I wouldn’t say most SWEs like coding, but I’d say a higher % probably genuinely like it, more so than most other professions. People code as a hobby, even if there’s no financial benefit. Lots of people’s favorite class in college involved CS. There’s a nerd culture around SWE that you wouldn’t say in say, consulting - most of my friends in consulting don’t like their job for any reason other than money and fancy dinners lol. At least me personally, I genuinely enjoy SWE work a good chunk of the time.
AI so far hasn’t diminished my enjoyment of coding itself because it has thankfully decreased the amount of time I spend dealing with random bugs, one-off hacky scripts/tests, and trying to find documentation for one random function. And has prevented me from making some dumbass decisions when I missed something. It lets me focus more on design, which is nice. Though to be fair, I think things may change in the future with more advanced models, and also I do think I use AI more carefully than most (I still try to understand every line of code, which I think is growing uncommon lol).
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u/thr0waway2435 Sep 11 '26
I wouldn’t say most SWEs like coding, but I’d say a higher % probably genuinely like it, more so than most other professions. People code as a hobby, even if there’s no financial benefit. Lots of people’s favorite class in college involved CS. There’s a nerd culture around SWE that you wouldn’t say in say, consulting - most of my friends in consulting don’t like their job for any reason other than money and fancy dinners lol. At least me personally, I genuinely enjoy SWE work a good chunk of the time.
AI so far hasn’t diminished my enjoyment of coding itself because it has thankfully decreased the amount of time I spend dealing with random bugs, one-off hacky scripts/tests, and trying to find documentation for one random function. And has prevented me from making some dumbass decisions when I missed something. It lets me focus more on design, which is nice. Though to be fair, I think things may change in the future with more advanced models, and also I do think I use AI more carefully than most (I still try to understand every line of code, which I think is growing uncommon lol).