I'm a senior engineer (web full-stack) at a bank. I've been doing this for about 5 years.
When I write code, I find it similar to authoring a book or even writing a poem. I love trying to write code that reads really well, has beautifully designed boundaries between dependencies, great structure and so on. I also find that I write code with a big focus on making it a joy to work with for developers that touch it later on.
I struggle with the emphasis on collaboration and quick iteration approach in this field. "Co-authoring a book" with 6 other "authors" in two week chunks just seems crazy to me. And what I've seen that passes as shippable code is also crazy to me -- but hey, "it works".
I also have never been a guy that gets overly excited about using technology to solve problems or using software to satisfy business needs. I really just like writing code, setting up development environments or CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure or whatever...just for those things themselves. (Again it's like an art form to me. And I really really like reading other's well thought out code and appreciate for just that rather than the use-case or problem that the code is actually solving)
Anyone else out there like me? (Not arguing the merits one way or the other...just curious if I'm a weirdo)
Yeah, this is me. Coming up on two decades in game dev, and I've always cared way more about building things that are genuinely robust and also make sense to humans, but everyone just wants "fast and cheap", thinks documentation is a waste of time ("you can just talk to people"), doesn't understand "tech debt" as a concept at all, and refuses to prioritize tools work because "it's not player-facing".
All software is rushed software.
I'm job hunting as a project manager right now and yeah its all short gigs with huge salaries and ridiculous demands. They have so much investor cash to burn to find the next thing that sticks in their niche.
Is that still the case? I thought those days were over.