I got promoted, and I couldn't be sadder

4 minutes to read

Reflections on getting promoted in an AI-first world

Back in the past, I worked as a "system analyst," and, in short, it was a job where I had to gather all the business demands and translate them into specifications, which would later be sent to a software house that would develop it and send me back the code to review, test, and deploy, and be responsible if anything went wrong after the system was live. Then I would proceed to pass it to the support team, which would later do improvements and bug fixes.

I hated doing that. The process was bureaucratic and slow, the documentation had a very opinionated format, the iterations and feedback loop were horrible, and the final quality of the software was bad, and I had to keep it as mine. During development, we were not allowed to change the code, so we needed to write and exchange more docs/emails with the software house and try to fix some bug or logic not behaving as expected. Back in the day, I was already super into software development, and I had studied some in past work, college, and personal projects. One day I thought: What would happen if, instead of going through the software house pipeline, I did the thing myself?

So I tried. I did all the formal things and the coding in a very small and pinpointed project I got, and the experience was incredible: fast iteration loop, the feeling of creating something yourself and seeing people use it, and the ease of supporting the code afterward. I decided that was what I would like to do, be a software developer. After some more projects done without a software house, I received pushback that I wasn't using the software house budget and that my department wasn't super prepared for this kind of work I was doing, and some people weren't happy. I was expecting to be dismissed, but instead I was lucky: the company was, in parallel, deciding to stop using software houses so much and wanted to internalize much of software development. My future was bright; I could do that "legally" in my work, but then I checked the job market to see what it would be to be a software developer in the outside world, and I saw I knew nothing. I used a custom SVC integrated with a custom CI/CD (I didn't know this term back then) and custom libs, wrapped in custom frameworks. I was a good developer, but exclusively for that company at that moment. I decided to step back and try to find a junior developer role in a company that was a reference in my country for a third of my current wage.

Since then I've been super lucky. I made a lot of friends, had opportunities to work in different companies with different stacks, learned a lot, and, in the end, managed to work at a company that was, for me, the tech reference. They had the best engineers, used functional programming, and were super engineering-focused. Working there was a dream.

And now, fast forward to today, I opened my Slack profile and saw my job description changed to Staff Software Engineer. I think I can finally say that the decision I took eight years ago was worth it, that I'm doing a good job as a developer, and that I was privileged to do something I like and make money from it. I mean, I'm not a super good developer. I have very generalist skills and was lucky to know what I needed to know at the right moment and had the will to learn what I didn't know, but I'm not a great developer, just normal, but I'm happy with that level.

At least I was.

It's kind of curious to think that my job now would pretty much revert back to the one I hated in the past: you have to iterate using natural language to build your software, build the right set of skills and plans so the agent knows what to do, and later be acquainted with being the owner of the change of something you didn't actually do and later support, deploy, and monitor.

I know the feedback loop in this new future we are living is blazing fast compared with what I had back in the day. I know these tools someday will write code better than most of us, and the code they write now can be good enough with enough care and review.

But I'm torn and sad, because I never stopped to realize how happy I was when I was coding. I was always worried about more money or working for the right cause.

Only now can I see that most of my happiness at work was the craft itself, the care, and the empathy, thinking of the next person who would touch that code. I always followed the boy scout rule: "Leave code better than you found it." I loved creating unit tests, executing stuff in the REPL, fine-tuning my editor setup, deciding which framework would be better, reading Hacker News to see a new language or tool and be excited to use it in my work.

But enough complaining.

On the same day my Slack profile changed, I received pushback that I wasn't burning the expected amount of tokens for the week...

This post used Kagi's proofread was used to check the grammar of this post.