So, I’ve been a so-called software engineer since mid-2016. Around that time, I started my apprenticeship at the Swiss web-hosting company, cyon. I was mainly working with legacy codebases written in Zend — one of the first PHP frameworks that somewhat introduced the MVC architecture to the PHP world. It was nothing fancy, but it got the job done. Also, ten years of legacy added a lot of complexity to it, so it was rather complicated navigating that mess of a codebase.
Later on, I switched to Laravel codebases and mainly worked in DevOps environments. I’ve worked for startups and web agencies and have seen many, many projects. I was by no means the most advanced developer, but I think my work was always solid. As always, programming is only half the job. You constantly have to juggle meetings, design decisions, staffing, and all sorts of other things. A lot of the time, it can get really tiring. But the fun part was always the programming itself: the joy of figuring out that one pesky bug buried in legacy codebases; designing a beautiful new feature where you can showcase how your architecture is designed and all the other beautiful things about your code; or just coming up with a straightforward solution for something that seemed complex a few sprints ago.
Money was always an issue. Especially when working for agencies, you tend to operate at the brink of bankruptcy all the time. Or at least your clients think so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But at least you could argue that software development is complex, that it takes time to develop things, that security matters, and that it is a craft! And then? Then AI came along and f***ed things up.
It started slowly with autocomplete and evolved into auto-test and class generation, and over the past two years, into agentic coding. As a software engineer, you are now expected to develop solutions even faster and to basically just observe and correct what the AI is doing. Along the way, we also agreed that security doesn’t matter that much anymore as long as you can ship as fast as possible. This led to the one thing I loved about software engineering being pulled out from under our feet. Because now we don’t develop solutions anymore; we’ve become assembly-line workers observing and correcting the AI.
So, what did I do? Well, I left. I left for Project Management, not only because of AI, but it surely did its part. I later had a lot of touchpoints with SAP, and now I work as a Business Process Manager in a big corporate environment, the sole thing I swore to myself I would never become.
Do I hate my job? No, I like it. It is a stable gig, and I am not expected to be perfect. There is drive and a lot of know-how in the company, and we get things shipped with quality. In a lot of ways, it feels like when I first started out in IT. Is it perfect? No, but it works for me (and many others). If I could, would I go back? Oh, yes! I miss those good “old” days.
And no, I’m not a skeptic of technical revolutions. I just like to build things and work on complex problems without delegating all the thinking to a chatbot. I know that work environment, especially technical ones, tend to always change and evolve. But I really do believe that this technology causes us more harm than benefit. At least in the state we are currently in.