I'm at a time in my life where I most probably have 15 to 20 years of gainful employment left in me.
Perhaps too little time to retrain; but definitely too much time to retire comfortably now.
A midlife crisis, coupled with an existential crisis.
I thought I had a clear route ahead. What do I do when everything I've learnt and dedicated myself to, is no longer valuable?
I'm a 52 year old software developer that spent my entire career purposefully trying to avoid being pushed into management so I could remain a direct contributor because the craft of writing software has always been my favorite part of the job.
I'm still employed in the age of AI but what used to be more passion than job has flipped to be more job than passion because the chunk of it that I was most passionate about is rapidly being devalued. On one hand, I should be (and am) grateful that my job was ever something I was very highly passionate about as not everyone gets to experience that, on the other hand its hard not to grieve when you've had that luxury and feel it slipping away.
I think that if I were a younger person I'd probably be thinking seriously of finding something different to do with my life in terms of career, but at the same time I'm sure people in that situation are also struggling because AI is making the future very murky for almost everyone in terms of what they can do that they will both be passionate about and for which human input will continue to be valued.
Maybe I need to spend some time finding myself and rediscovering what I want and need .. but I can't help feel pretty disheartened.
Mate, come on. Modern corporate hellscape America forces people say stuff like this. He wanted the job because you pay him MONEY which is required to EAT and not DIE OF ILLNESS, because employment is tied to if you get to see a doctor without going bankrupt.
I'm not sure when all this mission nonsense came in, but it's daft when you see it parroted around something as beige as SaaS. It's fine to want to make something good and make some money from it, but you don't have to pretend it's some kind of moral quest.
Then came the techbro, true nerds doing nerdy stuff got lost among the noise techbros created.
This "It's not (just) X, it's Y." pattern is so LLM-y it's almost hard to read it now.
I don’t think it’s okay either, but we were kind of spoiled that we enjoyed doing something that was in high demand. This isn’t the case for most jobs.
All is vanity.