I made a horizontal career move and accepted as a trade-off that at this time I won’t write code.
Old company: mildly toxic environment, out of touch CEO, poor leadership. Increasing AI push and wild gaps between different people’s competence. Constant arguing. The dreaded 5k loc generated PRs started appearing. My role: ~5% web programming tasks (that I actually signed up for originally) rest was design, review, and people-related work. I was not a manager. Hated it.
The project: 1 year of goal-oriented homelabbing, from a 50€ raspberry pi to hybrid cloud, gitops, kubernetes, and all the good bleeding edge stuff you need to run your own cloud. Did this completely without AI, built the resume, applied to a few places. Happens that one of the companies was looking for the exact stack I built my homelab around.
New company: Platform team, 90% hands on, competent manager, capped AI budgets, people treat each other respectfully. I quite like it. When I do coding it’s simple enough that it stays manageable even though I ask some bot to write it 90% of the time. It gets the job done, I wasn’t hired to write code anyway.
It’s probably a patch, but I’m hoping to run the wave long enough by this move. For the first time in a couple years I feel clarity. I trust that I’ll be able to pick up programming by hand if needed. Most people are in the same boat anyway, so the expectation won’t be there to perform on a similar level instantly. I trust that my ability to learn new things keeps being valuable.
On my free time I don’t currently write code, non-technical hobbies and maintaining the homelab I conjured eat it up. I don’t mind too much. I have enough interesting stuff to do. I think most of all it’s important that I get to create something. If I’m not exactly paid to do that it’s not the end of the world. Much worse situations exist, I’m still paid similar €€ than in my software position.
I made a horizontal career move and accepted as a trade-off that at this time I won’t write code.
Old company: mildly toxic environment, out of touch CEO, poor leadership. Increasing AI push and wild gaps between different people’s competence. Constant arguing. The dreaded 5k loc generated PRs started appearing. My role: ~5% web programming tasks (that I actually signed up for originally) rest was design, review, and people-related work. I was not a manager. Hated it.
The project: 1 year of goal-oriented homelabbing, from a 50€ raspberry pi to hybrid cloud, gitops, kubernetes, and all the good bleeding edge stuff you need to run your own cloud. Did this completely without AI, built the resume, applied to a few places. Happens that one of the companies was looking for the exact stack I built my homelab around.
New company: Platform team, 90% hands on, competent manager, capped AI budgets, people treat each other respectfully. I quite like it. When I do coding it’s simple enough that it stays manageable even though I ask some bot to write it 90% of the time. It gets the job done, I wasn’t hired to write code anyway.
It’s probably a patch, but I’m hoping to run the wave long enough by this move. For the first time in a couple years I feel clarity. I trust that I’ll be able to pick up programming by hand if needed. Most people are in the same boat anyway, so the expectation won’t be there to perform on a similar level instantly. I trust that my ability to learn new things keeps being valuable.
On my free time I don’t currently write code, non-technical hobbies and maintaining the homelab I conjured eat it up. I don’t mind too much. I have enough interesting stuff to do. I think most of all it’s important that I get to create something. If I’m not exactly paid to do that it’s not the end of the world. Much worse situations exist, I’m still paid similar €€ than in my software position.