Surplus to requirement
5 years round-about I started out my professional career as a software engineer, equipped with no degree, just a lot of spare time and relentless desire to code & create. When I was 19-20, the adults in the room would often tell me that I was "gifted", the top 1% of programmers, that I'd go far etc.. I climbed the ladder quickly, and claimed the auspicious title of 'senior' in 2021, along with a cool £65k salary. Back then that seemed like a lot of money.
Working through the years my passion has waned, intensifiying recently as I've come more to grips with the reality of the world, my place in it, and realising that my labour ultimately serves no higher purpose than profit-seeking. The nihilist in me would say that work in general has no purpose, but rather I think, my beliefs in what is "purposeful" has shifted over time. You could argue that my disillusionment is a consequence of the places I've worked, but I've been all over, even the most purposeful left aligned climate-change-focused startup still capitulated to the demands of capital. At-least we managed to plant >50 million trees off the back the bastard VC investment.
If I had my way, I'd create my own projects from the comfort of a coffee shop in a 2014 time bubble. Surplus to requirement for the demands of the modern software engineer. Despite 5 years being a short time in the scheme of things, it's long enough to get a grasp of the flow of the industry: hype cycles fuelled by speculation from desperate capitalists titillated by the potential to double their gold. Advancements made off the back of such cycles in recent decades result primarly in the capacity for more work to be done per unit of labour, that's the premise of this obsession with productivity. The cases where this is not true are the exception to the rule.
Which leads me to my next point, as AI continues to rip through the industry, tens of thousands will become unemployed (already 280,000 losses in 2024 alone) as productivity gains negate the need for additional engineers. The profit masters will continue to push automation as the tendency for the rate of profit decreases. That's how it always goes, no industry is uniquely valuable under a profit optimizing system. It'll be like the steel industry collapse of the late 1970s. The tech bubble will burst at some point. I want to get out.
Something I've been thinking a lot about lately is the brevity of life, you can't go back in time - so you only really get one good go around at things. Only one really good go at how you spend your working years, what friends you keep, your hobbies, how you love etc. What a waste it would be then to spend it writing software in exchange to live a largely comfortable yet uninteresting life devoid of any real material or social positive impact on the world.
I've had the money, bought the shit, yet it's never enough, and clearly from how our oligarchs operate - it never can be enough. What then makes living purposeful? The sisyphean struggle of consumerism & middle class comfortability can be undoubtedly crossed off the list.