All I know, is that I have been in technology my whole career. 99.999% of everything I have built, designed, launched and implemented is no longer in existence.
With retirement on the horizon, I cannot wait to close my laptop lid and never touch it again unless it is an absolute necessity.
For my part I hope to retire early so I can spend more of my time building and implementing the things I enjoy...
I'm not criticizing your desire - it's just that for me, the learning and exploration and building is the fun part. As long as it's still either useful for me, or I have the memories, it doesn't matter if it's still used by others, though that can be fun too.
I couldn't imagine having made this my career otherwise.
I remember a time without internet and without cellphones. I have helped build those things from scratch, all the way until where we are today. I have great memories and have made a living from it. But, it is not satisfying to the soul.
I just want to get to a time where I am not glued to the internet and do not carry a cellphone. The absolute freedom it brings to me is something that a lot of people are not familiar with today.
I don't want to get into too many details, but a side gig I have, when I bring people out into the field, I take their phones from them. And to watch the withdrawal that they have from the lack of dopamine hits is just sad.
It satisfies my soul. I accept that does not yours. I have no problem putting it aside; I enjoy e.g. going for walks and sitting down to meditate. But even then, if anything, I'm likely to come out of it bursting with new ideas for code I want to write or things I want to explore, and I hope that feeling never goes away.
That's fine as a personal anecdote, and to be honest you sound burned out. But making absolute statements like "it is not satisfying to the soul" does not help your argument at all.
Happy to provide my anecdote. In my 40s and I still live to build/create.
The first could be interpreted as you speaking generally (i.e. you think no ones soul can be satisfied by building tech or whatever), the second makes it clear that you are talking about specifically your soul not being satisfied.
It's zikduruqe's soul not yours. In my 40s I would have said the same as you. In my 60s it's starting to feel meaningless. People are in different stages of life.
I'm getting ready to explore ML applications on Apple systems, but first, I need to finally get around to learning SwiftUI as a shipping app system (I have only been playing with it, so far. Doing ship work is an order of magnitude more than the simple apps that are featured in "Learn SwiftUI" courses).
I'll probably do that, switching over to using SwiftUI for all of my test harnesses. My test harnesses tend to be fairly robust systems.
So far, it looks like I may not be using it to actually ship stuff, for a while. Auto Layout is a huge pain, but it is very, very powerful. I can basically do anything I want, in UI, with it. SwiftUI seems to make using default Apple UI ridiculously easy, but the jury is out, as to how far off the beaten path I can go.
BTW: I have been "retired," since 2017. I wanted to keep working, but no one wanted me, so I set up a small company to buy my toys, and kept coding. I also love learning new stuff.
SwiftUI is very bad at working with maps, and they still have a long way to go. Since most of the stuff I'm doing, these days, is highly location-dependent, I can't compromise.
I have been reading about people hitting these types of walls for a couple of years, and thought that Apple has worked around it. I suspect that the issue is with trying to use UIKit stuff inside of SwiftUI, and I was trying to avoid UIViewRepresentable (because it's a kludge).
I feel similar, but keep going another 10 years and we might lose the desire for that type of fun too, not to mention the “building” part might look radically different and not be “fun” anymore. Or maybe it will be more fun, but point is things change.
The building looks how we want it, though. A large part of my building has been replacing things because I don't like how it works. E.g. a few years ago I switched to my own text editor. Now I'm running my own text editor in my own terminal, using "my" (in this case a port from C to Ruby; the C version was not mine) font renderer, running under my own window manager, using my own file manager and my own desktop switcher...
And while some of the above had reasons, I am itching to rewrite more of my stack, and mostly for fun or out of curiosity than any need.
Things looking radically different is more likely to affect my enjoyment of it as a job than in general, though, because for my side projects I can build things as I please, using the tools I want (and mostly have written myself), and can ignore everything I don't like.
I absolutely agree things change, but I've been doing this for 42 years now, and so far it doesn't feel any different, so I'm going to guess I'll stick to this for some time still.
> I have been in technology my whole career. 99.999% of everything I have built, designed, launched and implemented is no longer in existence.
60-something here. I know exactly how you feel. I can't point at anything I've worked on in the last 30+ years that's still in use. It's very demotivating. When you first get into tech it's all shiny and new and exciting. But nothing lasts.
At work, we were cleaning out a closet which has accumulated stuff for at least 15 years. My boss said "Aww, a Cajun[1]!" and it turns out it was the first switch we used back when he started at the company. Later in the day, I had to ask him what he wanted to do with it and it took some definitely effort for him to say "I guess we can just put it in the recycle pile..." as he had good memories of working with it and building stuff on top of it.
Time marches on, and our great efforts are as nothing once they are replaced by the next big thing.
“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.
All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.
What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
I don't understand how this is demotivating. Most work output for most jobs is temporary. How many people make permanent objects for a living? I never have and that's fine.
I see this sentiment in tech all the time and I don't understand it. With DAWs and NLEs I have the equivalent of 100s of thousands of dollars of equipment from just 20 years ago. 3D DCC applications like Blender/Houdini allow new forms of creation without a clear physical equivalent. Software is magic and I plan to do creative things with it until the day I die.
It's incredibly sad how badly most programmers especially feel about tech. If I'll editorialize for a moment, it seems to most programmers actually hate software. Something about programming just makes people hate software.
I think it is empowering and democratizing, but agreed it's not censorship resistant and decentralized.
I'd argue the latter two conflict with the first two. Making something decentralized makes it inherently harder to use (less empowering), making it censorship resistant runs counter to companies interests and companies fund everything (less democratized, i.e., harder to make a living).
I don't believe it's programming itself, but rather programming as a career. And honestly, can you blame any software engineer that gets jaded after a while? :P
Fair, I suppose I strawmanned a bit on the comment I was replying to. Being jaded on programming as a career programmer certainly makes sense.
I guess I was responding to the part about "closing the laptop forever", which I took to mean closing it off to all the other amazing things you can do with a computer today. But in context, they probably mean just stopping programming.
But it still drives me crazy that god forbid a programmer would actually do something as low as open an Adobe product and actually make something that someone that's not another programmer could actually enjoy. Appreciate the creative good our industry has accomplished for godsake.
It’s probably because it’s representative of how the work was never productive or beneficial to begin with. It was some dumb idea resulting from a poor decision maker trying to compete in a dumb capitalist system.
In my main career? Doing a complete lift and shift from on-prem to the cloud. Over 100,000 containerized apps, across 5000+ instances. That's one thing.
Side gig? Still do consulting for various entertainment companies on a particular subject.
With retirement on the horizon, I cannot wait to close my laptop lid and never touch it again unless it is an absolute necessity.