There's always been an implicit pressure in coding in particular, that mixes "hobby" and "work". That's part of the problem.
A very large number of us fell in love with coding before we were taught - we self-taught, through magazine type-ins, early intro textbooks in school libraries, or perhaps the odd tutorial while trying to mess about with a myspace or geocities page.
That generation coded for fun. The itch that is scratched is the problem being solved, the cool little trick, the code golf or the figuring something out, or the new thing you just learned.
It just so happens, the market paid quite well for those skills, so we all got to do some version of this for a compensation package that could embarrass us talking about it at a family dinner with our parents.
And then, another generation arrived who saw that the career was well paid and that was the itch that got scratched. Except, for them, it didn't seem much like fun because what's fun about fixing bugs and figuring out class hierarchies and reading API or SDK docs?
I don't wish to generalise, but honestly: when was the last time you saw a programmer who started to learn it all at college or later, be really giddy about their work? They're here to get paid and to get the job done, they never really got into this gig for "fun", it just seemed a better option than becoming a lawyer or going to medical school.
I worked in one company where the divide was hilarious: older types hacking Ruby in vi/emacs on mechanical keyboards and wanting to code advent of code at lunch vs younger types who thought hoodies weren't workwear, "engineered" Java services in huge IDEs that they wanted to autocomplete everything, everywhere, and spending lunch talking earnestly about whether BTC was an investable asset class. OK, you do you, everyone can be whatever they want to be, but I know which one is more fun for me.
The real tension arrives when the industry - expecting us all to be super geeks having fun all the time - implicitly expects us to show up at interview with a) side projects and b) knowledge of cutting edge tech that we weren't exposed to at work.
The "hackers" (for want of a better word), will have side projects. The "engineers" (for want of a better word), will prioritise other things at the weekend like, I don't know, going to golf clubs or pilates classes. The hackers will play with tech more than the engineers in their own time, because it's fun, and push boundaries of their own knowledge.
About 10 years ago, there was active push back. "I shouldn't be expected to have side projects to interview at X", appears on social media. Sure, I can see that, spending time with your children does seem important, but, like, there's a lot of hackers who have kids and side projects, and well, are you saying they shouldn't be able to do this as a hobby as well? Or that you feel there's some lack of inclusion because you hate building software and they don't, and they might interview better than you? Well, OK... I guess...
Then, GenAI enters the chat. The engineers see promise - productivity rises per hour while the boring bit (figuring out how to build software), melts into the background and they can spend more time talking to people. The hackers don't like talking to people quite so much and see the fun bit melting away as a real problem. But also, this is the cutting edge stuff that they now need to understand a lot more as part of their hobby. And it's horrible.
And then at work, the mandates come down from leadership. Token maxing, leaderboards and monitoring of AI output, questions about why you're going about it the "slow way", when our competitors are not. For a whole bunch of people, that's a really, really sad decline.
Imagine if you were so into your motorcycle you had figured out how to get paid very well riding it professionally - perhaps as a courier for body organs or something - and then somebody turned up and said "nope, you're going to operate this automated delivery drone from now on, where you just type in the address and it does all that navigating and getting things where they need to be, and you don't. Oh, and by the way, motorcycles are boring and stupid and you shouldn't really ride them at the weekend either because drones are better and if you keep on going on about how much you like your motorcycle, we're going to judge you, OK?".
You'd feel pretty rotten, and mourn the loss of a corner of your life that gives you joy a little. Every minute you played with your bike (perhaps in secret!), you'd be thinking "should I not be keeping up with this drone stuff?", just as you had done the last X years of your career when a new advancement came you wanted to be on top of, except this advancement takes away the fun.
I say all this as somebody who studied software engineering, and who described himself professionally as an engineer for many years, but in habit, in reality, spent almost every day from the age of 11 hacking.
The pressure to use AI everywhere, to "keep up" with it all, it's horrid. I know people who want to just quit and go become farmers, because at least then they're not exposed to something they loved since their teenage years being destroyed by middle managers who resent them.
For many of us, this era feels like laying to rest a history of over 70 years. And it's sad.
So, some of us are going to huddle together around our memories and keep going, and AI can sod off (at least in our downtime), and we're going to remind each other of the fun and it being OK to hand crank solutions again for the joy of it.
