[cognivore]

I see this too, and not just post-COVID. 10+ years ago we used to have "Let's Learn This Now!" where the developers would agree on particular subject and then learn and discuss it on our own time, and occasionally it would lead to improvements in our development. We went through Ruby (on Rails), Angular (nope, not even) to React (meh), queuing (ZeroMQ mostly), Asp.NET MVC, Redis, Docker, Octo, NoSQL dbs - the list goes on (even custom mechanical keyboard building). It was a lot of fun, and it was nice to have all the perspectives and interesting ideas shared.

Now there is only a few of us that still attempt this, as the rest are not interested in anything beyond their job description. Honestly in the last 10 years the phrase "That's not my job" has entered the company's phraseology when previously it was perceived as an opportunity for growth or even just cross training. Hell, that's 90% of how I advanced up the ranks - taking on new responsibilities.

A dev manager we had a while back, who has been managing developers for 20 years, told me that a lot of the problem is passion vs money. Many recent developers are in the industry because they heard that software development is good money, so they got a CS degree. But they're not as interested in the continuing education that is a necessity for the career, and only those with a passion for it thrive. He sees them dev'ing a few years, realizing it's not for them, and then trying management, and then dropping out of industry because they're not interested in the effort to excel.

But if you have a passion for software development, love tech, and the whole 9 yards, work is just doing what you like, and you enjoy it (well, when your company isn't screwing it up - that's a different problem).

[itsboring]

As a kid, when people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said programmer. So that’s what I did.

The money vs. passion thing rings true, but at the same time, I’ve found that channeling passion to my employer doesn’t really reward me in the way I want. When I go “above and beyond” my job description, the reward is actually a punishment: more of the shit I don’t want to be doing.

Instead, I set aside some time to work on open source stuff. I actually feel a sense of ownership then. I’m not working to make somebody else rich, and I can do things my way and in my own time.

[linuxftw]

There was a lot more interesting work 10+ years ago. All the interesting bits have been commoditized.

[itsboring]

I hate to say it, but I think we (as in, developers) did this to ourselves, or we were at least complicit. People like to think that these massive piles of abstractions we’ve built are for the benefit of future developers, but I’m starting to look at the software landscape more like a landfill with layer upon layer of waste output.

[lopkeny12ko]

Couldn't have said it better myself!