alt Hacker NewsOne solution: do NOT just program for work. If it's not work related - where management can dictate how you work - you can whatever you want, and if what you want is to keep writing software and not outsource your brain to an AI, absolutely do so.
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Fine that doesn't change the fact for a lot of people they felt they had "if you love what you do you don't work a day in your life" and now they don't. They aren't wrong to feel a sense of deep loss.
Or just shut down your computer after work and “touch grass”. Go to the gym, hang out with friends and family.
My “brain” has always been a systems thinker. I was fortunate enough even in my first job to be directly in front of our customer and gathering requirements, not having the label for it then but trying to solve XYProblems, dealing directly with users and their pain points and seeing an entire data entry department built around my code. This was when I was 22 - 3 decades ago.
Now my brain helps me go from ambiguous, conflicting requirements, working with people, an empty AWS account and an empty git repo to a complete working solution.
Coding has always been the necesary grind between vision and implementation
I’ve come to the same conclusion, though my line of work was research rather than software engineering. “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” It’s fun as long as I enjoyed the tunes being called, but the tunes changed, and I became less interested in playing.
I am now a tenure-track community college professor. I’m evaluated entirely by my teaching and service. While teaching a full course load is intense, and while my salary is nowhere near what a FAANG engineer makes, I get three months of summer break and one month of winter break every year to rejuvenate and to work on personal projects, with nobody telling me what research projects to work on, how frequently I should publish, and how fast I ship code.
This quote from J. J. Thomson resonates with me, and it’s more than 100 years old:
"Granting the importance of this pioneering research, how can it best be promoted? The method of direct endowment will not work, for if you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible results being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want this kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it." (from https://archive.org/details/b29932208/page/198/mode/2up).