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Software engineers are facing an 'identity crisis bordering on depression,' Menlo Ventures partner says
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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Most of my career I was allowed to write code how I wanted. I made it beautiful and nice to read. It was genuinely fun to find the best way to implement each feature.
My final job, I was forced to add semicolons on new lines for each
if elsestatement, even for early returns, remove hyphens from my comments because they were "improper grammar", put a useless giant copy pasted comment at the start of each file so you can't even see any code without scrolling, one separate file for each class even if it's an internal helper class used nowhere else, and use interfaces and MVVM for literally everything, even when it was severely over-engineering (or should I say overengineering). It just felt soul crushing to make this ugly ass code that took forever to write, just because the style guide said so.Then A.I. happened and I quit being a software engineer completely. Telling an A.I. to do my work for me is just depressing. What's even the point anymore? I still code for fun but I'm done with the industry.
These days it’s very common to write whatever code you want, and a formatter automatically rewrites it to conform to the projects rules during precommit.
Which is great because it allows you to focus on intent instead of format, and completely avoids any team disagreements or change rejections for trivial bullshit.
And then somebody changes the auto-formatter settings and all of a sudden every single file changed and committe appears as having most lines changes and you loose the ability find the real code changes between a version before that and the current version.
Guess how I found this out ...
Standardizing code format via that path only works well if you start it really early in the project and never change it after that.
(Also, it doesn't solve the problem of different software design styles)
I hear you, but these are solve-able human problems, not code problems:
Manager: Jose revert your commit, thanks. Jose: okay, it’s been reverted, I won’t do that again, thanks for explaining to me why exactly what I did was the wrong thing to do.
I’ve had this exact conversation about this topic at least a half dozen times over the last decade.
When it comes to legacy code, almost all auto formatting tools I’ve used allow you to ignore whole directories and files, which can be very handy for legacy areas of the codebase not yet ready for this transition.
As for scenarios where large rewrites are necessary, it’s best to separate from any actual work, so the blast radius is focused, and that commit can be marked properly using .git-blame-ignore-revs which completes fixes the history issues that are common amongst those who don’t know what they are doing.
Definitely a painful process it can be, but it’s better to fight this battle than it is to try and get 1,000 humans to agree on something as vague as “style”
Ah yes, some random intern suddenly has 'credit' for almost all the codebase because they ran a linter with different settings than previous linter settings..
My favourite part is when your style or the auto formatter changes over time and you have to decide between:
Plus it doesn't fix the problem of auto formatters writing ugly code. You can't easily tell the auto formatter that early returns can be bracketless for brevity, but nothing else can be. Unless you add a comment like
\\ ignore-rule-2753674which makes me want to throw upIf you don't mind me asking, to which career did you switch to?
Unemployed / disability lol. But if I could still move around I'd probably get into something outdoorsy. Park ranger or the like. Keeping a candle lit though, in case one day I miraculously recover or medical science advances or something.
Edit: actually it's the reason I did software engineering in the first place. But actually this industry is now hostile to people with disability. Can I work from home because leaving the house is hard? No, everyone must be in office chained to your desk 9/9/6. Can I be neurodivergent? No, everyone must have constant in person meetings and work in open plan offices.
I wish I could work somewhere like your first paragraph. My career has been your second paragraph, probably because I’ve only worked on medical devices and we gotta have higher standards than a lot of developers. It also got taken a bit too much to the extreme tho
Believe it or not my first paragraph was working on medical software lol. It was good though, I liked the feeling of helping doctors help people, making the world a better place.