"For most of the last 20 years, the software industry sold more than jobs. It sold a story."

This "It's not (just) X, it's Y." pattern is so LLM-y it's almost hard to read it now.

Jokes on them, I just used Safari's summary feature. Even the title was enough for me to get the point.

I dont think it is okay. If you spending 8-12h per week then you it needs to mean something. If you dont care, you are throwing away majority of your life without meaning.

100%

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.

Related https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso

I've always thought that I could retrain myself multiple times in my life, and wouldn't suffer too much because of it. But the paths that I would've taken have changed as well: for example, I wouldn't feel as confident retraining myself for a designer-esque position, and I'm not sure whether I'd enjoy how those roles appear to be modernizing. This (seeming) lack of options seems to be a part of my low spirits.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of this particular article (as others have noted it reads like something an LLM wrote specifically for LinkedIn) but referring to the situation I find myself in as grieving is spot on for me.

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.

Would you fault those who've had outstanding 20+ year programming careers for not anticipating the change?

You're not wrong, Walter...

People saw change coming, they just don't have the ability to do anything about it.