I graduated from my own bachelor's program in '99, later than I'd hoped because of some personal decisions and indecisions. My first job after my internship began in February 2000, when the Dot Boom was raging, and every investor was looking for the next big internet thing.

It was exciting to walk through the parking garage that Monday morning and see all the brand new high-end cars folks had been buying after cashing out their company stock. I looked down on the decision to buy a fancy car -- these are tools to get where you need to go, in my mind, so I'm not gonna drop a shitload of money on a bad investment -- but it was cool to think I'd been offered stock options, and when they vested, I'd have this opportunity, too.

That day, my stock option price was set, and it was the highest price that company's stock had ever been. I didn't grok what that meant in the moment, but I learned real fast.

Two years later, when the stock was essentially a penny stock because of the Dot Bomb, I completely understood the con. It meant stock options were a bullshit way to give you a sense of "ownership" in a company that would probably not give a single, solitary fuck about you, as well as a way to claim they were paying you what you're worth in the market without doing anything of the sort.

I look at the industry right now, having been one of the recent layoff survivors from Amazon, considering how easy I made it for them to get rid of me (my task in the last year was essentially to automate my job with AI and code), and thinking about my kids in college -- one moving into their senior year, the other into their junior year -- and both, for some fucking reason, followed in Mom's footsteps, choosing computer science as their field of study.

I check in with them constantly:

• Why are you doing this? Because we'll always have a job. [Insert panic.]
• If you don't love development, if there isn't some part of you that's curious or excited about something in at least one of your classes, you will burn out and hate your whole life after a year of the current bullshit in the industry. Are you sure about this? I'm already this far in. [Insert frustration.]

Everything is on fire.

Companies are finally finding out that it costs more to use AI to do the work than the hundreds and thousands of people they laid off cost them.

Companies are ignoring the data that showed AI alone is an expensive dumpster fire, humans alone are slow and less effective, but humans+AI are damned effective and damned fast.

It hurts my soul to use genAI to code, but the speed required in the industry now means I have to at least use it to take care of most low-level coding decisions -- iterating loops, setting up a framework -- and make sure I'm evaluating its choices and either changing the code (easy in the early stages) or prompting for a change (better to avoid inserting bugs) and being explicit in the execution so it uses the data types, the algorithms, the clean[ish] coding I insist on using in my code. I don't feel the loss of sharpness some have complained about, and I'm grateful for that.

Then again, since I left C and Perl behind for other options, as new languages came rolling in, each a better option for different use cases, each containing its own sets of libraries to extend and expand its capabilities, I've been attached to a search engine as I work. Fuck if I remember if PHP's array sort does it in place or into a new array, my head is full of Java's enum shortcut singleton pattern implementation, so let the googles remind me.

But I also adopt fun mini-projects where I use zero genAI. It's actually annoying and tedious sometimes, but it's a good exercise. I do it in vi, too, just to be an ornery old cuss and remember what it was like back in the stone ages.

Now that I've left a FAANG with zero intention to ever return to that life, self-employed and doing cool shit with code after thinking I was too old, too tired, and too crispy to be a dev again, I feel conflicted about the state of the industry and its future. I've seen the industry rise from the ashes of the Dot Bomb, but the world was a more nimble and more hopeful place back then. Not even the national tragedy of 9/11 dented things enough to lead me to believe I'd made a super bad decision pursuing software development as a career. But now, in the midst of the bullshit happening in the US and across the world, AI makes me question everything.

We might as well consult a Magic 8 Ball with the way the world is anymore, but... Can we come back? Will we come back?

The answer to the first, I believe, is yes. If we learn to use the power of machine learning models to assist us, to make the world more accessible to those who lack access, to enforce hard guardrails and guidance forged in titanium ethics and targeting justice, we can indeed come back, better than before. A Magic 8 Ball response I'd vibe with might be "Yes, but...", or maybe, "As I see it, yes".

The answer to the second, I believe, is still gonna net you a Magic 8 Ball response bouncing between "Reply hazy, try again" and "Don't count on it". I can't imagine even the mathematical laws of probability would dare allow any other direction. We've proven we are slaves to the people and the systems that are dismantling the industry to make billionaires wealthier, so my GenX cynicism is in high gear about whether we will come back from the ashes this time.

But! We can still do cool shit and try to make the world better even as it burns, so let's do it. Let's adopt a fuck-it attitude, use code for civic good, use tech to bring everyone to the table, and cast a few Perl hexes along the way.