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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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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.
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.