Software engineer, here. Yep, the burnout is real. I consider myself fortunate, however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
I think that’s pretty much where the entire industry will go soon.
Yeah based on WYEA’s articles recently I would say that is the case. As providers move to token based billing, trying to find a way to break even, the rising costs will lower usage, which will probably then drive up costs further as the (imaginary) capital has already been spent on the DCs.
Waiting for that glorious bubble to burst now that they’ve successfully landed the public with holding the bags
Huh. Maybe I will have a shot at getting a job… Oh, wait, I have 35 years experience, am over 50 and have been unemployed for 16 months. Never mind.
I gave up the humiliating shit show called a job search 3 months ago, and frankly my last job killed any interest in software development anyway.
It’s all idiots telling professionals they’re wrong and incompetent while blaming them for the ongoing production failures we solved and explained every month for a year but still can’t get the code past review because “it does too much”. 30 fucking lines of code “does too much”. Pompous morons.
We’re a threat of competence, and they’re excising us relentlessly. I will laugh bitterly as I watch the soon to be torrent of fiascos and lamentations these idiots spout while still finding a way to blame software engineers.
I’m with you, MasterBlaster!
It sucks for lots of us, more every day, so at least we’re not miserable, alone.
I’m sorry that happened to you. I’ve also seen it happen to a lot of very good engineers I’ve known over the years. It’s truly insane. I know some people who’ve had to dip into their 401k accounts early just to keep their heads above water, and it’s going to be an economy-wide disaster soon.
Yeah, I didn’t want to retire yet, but like my father before me, the choice was not mine. I saved enough that I should be able to actually retire and survive on part-time low income jobs. Unless the market crashes for a year straight cuz after that I got to start selling stocks.
with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately
Meanwhile, my company has forgotten how to write bash scripts… More and more things that could just be bash scripts are being added as stupid Claude.md scripts.
Hahahaha. Let’s go! grabs popcorn
Wow, that’s some brilliant vendor lock in on Anthropic’s side.
Not that good. Claude skills are cross-compatible with Cursor, and probably other options.
Still good, cos it’s locking in to AI in general, but not quite a specific vendor lock-in.
The modern take of a disturbed idiom is “There is more than one way to microwave a cat!” (disclaimer please don’t actually do this).
At or near the bottom of complexity you would think it hard to fuck up “compress this directory and verify they are backed up before deleting the originals” but apparently some of these models have a RNG triggered Uno reverse card so “delete the originals, verify they are backed up, and compress this directory”. Also that wasn’t a mistake, maybe Claude will infer “they” is a specific set of files, but another model might decide you meant all the dot files at
~/?Joking aside, the devil is in the details which makes me think even more time will be sunk finding out the RC Cola bottom shelf AI model does things just a bit too differently than Claude.
The next step is to switch from scripts to prompts, to improve that lock in!
More and more things that could just be bash scripts are being added as stupid Claude.md scripts.
But they can pay an ongoing subscription cost for the Claude script, and it may sometimes hallucinate.
The bash script would be free forever and keep working unchanged for decades.
It’s too soon to know which approach is the right way. (I nearly died of sarcasm, there.)
Anyway, I agree. There may not be enough popcorn for all of this!
Why would you want the same result twice?
however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
and the Slop companies are still losing money… the end result still seems to be more expensive, crappier code, yet most companies seem to be so nearsighted they are not jumping into the spike pit face first
Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of places around me cut back. Thankfully, I’m not forced to use AI directly. We do have it for code reviews (which I don’t hate as a concept, but would prefer local models trained on ethically-sourced data).
Ours is trying to cut everything to the bone to avoid admitting AI is not the future.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
We have execs trying extremely hard to push products through purchasing that are literally illegal for us to use because of the data being used.
I really hope you’re right. My company is still in the “use as much as possible” phase, and my manager is quoting Jensen about “you need to use half your salary on tokens!”. I’m looking for other work, but everyone is looking for vibe coders at the moment it seems…
I’ve gone from really loving my job, to hate my life.
Mo Bitar had a bit of advice that I think is applicable here: Lie. Claim to be an extreme 10x vibe whatever. Put “AI enablement” (whatever the fuck that means) in your LinkedIn profile. And wherever you get hired, commit to using enormous amounts of tokens as they require.
Then just… write code. Oh, definitely use the LLMs, too, but not for anything important. Set them to work writing BASH scripts or something. Get them burning through tokens to summarize all the corporate documentation you can find. Have agents creating agents to test the output of other agents and report to more agents on what the agents are doing. Meanwhile, do real work. Make sure that for every PR, you have the AI do one thing on it, to give it that code-slop shine.
Sucks that this is where we’re at, but it is what it is.
I’ve had LLM generate so many web sites about various random animals I’ve crammed into a prompt. No one wants web sites about those random animals, but my management is pleased at my token utilization.
