When I first started out, I’d just open an editor, write code, maybe google a few things, and that was my whole day. Now? My workflow looks like Jira updates, Slack pings, and juggling AI tools (Copilot, Blackboxai, Cursor, what not) on top of Vscode and Notion. It’s supposed to be “efficient” but honestly, it feels like death by a thousand cuts. Every switch pulls me out of focus, and by the time I’m back, the mental cost is way higher than the work itself. does it get better with experience, or do we just adapt to this endless tool juggling?

Update:

Thanks for all the many insights. It‘s good to see I am not the only one facing these problems. Most of you keep with the principle „I don‘t need to know everything and rather stay with proven frameworks and techniques“. Some of you even noticed, that these days it‘s not only about programming and documenting but also about side-quests like observability and infrastructure.

What some of you thought: no, I am still very happy with the profession I chose. I was only ranting about the sheer speed of progress.

But, as one of you noticed: In our 40s we are no hot-shot coders anymore. We rely on decades of experience; not only in relation to our profession, but also in relation to all the side-knowledge we collected over the years (business processes, business intelligence, communication with stakeholders etc.). And being a well seasoned draft horse instead of a hectic thoroughbred surely has advantages.

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I am 45 years old. I started when I was 12 (with GW-BASIC on a 286), then Turbo Pascal, C and C++, Java, PHP and more recently JS via nodejs and Go and more web-based stuff in the last few years.

I know a good part of my job is evaluating new technologies and - if it makes sense - use them.

Back in the 90s (and me being younger) it seems that progress was more reasonable. You had at least two years with a Tool/Technology/Software until the „next big thing“ entered the stage.

Today it seems to me I am missing out way too much. The number of frameworks, each basically doing the same thing as the others while just being more modern, seems to rise exponentially.

And often it happened that I was looking for a solution for something to no avail, then implemented a custom modus operandi. And five years later there are dozens of mature solutions for exactly this problem (yet I never researched it again after my first inquiry)

I am old enough to not trying to chase every pig through the village but it‘s sometimes frustrating finding something new (and useful) just by accident and then seeing it‘s not some obscure niche product but actually a well established project.

Fellow developers between 40 and 50, do you have any strategies how to manage all that knowledge and the intake-speed required these days? (Note: I am not talking about mental health and stress management/reduction.)

They gave us access to Claude AI and now he expects every feature to be done in a single day. He can't understand why some things take a couple weeks (one sprint). But there is so much other work, testing, code review, integration testing, iterating, etc.

saw this survey from storyblok this week 58% of senior devs at medium to large companies are thinking about leaving because of outdated tech stacks. 86% said they feel embarrassed by the technology they work with daily

and like. yeah. i get it

i've been at my current company three years. we're running a rails monolith from 2011 that nobody fully understands anymore. there's a mysql database with tables that have columns named "temp2" and "new_field_backup" that are absolutely load bearing. we have a cron job that runs at 3am that one engineer wrote in 2014 before he left and the comments are just "don't touch this"

the thing that gets me isn't even the technical frustration. it's the cognitive load of knowing that everything you build has to work around this thing. you spend more time thinking about what might break than what you're actually building

and when you try to explain to non-technical stakeholders why something simple takes two weeks because you have to carefully route around seventeen years of accumulated decisions their eyes just glaze over

the embarrassment angle from the survey is real too. it's hard to talk about your work at meetups or even interviews when your honest answer to "what are you working with" makes people wince

curious how many people here are in the same situation and whether anyone has actually successfully convinced leadership to do something about it or if we're all just waiting for a rewrite that never comes

I'm curious why it seems PostgreSQL has overtaken MySQL & forks like Maria or Percona as the default relational database. Teams seem to choose it by default when starting a project needing an RDB in the past few years. I see it regularly recommended over and over again because of the increased feature set - but of the probably dozen projects I've had some part in there has only been one that I recall used features unique to Postgres.

In my experience the MySQL distributions I've worked with are much more set it and forget it. Maintenance costs are much lower - there aren't that many tuning parameters you really need to play with when things start scaling up.

On the other hand Postgres has a few things that will bite you if you haven't run a production cluster before. Every single company I've consulted for that is using serverless applications and is starting to see some traffic has been bit by not running pgBouncer in front of PG - the process per connection model ends up causing it to fall over.

Then you've got things like the autovacuum that gets wrecked by larger transactions in write heavy operations if you're not aware of it.

I just feel like the additional feature set of PG incurs a lot of operational or maintenance overhead that is overlooked and often underutilized. It probably wouldn't be a problem if the engineers making the decisions actually knew what they were dealing with but that's not been my experience at all. Especially at smaller startups when I ask about the decision to roll PG it feels like the answer I get most of the time is "I dunno, X person who's no longer here picked it and we've just been going along ever since"

I'm certainly not an expert on the inner workings of either. I tend to only dig into this stuff out of necessity. Just curious if there's something I'm missing or if others have noticed similar things.

Hey everyone, I’m a software developer and honestly, I’m a bit addicted to coding and reading tech blogs. Weekends often feel confusing for me — if I stay home, I get bored; if I go out, I end up feeling guilty for not learning something new.

Sometimes I just hop on my bike and start roaming around aimlessly. It feels refreshing for a while, especially being close to nature, but later that guilt of “wasting time” kicks in again.

I really want to find a balanced weekend routine — something that helps me learn a bit, but also refresh mentally and emotionally. Any suggestions from fellow devs on how you manage your weekends?

I mean once started on 25 does active coding lasts till 40 or 50 or eventually you switch out once you fill the pockets with $$$ from software engineering into something else? (It seem a feasible goal with software development wages at least for me.)

I code for 7-8 yrs and I feel like that this job drain you mentally even if you love coding. I mean not having the x-y tool or see a bad practice and have to cope with it, drains you mentally and makes you not wanting to keep on coding. Also frequent job changes and ending up into yet another startup are also a mental drainage (at least for me).

I mean in early years I would spend hours to develop small tools and look for stuff now I just want after work to relax and take it slowly. Now I focus on personal projects that help me wioth work but I am unsure if I would be given the choice to use them.

Is this true for you?

Perhaps it's wisdom, or perhaps its defence against the crazy rate of change, but I find myself more and more drawn to simple tech and solutions - things that haven't changed in a long time because they're almost perfect. Taking the SO dev survey today, I realized a lot of my favorites maybe aren't well known.

Here's my list today.

1. notes in markdown (vimwiki at the most)

2. hugo (static site generation)

3. make (50 years old, still a good way to organize project scripts and incantations)

4. dokku (self-hosted application platform. git push to deploy.)

5. vim/nvim (tricked out, but doesn't change for years)

6. linux (the operating system I'd always wanted, 26 years as my daily driver)

7. sqlite (its very existence and success makes you question a lot of "normal")

8. go (just great to get things done with and not shoot yourself in the foot too often)

9. htmx (wait, why do I need so much JS again?)

10. elm (functional programming at its best)

11. grug-brained developer (re-read it for a refresh once a year)

I'm in a phase where not much excites me about this industry, but that list fills me with the warm fuzzies.

Anything you like that I'm missing?