It’s been 25 years since PHP3, and knowing how to code always felt like a superpower.
Lately that feeling has been shrinking seemingly overnight. I delayed it quite a bit and only started to use Claude early this year. It didn’t take me long to get what this really meant. The feeling reminds me of something I experienced a long time ago.
After I turned 20, I dropped out of college.
The summer before, I’d moved to Paris to work in a small Rails shop, where I pretty much learned everything over 3 months. The people I was working with were so helpful, Rails 1.2 was cutting-edge at the time, and even though there were 2000-line controllers, we were shipping stuff, clients were happy, and I was excited to walk up rue Montmartre every morning to go to work. So when I came back from that experience and was asked to sit all day without a laptop, staring at an overaged professor trying to interest me in economics or law, I knew I was wasting my time.
I joined a promising startup the following year, and as a good old traditional French company would, they picked my salary based on my diplomas, which were non-existent. I loved the idea of the project so I said yes nonetheless.
I gave it my all, 10-hour days struggling with building a new platform and maintaining the old one. I was by myself most of the time, despite some periodic outside help, which ended up adding more pressure because “hey, you’re 2 now, it should AT LEAST go twice as fast”. I didn’t want to stop though, because I was so passionate and having so much fun in the process. This without realizing I was being undervalued.
On a June day, the pain took over the pleasure, so I decided to leave the company. That’s when the CEO gave me a speech about my issues in motivation, and all the things I needed to change to basically suck a bit less. He was 5 months away from understanding what a variable was. I felt like shit.
Undervalued, unrecognized, pushed to the side, like what I brought was not that important, and I was easily replaceable.
There’s a similar feeling today, like the big boy just came into the room now, that he’s looked at every single piece of code we’ve all ever written, taken it to understand the game, and now we can step out. Not needed anymore, no value, we’re too slow, too costly, too complicated, and we’re definitely replaceable.
I’ve completely stopped writing code by hand, and it’s hitting me harder than I expected, like my whole system is still expecting something to happen but it never gets to it.
I also believe it’s not over, and there’s other aspects of our activity that will be slowly replaced. For some, it’s scary as hell, it’s been such a big part of who we are, the parts of our brains we used, the financial rewards…
I’m letting it go. Like a piece of my identity and how I see myself (and even how others see me) is not there anymore. It feels like a bit of history now, nothing is certain, and yet there’s faith that I get so much more time to myself to express parts of me that were swept under the rug.
How are you all dealing with this? Would love to hear your angle.
Top comments (4)
"Undervalued, unrecognized, pushed to the side" is the same sentence your 20 year old self wrote, and that's the clue. Your subconscious decides what you notice through a filter called the RAS. That startup taught it a rule: your worth equals the thing you produce. Now a tool produces the thing faster, and the filter replays the old file, so it feels like being replaceable all over again. But that feeling is old programming, not a fact about you. Your confidence was never in typing code by hand. Twenty five years of knowing what to build, what to cut, and when something smells wrong is still yours.
On your question, my angle: stop letting the work be the only proof. Give the filter new data from rooms where code isn't involved at all. Genuine compliment to a stranger. When that is easy, add a bit of conversation. Does not matter how it lands. The action is the win. When one room gets easy, find a harder one. Really honest post.
Hey Christopher, yes indeed I agree. And "Twenty five years of knowing what to build, what to cut, and when something smells wrong is still yours." => Yes, it still is, for the moment…
Compliments to stranger, yes 🙌 It's great how all of us are being faced with this, a big opportunity to reconnect with more of our human side. I found that talking to machines 8 hours a day personally slowly eroded my connection with others when I was in my 20s. I had to take a solid 4 year break from it to discover this whole other side of me 😊
That four year break says a lot. The connection with people never left. It got covered up by eight hours a day of talking to machines, and it came back once you had room. Keep a little of that side active every week and the 'for the moment' part gets a lot quieter.
Yeah great, thanks Claude Jacob 👍