A different path

Just recently, I chose to leave my previous company, where I worked at for the past 8 years. It was not an easy choice but, a combination of factors lead me to this decision. I was not happy with my current situation, nor with the current state of software development. I don’t think I need to explain much why but, for the record, the AI has completely disrupted the way people, and companies, work. Not in a positive way, in my view.

To summarize, I was burning out, hard. And the only way out was to, leave.

After 14 years of working in the web development area, I really don’t like the direction it is heading. The creative work, especially in the frontend side of things, which was always something that I loved, has now been delegated to AI tools. All the knowledge, mastered over a long period of time, learning the best practices, becoming efficient at what you do, mastering the tools, all of it, gone. Replaced by a soulless machine.

Why spend time figuring out the best way to architecture the code of a design system, when AI spits out a complete one with Storybook in a matter of minutes? Is it good? No. Is it faster than any human could possibly be? Absolutely. And time is money, especially for the clients. They don’t care how it’s done (they never did). They care how fast can you deliver the work and how much money is it going to save them. Even if four months in, they figure that the work is sh*t and needs to revised. It’s just an excuse for booking a new project and list more expenses. It’s an endless cycle.

At least, before, this cycle led to new jobs, promotions and knowledge advancement. The last one is crucial. Because it’s main factor that leads to the other two: promotions, usually, come to those that display significant improvement of their knowledge, which creates a gap. That gap is then filled with new, fresh, talent. These juniors might not have all the knowledge yet but they bring new perspectives and challenges to the status quo. It’s like flower pollination, for companies. Without it they die. AI is widespread industrial insecticide.

A fork in the road

At age of 39, choosing to leave, a somewhat secure job, might seem insane. It probably is. But it’s somewhat more sane than being unhappy working in an area that seems, perhaps, not entirely doomed, but at least on the edge of a precipice.

In life, people say that you should try to follow your passions. One of mine, as early as I can remember, has been video games. Perhaps, my earliest memory was of playing a Spider-Man game in the original, bulky, Game Boy. But the game that definitely made me fall in love with video games was, Street Fighter 2 (also on the Game Boy). Everything about it was perfect! The special moves, the fireballs, the winning screens, and the music. Ah, the music, even in its chiptune form, it’s still a legendary soundtrack.

So, from an early age, with the perfect mode of entertainment in my hands, I was in heaven. To this day, I still love everything about this form of art. I loved picking the game magazines, reading the opinions, interviews and news about upcoming games. Later on with YouTube, I discovered that other people also have this, deep passion, and devoured endless video essays: from game design to programming and animation. It’s still a passion and I’ll probably play till the day I die. Perhaps with some sort of VR device directly connected to the brain.

So, with this in mind. When I took the decision to leave my previous company and being burned out. I decided that I had enough of working for other people and that it was time to try create something for myself. I have been brewing some ideas and I know that it will be very challenging, but if not now, when?

Will it succeed? I don’t know. What if it fails? Then I go back to the old rat race, If I have to. Such is life. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.