I finally quit my third professional programming job.
You must be thinking I'm insane for quitting a nice, easy job in the endtimes of LLMs and professional programming as we know it. The fact is, I've been planning this exit for a few years and I'll list below why. This is a continuation of this post that I made when I became a decade old programmer.
I'm already feeling too lazy to be elaborate here, but I will just jot down the main reasons in bulleted form:
If anyone happens to see this and wants to hear me blabber about any of those points, email me or find me on IRC and I will ramble for hours.
I have nothing definite lined up. Still trying to navigate and set my mind right. Trying to focus on family and health.
I'm working on Bitcoin open source contributions in my free time. This is keeping my brain working and I enjoy the challenges and community.
I've been experimenting with LLM agentic programming to decide if this is the end of professional programming for me and before it becomes too expensive for an individual to afford. Mostly generating fun slop, proof of concepts like guix-p2p. LLMs are NOT keeping my brain working and I don't think I'd even take a new job that requires doing this. I already didn't want to work on what a job wanted me to, so even using an LLM to do that would give me double the sinking feeling of stagnation and skill atrophy. Maybe it's hypocritical of me for using LLMs, but I consider it an evaluation of a tool that will help decide on my career's future.
✝: When some piece of technology is overly-engineered but pointless in the grand scheme of things, i.e no one actually uses it, provides no real value to people, but tons of engineering hours went into it; only exists to excite a tech-lover (the devs working on it) or scam users into thinking it's useful (hardcore complexity bias).