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Comment by birdsongs | Hacker News Reader

It's really bad now, yeah. :( It just really hurts that I spent well over a decade of my life learning and honing skills to engineer safe, quality software and now it's just, useless.

No one cares at best, or I'm callously told "keep up or fall behind" at worst. When that's not even the problem, it just, sucks now. There's no joy in anything I do professionally.

Can I ask where you went? I'm seriously looking for an exit, I just don't know what yet. Maybe a trade, in Scandinavia the pay is actually comparable, I just don't want to go back to school.

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It just really hurts that I spent well over a decade of my life learning and honing skills to engineer safe, quality software and now it's just, useless.

It can feel that way with all the hype but I very much doubt that is really true. I see an industry that is rapidly dividing into two camps - "move fast and break things" and "this actually needs to work". Writing everything with agents and merging while barely even checking what is in the PR has become standard practice in the former but it will get you laughed out of the room in the latter.

Even “actually needs to work” has a wide spectrum from “people could die” to “our customers will be pissed”.

For the latter, the product looks nice and polished on the outside but makes “steaming pile of crap” a gross understatement.

I was fortunate and saved up enough to live frugally and just work on passion/learning projects for a while. I've been considering going back into commercial software development as a solo dev and leveraging AI, but keeping the focus on quality and craftsmanship. In my opinion there's never been a better time to start a new, ambitious project if you're passionate about quality software.

I agree, that's acutally what I'm doing right now: living frugally in a cheap country while building an ambitious high quality pruduct.

I never had a better time "professionally" (albeit no income yet!) so far in my whole life! Apparently it's truly like the best of times and the worst of times to be building software, if you have the luck and the luxury to be able to work only for yourself than it's really a great time to be alive.

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