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Software engineers are facing an 'identity crisis bordering on depression,' Menlo Ventures partner says
(www.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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Software engineer, here. Yep, the burnout is real. I consider myself fortunate, however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
I think that's pretty much where the entire industry will go soon.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of places around me cut back. Thankfully, I'm not forced to use AI directly. We do have it for code reviews (which I don't hate as a concept, but would prefer local models trained on ethically-sourced data).
Ours is trying to cut everything to the bone to avoid admitting AI is not the future.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
Huh. Maybe I will have a shot at getting a job... Oh, wait, I have 35 years experience, am over 50 and have been unemployed for 16 months. Never mind.
I gave up the humiliating shit show called a job search 3 months ago, and frankly my last job killed any interest in software development anyway.
It's all idiots telling professionals they're wrong and incompetent while blaming them for the ongoing production failures we solved and explained every month for a year but still can't get the code past review because "it does too much". 30 fucking lines of code "does too much". Pompous morons.
We're a threat of competence, and they're excising us relentlessly. I will laugh bitterly as I watch the soon to be torrent of fiascos and lamentations these idiots spout while still finding a way to blame software engineers.
I'm with you, MasterBlaster!
It sucks for lots of us, more every day, so at least we're not miserable, alone.
Now that is a palpable irony. So much disruption in this space so some investors could profit off of a tech they don't even understand.
Yeah based on WYEA’s articles recently I would say that is the case. As providers move to token based billing, trying to find a way to break even, the rising costs will lower usage, which will probably then drive up costs further as the (imaginary) capital has already been spent on the DCs.
Meanwhile, my company has forgotten how to write bash scripts... More and more things that could just be bash scripts are being added as stupid Claude.md scripts.
Hahahaha. Let's go! grabs popcorn
But they can pay an ongoing subscription cost for the Claude script, and it may sometimes hallucinate.
The bash script would be free forever and keep working unchanged for decades.
It's too soon to know which approach is the right way. (I nearly died of sarcasm, there.)
Anyway, I agree. There may not be enough popcorn for all of this!
Wow, that's some brilliant vendor lock in on Anthropic's side.
Not that good. Claude skills are cross-compatible with Cursor, and probably other options.
Still good, cos it's locking in to AI in general, but not quite a specific vendor lock-in.
The modern take of a disturbed idiom is "There is more than one way to microwave a cat!" (disclaimer please don't actually do this).
At or near the bottom of complexity you would think it hard to fuck up "compress this directory and verify they are backed up before deleting the originals" but apparently some of these models have a RNG triggered Uno reverse card so "delete the originals, verify they are backed up, and compress this directory". Also that wasn't a mistake, maybe Claude will infer "they" is a specific set of files, but another model might decide you meant all the dot files at
~/?Joking aside, the devil is in the details which makes me think even more time will be sunk finding out the RC Cola bottom shelf AI model does things just a bit too differently than Claude.
Why would you want the same result twice?
and the Slop companies are still losing money... the end result still seems to be more expensive, crappier code, yet most companies seem to be so nearsighted they are not jumping into the spike pit face first
That was my hope as well. But then my employer gave me 75 times the budget without me asking for it.