[thisoneisreal]

I had some of my own struggles but I really started noticing this more broadly in the last 2-3 years. I'm not sure if Covid did it, the end of ZIRP did it, or what, but there was a shift where suddenly almost every SE I would talk to seemed to be burned out. I can think of a lot of potential reasons but honestly the thing that jumped out at me the most is how almost in perfect sync it seemed to happen across the profession. It's a real bummer, I remember when SE was a pretty fun profession and people seemed generally pretty happy coming to work. (Maybe this was some kind of illusion though or I was just lucky where I worked at the time. I've heard plenty of death march horror stories from the old timers too.)

[reverius42]

Even the death marches were fun in their own way (though exploitative).

I think the reason it feels different now is that all the big companies are just constantly doing layoffs (at least every few months). So it always feels like layoffs are looming and everyone is at risk. Jobs used to feel safer (especially when most tech companies were growing rapidly instead of shrinking).

[brysonreece]

The golden age is over. It’s a saddening experience watching something you care about, and your opportunities to build a career and life around it, fade away. The reasons for this are numerous, (like you mentioned; ZIRP, COVID, etc) but the ultimate irony IMO was the layoffs/AI push being an industry-driven nail in the industry’s own coffin.

There’s also something to be said about the industry’s faltering after the social era, a period which largely began the degradation of Big Tech’s public image, which was worsened even more by the overcorrection into Crypto/Web3, and finally through AI - which feels just as forced as the previous era was.