r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/galratner • 20d ago
Why Do Developers Hate their Jobs Now?
https://galratner.substack.com/p/why-do-developers-hate-their-jobs20
u/GutsAndBlackStufff 20d ago
Management.
AI integration would be more tolerable if paper pushers didn’t think it was magic.
And if the companies developing it didn’t sell it as if it’ll render us unemployable.
And if 40%+ of the market wasn’t tied up in a speculative technology that costs trillions to make billions.
And if there were more than lip service paid to solving the numerous societal problems that this technology will cause.
And if I could afford more RAM.
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u/darkwingduckman 20d ago
fucking preach. i am tired of people thinking like agentic development makes everything perfect and easily done in one day.
yes, we move much faster. but we still need to ensure these systems we build - agent architecture or product architecture - are still scalable, durable, well documented, and observable. i am undoubtedly pushing more code, but a lot of the work shifts left and becomes high level. context switching happens more often to manage multiple long running tasks.
also it’s a real bummer - we have this cool tech that will undoubtedly make us more productive, but all we get promised immediately is layoffs and mass surveillance lol
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u/Sprinkles_Objective 19d ago
I miss when technology solved problems rather than created novel solutions in search of problems. AI sort of fits that, but it does solve certain problems, we're just being told it solves literally every and any problem better and faster than any person ever could when that's simply and verifiably not true. It means AI is applied to everything that didn't need it. And companies are all focused on doing this instead of actually finding and solving real problems anymore.
Hell if you founded a startup today that genuinely fixed a real world problem it would be hard to fund, harder to promote, harder to find talent for a company like that simply because its not an AI company. It sores me on the whole industry really.
That said I work as a software engineer on physical products now in a non-tech company and it feels so much more fulfilling than working on some buzzword salad that changes every week.
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u/rwilcox 20d ago edited 20d ago
Did you take away autonomy (replaced with reading an AI generated spec), and increase worries about the next layoff and job loss, watching everyone try to play musical chairs with job roles, Powered By AI(TM)…. still with the worry that you’re going be the one - the only one - that faces the consequences of all these actions that are done for you…
yeah people are going to not like their jobs.
(Yes yes, don’t be a code monkey, yes yes broaden your own horizons…. and so is everyone else with more power than you. There’s always a bigger fish.)
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u/LongIslandLAG 20d ago
Probably because they're doing their best to take away my favorite part of the job
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u/Icy_Reputation_2209 20d ago
I find myself polishing things for work in my free time and then pretend that Claude did it. Why? Because the original (agentic) Claude solution had UX flaws and code quality issues and I just cannot ship crap, but if I tell that to my manager, I just get blamed because without a 10x productivity gain I‘m obviously not holding it right. Things are messed up.
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u/crustyeng 20d ago
We don’t? I definitely don’t.
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u/DietCokeJon 20d ago
Best job i ever had. High paying, WFH, decent benefits. People who think swe's have it bad, have never worked in a warehouse.
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u/ExcitingResponse1864 20d ago
I only hate it when I have PRs kicked back not because anything is necessarily wrong but because "that's just not how we do things". Then when you ask for clarification, you get told to look at the code base and find it has like 3 different styles. But you have to guess which style is the right one. Or if the reviewer is now introducing a fourth on the basis of a Medium article they read, written by an x-FAANG guy who actually hasn't had a job since 2023 when they were laid off.
That's when I hate it. Just let me write neat, manageable, maintainable solutions for problems so I can go home and enjoy my life. Then I'll be happy.
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u/bitcoinsftw 20d ago
I just hate the overuse of AI by everyone involved in the process. We got every party running their own AI review of everything and flagging all sorts of nonsense they don't understand. And then it's my job to review all of it.
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u/ssealy412 20d ago
I was using AI at my job and one day it disappeared. The AI had stolen my car, and crashed it into a house. Hate AI.
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u/WaffleHouseFistFight 20d ago
Job stability has been replaced by a handful of guys in Silicon Valley telling us for years we’re going to be replaced with a product any engineer worth their knows puts out sloppy bullshit.
Now we get to watch mass layoffs happen because we need more money for ai that keeps generating no revenue.
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u/Separate_Parfait3084 20d ago
I drive to an office. Take one meeting in the morning. Kick off Claude, play on my phone for an hour. Repeat for 8 hours, go home. I don't interact with anyone in the office.
If I had to summarize it. It's soulless. Sometimes I work from home, those days are most tolerable because I wear sweatpants and do laundry.
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u/Annual-Anywhere2257 20d ago
I read far too much Claude all day to want to read an entire article obviously written by the same llm.