Yes I think your experience sums up about >95% of all dev experience. I am doing about same thing as you for last 8-10 years or so. I guess it is about same time where Agile took hold of IT/Software industry.

Apart from may be few core infrastructure primitives at public Cloud providers most of IT stuff today is API calling API calling API and so on.

It will be the case until Human is Out Of Loop from most of the IT work.

I agree. My enjoyment of my career as a software developer dropped dramatically about 10-15 years ago when "agile" started taking off. Even in some of the companies I worked at that didn't actually use it, it was mentioned in pitches by sales to show how modern we were and then used as an excuse to shoehorn in all kinds of random features that made no sense.

I very much doubt more than a low 10s % of companies do scrum or safe.

And it's unlikely that more than a low 1s% of companies do agile as originally conceived. "Agile" has become everything it was originally opposed to: tons of process, specialized roles that have nothing to do with development (scrum masters), little to no direct communication with customers (at least in the places where I've worked). The dominant tool for doing "Agile" (Jira) says it all - a slow, heavy, bug tracking system with everything and the kitchen sink in terms of features often imposed on teams from the top down. Very "agile" indeed.

I can 100% guarantee you my SAFe company still thinks of themselves as Agile. Sure, we just planned out what were doing in every sprint for the next quarter, but we still do the ceremonies, and that's what's important, right?

I have no metrics on this, but I've been seeing/hearing of scrum popping up in all sorts of places, not just in software but in other firms where it doesn't belong. For example, my relative works in a chemical engineering firm and they use scrum. A friend of mine is in another flavor of engineering field and they use scrum as well. The sad truth is agile/scrum has really lost the plot in most places and is mostly used as a way to justify micromanagement of developers (or other roles) and lack of proper long term planning.

I would bet that the majority of companies with more than couple of devs do some sort of "agile" for dev work.

I mean computerization has always been about automation. There are a massive number of tasks of humanity that have been automated or mechanized away and more will continue to do so in the future.

This right here is how I feel about this too.

I used to have a lot more mental bandwidth and energy to be "curious" and to tinker once upon a time. But now the world is so literally and figuratively on fire and every executive is so rabidly frothing at the mouth over AI that now I just want things to "just work" with the least amount of bullshit so I can just go home on time and forget about work until the next business day.

I just want this fucked decade to be over already.

While I want that too, I have no illusions that the next decade will be better.

While I do agree things can always be worse (and seem to want to continue to be worse), I think there has to be a rock bottom of sorts past which the unwashed masses will simply not tolerate. Maybe that's what's left of my optimism talking.

> stand-ups and scrum and SAFE

Honestly some of my best jobs were at places that had a nicely balanced practice in place and the backbone to remind execs that if they interrupt makers daily with new shiny asks they will in effect get nothing (because nothing would ever be completed)...

But obviously we can both have worked at places with those labels with vastly different implementations and thus experiences :)

To be candid, even though my jobs have time to tinker, I don’t want to fight with Product or Management to get improvements into prod.

Took me half a year to get them to value Sentry, lol.

I’ll just collect my check and go do something else.

Exactly the situation in pretty much every company I worked at in the last 10 years.

Fighting the Product Manager, fighting the Designer, sometimes even fighting some micromanaging stakeholder that won't leave you alone.

It's definitely fights I can win, but do I even have the energy anymore? Development work involves more than meets the eye. While there are some folks who understand the technical intricacies, it's tiring having to join discussions you know won't go anywhere.

I wish it was 2000-2010 again, when my biggest problems were Sales promising features we don't have and then having fun with the other devs coding it.

I was at the same place you are for a while until I realized my obsession with doing everything "right" was killing my enjoyment of programming. I read through Let Over Lambda a couple of months ago and was blown away at how deeply unmaintainable some of his code examples are, but I got inspired to start letting myself do weird unmaintainable shit while programming instead of constantly acting like my code has to pass a code review and I've found its a lot more fun.

If you don't have energy, then you are doing too much. Pace yourself. If you think something can be delivered in 5 days, say it needs 10 days. Otherwise this is just a road to burnout and exploitation.

World will not end if project is delayed by few weeks. You get time for your own tinkering (never tinker on company stuff, even if that would improve things, unless you are shareholder).

This so much. When there’s a real urgency, you will know it (aka the whole team will be brought in). A good pace (as in not ruining your mental health) is feasible.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Any non-small company has plenty of people that need to justify their salaries.

Meetings is one of the most effective ways to actually pretend to be working.

The larger the environment, the more brain power it takes. Microservices didn't help with that

Interesting.

for me it feels like I have to spend all day fighting with folks who are constantly “holding it wrong” and using libraries and frameworks in really weird/buggy ways who then seem completely uninterested in learning.

In my free time I love working on my own projects because I don’t have to deal with this bullshit and I can just craft things finely without any external pressure.

damn this was me for a few years. I hate corporate work environments so much. Then they hire bottom of the barrel contractors and expect you to get them up to speed in less than a week or so.

Final straw for me was RTO. Silently quitting and getting my ticket punched (laid off) was the best thing for me.

Did you find an enjoyable job at a less corporate place?

At least you're not sitting there patching Y2K bugs

Exactly the same sentiment here.