You thought this would be about AI, didn't you? Don't worry, it's not.
I'm in a bit of a career crisis, and I was wondering how many others out there might be in the same boat. I've been a professional programmer for multiple decades. I've seen the Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Mobile, Social, Cloud, and now AI hype bubbles come and go. And for a time, it was good.
But around the 2010-2015 timeframe, something changed. More and more of the daily grind became about how to optimize one's performance review packet. How to "evince" one's impact. How to get promoted. How to scale the heights of the Senior, Staff, Staff+ engineer edifice. It got to the point where entire projects were shifted around because "so and so needs to show impact this half, or they'll underperform". The HR staff, who previously were the lovely people you'd go to for help with health insurance problems, became hardened bureaucrats who presided over engineering with an iron fist, shunting anyone into "underperforming" hell at the first sign of reduced "impact".
For anyone unfamiliar, those who go into the "underperforming" pile live in a kind of purgatory. They're placed in a position where they need to "prove" their worth to the company, but by virtue of carrying the "underperforming" label, lose many of the degrees of freedom to enable this. It's framed an assistance program for the employee, but in truth it's a way of "managing them out".
Coincidentally, all of this changed around the same time that tech compensation went crazy, and a lot of new people washed into the field more out of an interest of riches than genuine interest in technology.
At first I assumed this was an artifact of working for Big Tech Co™, so I switched to a tiny company. To my horror, I saw the same thing there. And when I say same, I mean exactly the same: they had cargo-culted the exact same HR-weaponized performance review system that Big Tech Co™ used. I saw several actual high performers get shunted to the "underperforming" pile, never to be heard from again.
Back in my day, we didn't need all this performance review bureaucracy. We either delivered or we didn't (we always did), and the performance reviews took care of themselves. Nobody cared about their "packet". What they cared about was building and creating value for users.
So I ask you all this: is it like this everywhere now? Are there any places out there where there's still a joy of building for its own sake, rather than to further the case for one's promotion packet (or worse, to build a case not to be fired)? Is there any point being a programmer anymore?
That job didn't start getting "why bother" until 2020 or so.
Companies are only good places to work until they're not. When they become not good places, it's time to move on. But there are still decent places, so keep looking.