I've been a software developer for +25 years. The other day, I actually did the maths. If I don't count the fact that I started writing my first programs on a ZX Spectrum as a kid around 1988, and only consider my professional career, which began sometime in the second half of the 1990s as a junior developer, that's still almost thirty years.
YEY. That's scary. I am old.
I've seen so many trends come and go that it's hard not to smile when I hear people proclaiming that something is the latest, greatest thing.
I remember when JavaScript didn't exist. Then it arrived, and we struggled with vanilla JS just to validate form fields in a browser. Then jQuery came along, and suddenly everyone, everywhere was using it.
But even before jQuery, there was Ajax and Xajax (I think those appeared sometime in the 1990s, perhaps around 1999).
Anyway, the point is the evolutionary hype cycle and the waves of trends surrounding it, always following the same curve, amusing in their own way.
The same thing happened in every area of programming, and in design too. CSS frameworks are just one example.
Over time, software development principles emerged: SOLID, DRY, KISS.
Eventually, it became widely accepted that writing tests wasn't just a good idea, but a necessity. Even just a few years ago, I was talking about major companies with enormous codebases that didn't have any unit tests.
And that's just one tiny part of the countless theories, principles, conventions, design patterns, approaches, and methodologies that emerged, became superstars, and then fell out of favour.
And then, into this endlessly charming, self-contained chaos that only insiders could even begin to keep up with, this thing we call software development, AI crashed like a blazing meteor.
I was one of those people, and I've written about this here before, who got frightened by the very first versions of ChatGPT, back when coding agents didn't even exist.
What surprised me was being called an idiot when I warned people that this was going to change everything.
Reading through my LinkedIn feed, I think software developers are currently going through the five stages of grief.
Most of them have already been through denial. Now they're grieving, and today, for the first time, I started seeing posts that seem to be in the angry and bargaining stages. I completely understand this. Finding a new job is very hard; interviewing is a nightmare.
But I believe everyone will come out of this better if they reach the acceptance stage as quickly as possible.
If they try to calm down and accept that many of the things they believed in are either no longer true, or perhaps never were true in the first place. That everything is changing. That anything can be questioned. And that nothing lasts forever.
I hope the best, and I wish everyone will find a new job and be happier soon.
I don't consider myself a particularly good programmer. I'm average.
But even I have figured out, over thirty years, that everything is always changing, and those who can't accept that are working against themselves.
AI is changing our lives. Fully. Yeah, this is a cliché; everyone knows this. I'm watching with interest as everything is being called into question. For example, I've read in a few places that AI might make us reconsider the way we've been using unit tests up until now.
At first, you raise an eyebrow. But somewhere deep down, I know there's something to it. Thousands of badly written, badly used tests are a perfect example of how quantity doesn't necessarily improve quality. And this is only one example - I could write hundreds of other examples like this. Our lovely software engineering and programming industry is now a big question mark.
But questions usually are good :) So question marks should not be that bad.
Bad joke. Anyway.
I think I'm slowly coming to accept reality. So the fifth stage is coming. Hopefully.
I accepted that software development has changed. That the entire IT industry has changed, along with the recruitment and headhunting profession connected to it. That everything is harder. That many established principles can now be questioned. And that this, too, is another trend. Another wave of trends with another set of IT celebrities and billionaires. Done, accepted.
As with all the previous waves, I'm not going to join in as some enthusiastic know-it-all proclaiming I have all the answers.
I'm observing, learning, doing my job as a professional developer, and trying not to deny reality. Actually, I have a deadline next week, and I need to finish it. You might know this feeling. Life is life.
Oh, and I didn't write this with AI.
But this lovely, enthusiastic AI corrector tried to fix the typos. :)
Have a lovely day.
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