Can do my real work and get praised for my actual productivity, and burn the tokens to get praised on AI adoption…
Clever! And when sanity starts reasserting itself at your company, you can claim you’re focusing on saving the company money by reducing your token usage and just… make fewer animal slop websites.
Removed by mod
That was my hope as well. But then my employer gave me 75 times the budget without me asking for it.
Throwing good money after bad just to avoid having to admit they fucked up, huh.
Oh, so you think they fucked up right here? Let them fuck up even harder!
That’ll show you!
That makes sense. Software engineers have gone from being artists (because yes, software architecture is an art) to becoming AI managers. It’s demoralising.
I believe open-source software will continue to provide a refuge for artists.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that code can be art but I was never able to express myself on that level at my corporate jobs. I was always limited to writing code that aligned with the company’s rigid style guide, and never allowed to implement new design patterns that would’ve improved things but deviated from the way things were done in the existing codebase.
Thus, I’m not too miffed about being forced to use coding agents at work because writing corporate-sanitary code already felt like a robotic process before LLMs existed. Personal hobby projects and open source contributions are where we can express ourselves freely and create our art the way we want to. They’ll never be able to take that from us.
Most of my career I was allowed to write code how I wanted. I made it beautiful and nice to read. It was genuinely fun to find the best way to implement each feature.
My final job, I was forced to add semicolons on new lines for each
if elsestatement, even for early returns, remove hyphens from my comments because they were “improper grammar”, put a useless giant copy pasted comment at the start of each file so you can’t even see any code without scrolling, one separate file for each class even if it’s an internal helper class used nowhere else, and use interfaces and MVVM for literally everything, even when it was severely over-engineering (or should I say overengineering). It just felt soul crushing to make this ugly ass code that took forever to write, just because the style guide said so.Then A.I. happened and I quit being a software engineer completely. Telling an A.I. to do my work for me is just depressing. What’s even the point anymore? I still code for fun but I’m done with the industry.
If you don’t mind me asking, to which career did you switch to?
Unemployed / disability lol. But if I could still move around I’d probably get into something outdoorsy. Park ranger or the like. Keeping a candle lit though, in case one day I miraculously recover or medical science advances or something.
Edit: actually it’s the reason I did software engineering in the first place. But actually this industry is now hostile to people with disability. Can I work from home because leaving the house is hard? No, everyone must be in office chained to your desk 9/9/6. Can I be neurodivergent? No, everyone must have constant in person meetings and work in open plan offices.
These days it’s very common to write whatever code you want, and a formatter automatically rewrites it to conform to the projects rules during precommit.
Which is great because it allows you to focus on intent instead of format, and completely avoids any team disagreements or change rejections for trivial bullshit.
My favourite part is when your style or the auto formatter changes over time and you have to decide between:
- running the auto formatter on 200,000 12 year old code files
- doing them one by one
- formatting them when you have to change that file
- or ignoring all the warnings forever (it’s this one, this is what you do)
Plus it doesn’t fix the problem of auto formatters writing ugly code. You can’t easily tell the auto formatter that early returns can be bracketless for brevity, but nothing else can be. Unless you add a comment like
\\ ignore-rule-2753674which makes me want to throw up
I wish I could work somewhere like your first paragraph. My career has been your second paragraph, probably because I’ve only worked on medical devices and we gotta have higher standards than a lot of developers. It also got taken a bit too much to the extreme tho
Believe it or not my first paragraph was working on medical software lol. It was good though, I liked the feeling of helping doctors help people, making the world a better place.
I believe open-source software will continue to provide a refuge for artists.
Yes. My work is open source, and pretty unchanged. We get some AI pull requests now that take longer to review than doing the work ourselves.
I think a key difference is that there was never any tolerance for bullshit in my team’s code base.
We don’t have thousands of points of boilerplate, or a big pile of “not invented here” crap code.
So we don’t have somewhere for the AI to really shine.
Yup. I’m watching my artform die in real time. Not only will my career no longer exist in the form I enjoy it, but the art form itself will die. Nobody is going to appreciate artisan code like they do other forms of art.
for the last three years and a bit, silicon valley has promised eradication of everything from writer to filmmaker as a career. after all this i don’t think that devs get to hitch their wagon to artists for sympathy points
That’s a very warped impression of Silicon Valley. And it probably comes from Hollywood movies, which is super ironic since you mentioned writers and filmmmakers.
Dumb representation of computers in movies has done more to harm their image than actual software ever did. Most of the AI hype is based on fantastic notions of AI as seen in movies.
Cory Doctor’s recent book on Centaurs and Reverse Centaurs is worth reading.
The core idea of that is that centaurs are a human top and machine / alien body, they’re effectively augmented humans with all this technology to help them excel.
Reverse Centaurs are human bodies and machine / alien tops, where the humans are just checking the work of systems and are subservient to them. He points out that that’s one of the fundamental differences between Amazon and the Postal Service is that in the case of Amazon drivers, they basically function as a reverse Centaurs where they are just an appendage of the delivery car, tracked and managed by that car, to do the tasks the car can’t do on its own.
