Why software engineers are grieving

Yeah, I'm not a fan of this particular article (as others have noted it reads like something an LLM wrote specifically for LinkedIn) but referring to the situation I find myself in as grieving is spot on for me.

I'm a 52 year old software developer that spent my entire career purposefully trying to avoid being pushed into management so I could remain a direct contributor because the craft of writing software has always been my favorite part of the job.

I'm still employed in the age of AI but what used to be more passion than job has flipped to be more job than passion because the chunk of it that I was most passionate about is rapidly being devalued. On one hand, I should be (and am) grateful that my job was ever something I was very highly passionate about as not everyone gets to experience that, on the other hand its hard not to grieve when you've had that luxury and feel it slipping away.

I think that if I were a younger person I'd probably be thinking seriously of finding something different to do with my life in terms of career, but at the same time I'm sure people in that situation are also struggling because AI is making the future very murky for almost everyone in terms of what they can do that they will both be passionate about and for which human input will continue to be valued.

If you believe you have that, that's a privilege, but most people in the world don't.

All is vanity.

We were literally told that because of the Computer/Internet revolution, the entire nature of business was changing…politics too! Companies would become collectives, employees would have immense power to set their own goals and be radically UX-focused, profits would be widely distributed, and the old corporate structures & crony capitalism would largely be done away with. In a certain sense, becoming a software engineer was to be birthing a new form of leftism.

That largely turned out to be complete and utter hogwash. The instant capitalists realized they had extracted enough out of that myth to gain ultimate power and reassert dominance, they pounced. 2020-2026 has been a boiling-frogs-in-pots shift from collectivism to an extreme sort of New Oligarchy. Software engineers weren't making the world a more fair, creative, and democratic place. LOL! The exact opposite, in fact, has occurred.

Yes, of course we're grieving. But using agents to generate "code" isn't the issue. That's merely a symptom, one among many. The root cause? Societal systems based on pure greed and bigoted supremacy which were NEVER properly dismantled. The new leftism of tech? Nothing but a mirage. Millennials got played.

And wow did we fall for it.

My only hope at this point: Gen Z will succeed where we clearly failed. Our best hope is to listen to them, partner with them, help them channel their rage into action, and take control back from the tech moguls and oligarchs.

Gen Z? Hardly. They'll hand it over without question not having any reference to the prior computer era, technologicial independence etc. Sure some of them are anti-establishment etc, but huge swathes are totally dependent on the platforms telling them what to do, have a ephemeral disdain for any history and exist only in an empty, cultureless now grapsing at only the recognizable/familiar. Not betting on them.