Open up tech social media on any given Tuesday, and you’ll find two kinds of people screaming into the void.
On one side, you have the AI grifters breathless with excitement, informing you that writing software is officially dead, that syntax is a relic of the past, and that real “visionaries” just whisper prompts into a chatbot while sipping overpriced cold brew. On the other side, you have the battle-scarred corporate cynics. These are the folks who treat every line of code as a personal tragedy—a “liability” that exists only to decrease company shareholder value and ruin their weekend on-call rotation.
Between the hustlers desperate to automate you away and the burnt-out senior engineers who view a text editor like a prison cell, a weird consensus has formed: If you actually enjoy programming, you’re doing it wrong.
You’re seen as either naive, woefully behind the times, or desperately un-promotable. “Don’t fall in love with the code,” the career gurus sneer from their LinkedIn pedestals. “Fall in love with the business outcome.”
I’m here to say what nobody in a Patagonia vest wants to hear: To hell with that. It’s still completely fine—in fact, it’s pretty damn great—to love programming.
How did we get to a point where enjoying the central act of our profession became something to be embarrassed about? Simple: software ate the world, and then corporate finance ate software.
Two decades ago, programming attracted the weirdos, the tinkerers, and the digital obsessives who found genuine magic in making inert silicon jump through logic hoops. It was creative, frustrating, and exhilarating. Then the industry ballooned into a trillion-dollar gold rush. Suddenly, our hobby-turned-career was overrun by Agile certified scrum masters, quarterly OKRs, twenty-layer microservice architectures, and MBA consultants measuring productivity by story points burned per sprint.
The corporate machine did what it always does: it stripped the craft down to its most miserable, commodified parts. When people say they hate programming, they usually don’t hate programming. They hate Jira. They hate two-hour architecture review meetings with six people who haven’t written an if statement since the Obama administration. They hate fighting a bloated CI/CD pipeline just to deploy a one-line CSS tweak.
And now, the tech industry thinks the ultimate salvation from this self-inflicted misery is to eliminate the code entirely.
Let the LLM spit out the functions! Let the agent handle the logic! You just sit back and be a “systems orchestrator.” But that premise assumes the code was always the problem. It assumes that typing out logic, structuring data, and wrestling with edge cases was mere manual labor—an unpleasant chore on the way to shipping an MVP.
Saying programming is just a liability is like saying playing the piano is an inefficient way to produce sound waves. Sure, a synthesizer hooked up to a randomized MIDI generator can pump out notes faster, but that completely misses the point of the performance.
There is an undeniable, tactile satisfaction in building something elegant with your own brain and a keyboard. It’s the feeling of tracking down a ghost bug that has haunted your stack for three days, realizing you had an off-by-one error in a ring buffer, and watching the whole system suddenly purr with silent, ruthless efficiency. It’s writing a recursive algorithm that fits together so cleanly it feels less like you invented it and more like you discovered a universal truth.
That isn’t a “liability.” That’s craft. That’s why we got into this room in the first place.
You don’t have to spend your weekends building an enterprise-grade SaaS designed to optimize ad-click conversions to justify your passion. Go write an emulator for a console nobody plays anymore. Write a parser from scratch instead of pulling in a 400-megabyte dependency tree. Build a stupid, useless command-line tool that only makes sense to you.
Stop letting people who view the world exclusively through spreadsheets dictate what is worth enjoying. If the suits want to outsource their brains to a probabilistic token generator and spend the rest of their careers rubber-stamping machine-generated soup, let them. Some of us still actually like the feeling of our fingers on the keys.
Hot Take: The engineers who genuinely love the nuts-and-bolts craft of programming aren’t the ones who will be replaced by AI. The ones getting replaced are the careerists who only ever saw code as a miserable stepping stone to an executive bonus.