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Software engineers are facing an 'identity crisis bordering on depression,' Menlo Ventures partner says
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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That makes sense. Software engineers have gone from being artists (because yes, software architecture is an art) to becoming AI managers. It's demoralising.
I believe open-source software will continue to provide a refuge for artists.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that code can be art but I was never able to express myself on that level at my corporate jobs. I was always limited to writing code that aligned with the company’s rigid style guide, and never allowed to implement new design patterns that would’ve improved things but deviated from the way things were done in the existing codebase.
Thus, I’m not too miffed about being forced to use coding agents at work because writing corporate-sanitary code already felt like a robotic process before LLMs existed. Personal hobby projects and open source contributions are where we can express ourselves freely and create our art the way we want to. They’ll never be able to take that from us.
Most of my career I was allowed to write code how I wanted. I made it beautiful and nice to read. It was genuinely fun to find the best way to implement each feature.
My final job, I was forced to add semicolons on new lines for each
if elsestatement, even for early returns, remove hyphens from my comments because they were "improper grammar", put a useless giant copy pasted comment at the start of each file so you can't even see any code without scrolling, one separate file for each class even if it's an internal helper class used nowhere else, and use interfaces and MVVM for literally everything, even when it was severely over-engineering (or should I say overengineering). It just felt soul crushing to make this ugly ass code that took forever to write, just because the style guide said so.Then A.I. happened and I quit being a software engineer completely. Telling an A.I. to do my work for me is just depressing. What's even the point anymore? I still code for fun but I'm done with the industry.
These days it’s very common to write whatever code you want, and a formatter automatically rewrites it to conform to the projects rules during precommit.
Which is great because it allows you to focus on intent instead of format, and completely avoids any team disagreements or change rejections for trivial bullshit.
My favourite part is when your style or the auto formatter changes over time and you have to decide between:
Plus it doesn't fix the problem of auto formatters writing ugly code. You can't easily tell the auto formatter that early returns can be bracketless for brevity, but nothing else can be. Unless you add a comment like
\\ ignore-rule-2753674which makes me want to throw upI wish I could work somewhere like your first paragraph. My career has been your second paragraph, probably because I’ve only worked on medical devices and we gotta have higher standards than a lot of developers. It also got taken a bit too much to the extreme tho
Believe it or not my first paragraph was working on medical software lol. It was good though, I liked the feeling of helping doctors help people, making the world a better place.
If you don't mind me asking, to which career did you switch to?
Unemployed / disability lol. But if I could still move around I'd probably get into something outdoorsy. Park ranger or the like. Keeping a candle lit though, in case one day I miraculously recover or medical science advances or something.
Edit: actually it's the reason I did software engineering in the first place. But actually this industry is now hostile to people with disability. Can I work from home because leaving the house is hard? No, everyone must be in office chained to your desk 9/9/6. Can I be neurodivergent? No, everyone must have constant in person meetings and work in open plan offices.