Never in it for the money

Mass layoffs at big tech companies, fewer contractual work and even in the locker room at the gym people are talking giddily about "not needing a webdeveloper" anymore — "just use AI". Shit's getting real.

When the football player Marcel Jansen left the professional sport at the age of 29, former football player Rudi Völler said about people leaving the sport so early that "they never loved the sport". Jansen later countered that by saying he'll still play the sport he loves with his friends, just not for money.

There is a misunderstanding at the root of this. For Jansen, football is something he does, for Völler it's something he is — it's his identity.

Identity is a weird thing, dangerous too. It can be the last stand in a chaotic and changing world. It gives stability and a perspective on every problem. It even provides answers to most of them.

Without an identity, every question requires thinking and realignment, which can alter a person and their relationship to society. Frightening stuff.

People rather fight for their identity when its beliefs are challenged and bath in its glory when society praises its virtues.

It's also the mark of an amateur because it makes every criticism personal, instead of just taking it as another data point for improving future output.

Which is why I believe that identity is ultimately fear of the unknown and a restraint for personal growth. And it gets harder to shake the older one gets.

My identity has always been that of a programmer. I've been the guy to program all day and then come home and read books about programming (and maybe later do some extra programming). I've acquired all the rites of passage, including both neck and lower back pain.

I never understood colleagues who just punched the clock at 5pm, went home and enjoyed whatever else they did. I expected everyone else to be just as into the work as I was. I guess I was an ass about it on occasion too.

When I now hear that people are leaving the IT industry, my inner Rudi Völler wants to scream after them, "You never loved it!". But I've already worked out above that this is not true. Programming was just never their identity and now they are just going to leave for another job. Good for them.

Where does that leave people like me? I'll always be doing this, in one form or another. I think I'm fucking stuck here. Remember what I wrote about identities above? Seems silly to know all this and still have one, right? But they are hard to shake, even when you realise you have one.

I think the solution is to slowly evolve out of it, keeping what I love about it but also going with the flow. I'm going to try hard "getting good" with AI and see where this leads me, it can't be just the hell of debugging vibe-coded applications and maintaining legacy code bases.

I think being a programmer has made me a pretty creative problem-solver. That should certainly count for something and be a skill to transfer elsewhere.

But overall, I've come to realise, I'm at peace with all of this.

I was never in it for the money, I just enjoyed the ride. I was here before the hype and I'll be the one to turn off the lights.