For me it's even worse. Not only have I lost a lot of the passion that I used to have for programming when I started 30 years ago, I've lost my enthusiasm for software AS A USER.
Programming for me was always about connecting to a machine. I started writing games and native desktop applications in C/C++.
My first job was for a dot-com start-up that was a bit ahead of its time. Basically it made web-based office productivity software before we had terms like "the cloud", when Google was just getting off the ground and there was no GMail or Google Docs etc. That was how I got started in web application development and for many years it was grand. I was a "full stack" developer before "frontend" and "backend" were concepts. We needed to know how to optimize our SQL queries, avoid SQL injection vulnerabilities, and we even developed our own dynamic templating language using C++.
We offered a "hosted" version of our product but also a "self-hosted." Bare metal servers were the thing. We needed to be able to port our software to multiple operating systems and have it run on all sorts of hardware.
One of the most significant differences in the customer relationship was that if we wanted more business from our customers, we needed to convince them that upgrading to the newest version would be worth their time and money.
These days everything is SaaS, "cloud" and CI. As a user I need a fucking user account for every single piece of software I want to use. All of my data is hosted on someone else's computer which isn't even a computer. It's some virtual data centre hosted inside of an AWS data centre. The product owners of the company will use me as a perpetual beta tester, throwing any shit at the wall that they can think of hoping something will stick. The products constantly degrade in terms of performance and UX and I have no say other than to stop using computers and software all together.
Which is starting to happen.
I'm a software engineer that avoids using software in my personal life as much as I possibly can.
Programming for me was always about connecting to a machine. I started writing games and native desktop applications in C/C++.
My first job was for a dot-com start-up that was a bit ahead of its time. Basically it made web-based office productivity software before we had terms like "the cloud", when Google was just getting off the ground and there was no GMail or Google Docs etc. That was how I got started in web application development and for many years it was grand. I was a "full stack" developer before "frontend" and "backend" were concepts. We needed to know how to optimize our SQL queries, avoid SQL injection vulnerabilities, and we even developed our own dynamic templating language using C++.
We offered a "hosted" version of our product but also a "self-hosted." Bare metal servers were the thing. We needed to be able to port our software to multiple operating systems and have it run on all sorts of hardware.
One of the most significant differences in the customer relationship was that if we wanted more business from our customers, we needed to convince them that upgrading to the newest version would be worth their time and money.
These days everything is SaaS, "cloud" and CI. As a user I need a fucking user account for every single piece of software I want to use. All of my data is hosted on someone else's computer which isn't even a computer. It's some virtual data centre hosted inside of an AWS data centre. The product owners of the company will use me as a perpetual beta tester, throwing any shit at the wall that they can think of hoping something will stick. The products constantly degrade in terms of performance and UX and I have no say other than to stop using computers and software all together.
Which is starting to happen.
I'm a software engineer that avoids using software in my personal life as much as I possibly can.