I have a CS degree and have been a SWE for 13 years but never really developed a love of coding or software in general, I just happened to learn it and be pretty good at it in 2008. But even I have lost a bit of my identity, having one of the few things I have done most days for a decade+ be commoditized is pretty brutal no matter how I feel about software. For the past few years I've been trying to see where the puck is going (I've been leaning towards moving into management) but at this point I'm just trying to hold on until I reach financial independence. I assume my viewpoint is probably square in the middle of most folks in my position.
Of course, I just assume the responsibility for the output. I read everything and make changes all the time before I submit, but it saves me so much time source diving and finding entry points that I don't see myself ever going back.
I play Pro Drums mode on Rock Band 4 on my Roland kit. It's like...85% like real drums, which is close enough to when I just want to play along to something and turn my brain off. I'm probably top 100 or so and have been playing for about a decade now. It's a blast.
My network has gotten me every job over the past 10 years, and probably will get me the rest of the jobs I'll ever have. I am fortunate to have gotten into the industry when I did (2013), if I didn't have time to build a network I would genuinely be screwed.
I am when I have a deadline and tangible work to do. If I don't, I am incredibly lazy and have pretty bad executive function issues.
Right now I have some pressing tangible work to do, so I've pulled 50+ hour weeks for about a month straight. Once this is done I'll probably struggle to get to 40 for a while.
I turned off recommendations to try to reign in my screen time a bit and it's worked tremendously. My feed is exactly what I asked for, if I don't see a video worth my time then I close the app. It's better than ever in my experience.
This has been my thought all along, not sure why I don't see it more. I'm not scared about being left behind, none of the tooling looks crazy enough that a few weeks of dedicated learning wouldn't catch me up.
You will run into thundering herd/hotspotting/pre-warmed caching issues when you have to restart. There's generally not an easy to way to switch these sorts of systems on and off, especially a relatively new system that isn't battle-hardened.
I got nothing for the github outages this year though, that seems like incompetence.
I am employed (which, fair or unfair, seems to always look better to recruiters) but opportunistic. So far I have interviewed 3 times in the past year, every single one being a referral. It's definitely advantageous to have experience/a real network these days, as it must be a relief to all involved to not have to wade through a mountain of AI-generated resumes. I genuinely didn't know what to tell my intern last year when she asked me for advice on how to get a job. Telling her jobs were free when I graduated in 2012 is not useful, but because that was the case I don't know what to tell somebody without a network.
I work for a large video game company. I believe in escapism, it got me into computers as a child and ultimately into my career. I specifically left B2B big tech work and took a paycut just to sleep better at night. I find it difficult to imagine going back.