Imagine being a horse waking up with a human torso and micropenis.
lol sure they are.
They’re desperately trying to pump this AI shit up with these fake stories before they go public
Investors really are dumber demographic than MAGA.
Investors really are dumber demographic than MAGA.
Herd behavior.
Well, they are, but not for the takeaway the article gives. The article is so close, but fails to extract the accurate conclusion.
First are what he calls the “lazy” engineers — workers who rely heavily on AI to write code, answer questions, prepare updates, and complete tasks with minimal engagement.
Then there are the “craftsmen,” experienced engineers who bear the burden of understanding, reviewing, and fixing the growing flood of AI-generated code.
This is accurate. You have a set of “developers” who just need to make a good showing on the telemetry, whether it’s “tokens used” and/or prominence in commit activity. They are not held to account on actual productive outcomes, just that they supervised a credible volume of AI activity. If the AI generates code and tests and the AI is satisfied that the code passes the tests, then their job is done. You have another set of developers that have to live with the nightmarish consequences of the first, because they just generated a pile of shit that would have been better not to exist at all.
‘The craft they loved is dead’
Wrong takeaway, the craft is alive, but mismanagement is diluting it with bullshit.
Incidentally, this isn’t new, but the magnitude is new. I have had significant segments of my career consumed by management insisting that I somehow make the bottom dollar offshored developers “productive”, and similar pattern, if they “looked busy”, management was happy, and management didn’t care about whether the work was useful, because frankly they couldn’t tell. They could tell if some volume of “stuff” was happening and they just settled on that, and if the “stuff” alienated customers, well that was the fault of those “craftsmen” for failing to properly manage the output from the “lazy” engineers.
Investors really are dumber demographic than MAGA.
Hey don’t slander my investor bros. We put our money in a passive index fund just so we don’t lose to inflation. We dgaf as long as inflation doesn’t beat our savings.
It’s the stock trader morons that you really want.
I almost clicked the link until I saw the domain name.
Educate me?
Business Insider articles are generally trash content. They choose provocative headlines and hot-button issues to boost engagement, but once you’re on the site, there’s not actually that much to engage with.
Truth. Same with benzinga and Yahoo finance. Most are actually adverse for gold in disguise.
I used to work for a clickbait factory, so I’m familiar with the hallmarks.
Ahh so much of that nowadays. Probably AI written too, ironically.
INB4 “Engineers can’t handle stress, let’s replace them with AI”
FUCKING GOOD.
STOP BUILDING EVIL SHIT.
Yeah, lots of them have been living in the lap of luxury building the tools and platforms that have ruined society, without a second thought about it.
bordering on???
Today software engineers and tomorrow software engineers minus one.
Did they not think to develop a practical skill in case this fad died off?
I see you’re getting downvotes, but these same CS people told lots of other careers this very thing not even a handful of years ago.
I’ve had multiple CS peeps tell me this as I was starting my entertainment career.
People told you “Did they not think to develop a practical skill in case this fad died” a handful of years ago?
I call bullshit — that sentence doesn’t even make sense.
Yeah dude. Tech people have literally told other career paths to study CS since I was in college, for like 15 years now.
Shoes on the other foot now.
Those are two completely different sentences.
And I’m not sure why the shoe is on the other foot. The metaphor doesn’t make sense. You’re saying that people who want a stable career should go into entertainment?
The original poster was saying that same condescending advice CS majors would give other people in college, because now the shoe is on the other foot and CS majors are in the shit show just like everyone else is.
That’s literally it. It’s not that much deeper than that.
I’m sorry you felt condescended to, but I don’t see what “the shit” here is. The author of this thesis has an agenda, and much nonsense has been spilled by people who do not deserve a platform.
Do you mean automation in general? Yes we’ve been automating everything for a long time, and LLMs are another step in that line — but as someone who works with them every day and is still heavily hiring with large salaries — the “depression” isn’t from LLMs as a tool, or a threat to replace humans, but from a heavy handed directive foisted by executives who no longer know what grass looks like anymore.
Its the inversion of skill in the workplace where senior reviewers are at the mercy of early career developers who used to be constrained by their talent level — now unleashed by LLM to generate slop they can barely control, the most talented seniors are being crushed by slop while trying to keep the lights on, while management is laying off the same and rewarding the slop makers, so they can collect huge bonuses and move on before the load bearing engineers give out.
This is a management problem at publicly traded companies. And that is “the shoe in the other foot”? If you say so.
Mark my words — by the time token prices stabilize to reflect their actual cost, there will be more software engineers being employed in the world — with LLMs as a tool.
The two careers: computer science and entertainment.
Right, and you’re claiming entertainment is now more stable or lucrative than computer programming?
Nah. I’m refusing to engage such a stupid premise.
And just like it was a stupid them for them to say to you it’s a stupid thing for others to say to them
