risk doing without. Most will be fine; that's how insurance works.
    • ItsBob 4mo ago
      I live in the UK :-)
    • sunsetSamurai 4mo ago
      if you're in the US, ACA is an option, but it'll be expensive if you don't qualify for any subsidies.
    • floren 4mo ago
      Yes, that's a concern for me too, I'd like to retire early but healthcare has me wondering about getting a job as a teacher or something just to make sure I can afford it if I get cancer at 55.
• sharkweek 4mo ago
  Father in law was a real estate agent from the 80s until maybe 5 years ago. The day he retired was the day he absolutely positively suddenly wanted nothing to do with real estate anymore. He loved the career but it was interesting watching him just suddenly be done with it. He found other hobbies and interests pretty quickly once he took an inventory of how he wanted to spend his time.
  • XorNot 4mo ago
    Suddenly then all at once has been a common pattern for me too. Its liberating to have the experience to know that once you're done with something you won't miss it's absence.
• righthand 4mo ago
  It’s both, IMO from your brief comment, LLMs made you think it’s all troublesome endeavor because it outputs spaghetti code. No one likes hunting through spaghetti code and fixing it. Nobody wants to fill their plate with seconds immediately. Mess around with a poc and try not using the LLM to get started (use a project scaffolding tool/code generator instead if you must). Start with some appetizers and a first course. Stop working on it even if you feel satisfied. I like to try and get my pocs to a publishable state someone else can download and compile even if it’s wonky. That helps me bookend my work even if I don’t accomplish all the goals. I most recently made a poc with nuklear ui and libuvc make a small app that displays my camera feed. I pushed it up, the camera frames have some green flicker but it works. I did more research and found out there are better libraries than libuvc for this kind of thing. Now I have another prototype to make for my ideas. And a base to clone if I need some starter template.
• sqircles 4mo ago
  Sounds quite normal, honestly. Programming is in a dark place right now relative to how I used to enjoy it. I haven't touched a personal project in many months. You did something for four decades and whatever mystery may have been left there is probably gone with AI. Try identifying what made it feel like a "passion." Was it problem solving and discovering new things on your own by piecing things together? Then yeah, AI probably has something to do with that in regard to software development - but there are many other avenues you can take to fulfill that whether it be unrelated hobbies or charity work, etc.
  • coldtea 4mo ago
    >Try identifying what made it feel like a "passion." Was it problem solving and discovering new things on your own by piecing things together? Then yeah, AI probably has something to do with that in regard to software development - but there are many other avenues you can take to fulfill that whether it be unrelated hobbies or charity work, etc. If you had a passion for coding, then unrelated hobbies or charity work wont fulfill it. And if you have no job or a shit job or a shit coding job because of AI, no much means or morale for hobbies and charity either...
• kellogah 4mo ago
  I think part of the problem is that source code is always in flux. So to think of the satisfaction of completing a project seems difficult to imagine. Big corporations invent new “features” and then axe them, even if the products are delightful; venture capitalists obsessed with building to exit on profit alone; open source developers trying to make a name for themselves by building something in Rust to improve performance by 5%. Compare that to something like architecture or woodworking, gardening, baking, painting—creating real tangible things. My recommendation is combine the two: use arduinos and/or raspberry PI to automate water delivery in your garden. Stuff like that that you can experience the value at first-hand. :)
• cantalopes 4mo ago
  I feel you. I've been coding for about 20 years and the last 2 years were an absolute downer, draining all the joy of programming by offloading the actuall puzzles to an ai third party thst i just navigate and correct. I am 20 times more productive but 20 times less happy
• RHSeeger 4mo ago
  > battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted I rubber duck with AI a lot, to go over my understand, my plan, etc. I get all the benefits of putting my thoughts to words, plus some feedback. And sometimes, I let the AI write the code, too. It really depends on if I feel it understands the problem and solution well enough. And it's entirely possible that the answer is no, even if it helped me come up with the solution. But I always review the entire plan it puts forward and review the code it wrote. [1] I don't "battle" with it, unless I'm experimenting with letting it do ALL The coding. And I've done that. And it sucks. It's downright painful. I don't do that for work. [1] Unless it's a simple utility I'm doing for myself, like "write me a bookmarklet to find all the code in this page and open up a dialog with it formatted easy to read". Because, if it turns out it got that wrong, I can just change it later; it's for me anyways.
• runjake 4mo ago
  > Is that AI? Or is it me? It's you. And that's fine. You can still code entirely without AI or AI influence, so that's primarily why I say it's you. It may also, in fact, be burnout. It sounds like it to me. And it's okay to get back into coding if you ever feel like it.
  • SirMaster 4mo ago
    Yeah, I was going to say this too. I write code in my spare time for fun and hobby and personal skill development and I don't use AI at all. AI isn't ruining anything for me.
  • kamaitachi 4mo ago
    You’re right - it’s me. I used to code at home - chess engines mostly. Maybe once the novelty of retirement wears off (and the autumn approaches), I’ll start coding again
• ben_w 4mo ago
  > I haven’t even tried. I’m not burned out, but find I’ve lost the passion for coding I once had. > Is that AI? Or is it me? I had that shortly after ChatGPT came out, but as nobody was using it for work, I don't think it was caused by AI. Personally, I blame all the CV-driven development. Playing with AI coding models can even give me a bit of the good times back.
• qingcharles 4mo ago
  After 40+ years of coding, I couldn't be more happy about how AI has changed what I do. It got rid of the boring drudgery and grind and let me concentrate on the problem-solving, idea-generating parts. Never been more productive and happy in my work than I am right now.
• ian-g 4mo ago
  From the flip side, 10 years in, I've been getting really into art. It's not cheap, but it's easier to do my job with the thought that I have art this week and next week and maybe I'll get to teach it someday too. It feels healthy to not let your work control your life after retirement. There's so much else out there to do.
• daniel3303 4mo ago
  [flagged]