A very large number of us fell in love with coding before we were taught - we self-taught, through magazine type-ins, early intro textbooks in school libraries, or perhaps the odd tutorial while trying to mess about with a myspace or geocities page.
That generation coded for fun. The itch that is scratched is the problem being solved, the cool little trick, the code golf or the figuring something out, or the new thing you just learned.
It just so happens, the market paid quite well for those skills, so we all got to do some version of this for a compensation package that could embarrass us talking about it at a family dinner with our parents.
And then, another generation arrived who saw that the career was well paid and that was the itch that got scratched. Except, for them, it didn't seem much like fun because what's fun about fixing bugs and figuring out class hierarchies and reading API or SDK docs?
I don't wish to generalise, but honestly: when was the last time you saw a programmer who started to learn it all at college or later, be really giddy about their work? They're here to get paid and to get the job done, they never really got into this gig for "fun", it just seemed a better option than becoming a lawyer or going to medical school.
I worked in one company where the divide was hilarious: older types hacking Ruby in vi/emacs on mechanical keyboards and wanting to code advent of code at lunch vs younger types who thought hoodies weren't workwear, "engineered" Java services in huge IDEs that they wanted to autocomplete everything, everywhere, and spending lunch talking earnestly about whether BTC was an investable asset class. OK, you do you, everyone can be whatever they want to be, but I know which one is more fun for me.
The real tension arrives when the industry - expecting us all to be super geeks having fun all the time - implicitly expects us to show up at interview with a) side projects and b) knowledge of cutting edge tech that we weren't exposed to at work.
The "hackers" (for want of a better word), will have side projects. The "engineers" (for want of a better word), will prioritise other things at the weekend like, I don't know, going to golf clubs or pilates classes. The hackers will play with tech more than the engineers in their own time, because it's fun, and push boundaries of their own knowledge.
About 10 years ago, there was active push back. "I shouldn't be expected to have side projects to interview at X", appears on social media. Sure, I can see that, spending time with your children does seem important, but, like, there's a lot of hackers who have kids and side projects, and well, are you saying they shouldn't be able to do this as a hobby as well? Or that you feel there's some lack of inclusion because you hate building software and they don't, and they might interview better than you? Well, OK... I guess...
Then, GenAI enters the chat. The engineers see promise - productivity rises per hour while the boring bit (figuring out how to build software), melts into the background and they can spend more time talking to people. The hackers don't like talking to people quite so much and see the fun bit melting away as a real problem. But also, this is the cutting edge stuff that they now need to understand a lot more as part of their hobby. And it's horrible.
And then at work, the mandates come down from leadership. Token maxing, leaderboards and monitoring of AI output, questions about why you're going about it the "slow way", when our competitors are not. For a whole bunch of people, that's a really, really sad decline.
Imagine if you were so into your motorcycle you had figured out how to get paid very well riding it professionally - perhaps as a courier for body organs or something - and then somebody turned up and said "nope, you're going to operate this automated delivery drone from now on, where you just type in the address and it does all that navigating and getting things where they need to be, and you don't. Oh, and by the way, motorcycles are boring and stupid and you shouldn't really ride them at the weekend either because drones are better and if you keep on going on about how much you like your motorcycle, we're going to judge you, OK?".
You'd feel pretty rotten, and mourn the loss of a corner of your life that gives you joy a little. Every minute you played with your bike (perhaps in secret!), you'd be thinking "should I not be keeping up with this drone stuff?", just as you had done the last X years of your career when a new advancement came you wanted to be on top of, except this advancement takes away the fun.
I say all this as somebody who studied software engineering, and who described himself professionally as an engineer for many years, but in habit, in reality, spent almost every day from the age of 11 hacking.
The pressure to use AI everywhere, to "keep up" with it all, it's horrid. I know people who want to just quit and go become farmers, because at least then they're not exposed to something they loved since their teenage years being destroyed by middle managers who resent them.
For many of us, this era feels like laying to rest a history of over 70 years. And it's sad.
So, some of us are going to huddle together around our memories and keep going, and AI can sod off (at least in our downtime), and we're going to remind each other of the fun and it being OK to hand crank solutions again for the joy of it.