This is a major concern for junior programmers. For many senior ones, after 20 (or even 10) years of tenacious work, they realize that such work will always be there, and they long ago stopped growing on that front (i.e. they had already peaked). For those folks, LLMs are a life saver.
At a company I worked for, lots of senior engineers become managers because they no longer want to obsess over whether their algorithm has an off by one error. I think fewer will go the management route.
(There was always the senior tech lead path, but there are far more roles for management than tech lead).
I feel like if you're really spending a ton of time on off by one errors after twenty years in the field you haven't actually grown much and have probably just spent a ton of time in a single space.
Otherwise you'd be senior staff to principle range and doing architecture, mentorship, coordinating cross team work, interviewing, evaluating technical decisions, etc.
I got to code this week a bit and it's been a tremendous joy! I see many peers at similar and lower levels (and higher) who have more years and less technical experience and still write lots of code and I suspect that is more what you're talking about. In that case, it's not so much that you've peaked, it's that there's not much to learn and you're doing a bunch of the same shit over and over and that's of course tiring.
I think it also means that everything you interact with outside your space does feel much harder because of the infrequency with which you have interacted with it.
If you've spent your whole career working the whole stack from interfaces to infrastructure then there's really not going to be much that hits you as unfamiliar after a point. Most frameworks recycle the same concepts and abstractions, same thing with programming languages, algorithms, data management etc.
But if you've spent most of your career in one space cranking tickets, those unknown corners are going to be as numerous as the day you started and be much more taxing.
Aren't you still better off than the rest of us who found what they love + invested decades in it before it lost its value. Isn't it better to lose your love when you still have time to find a new one?
Depends on if their new love provides as much money as their old one, which is probably not likely. I'd rather have had those decades to stash and invest.
A lot of pre-faang engineers dont have the stash you're thinking about. What you meant was "right when I found a lucrative job that I love". What was going on in tech these last 15 years, unfortunately, probably was once in a lifetime.
It's crazy to think back in the 80's programmers had "mild" salaries despite programming back then being worlds more punishing. No libraries, no stack exchange, no forums, no endless memory and infinite compute. If you had a challenging bug you better also be proficient in reading schematics and probing circuits.
It has not lost its value yet, but the future will shift that value. All of the past experience you have is an asset for you to move with that shift. The problem will not be you losing value, it will be you not following where the value goes.
It might be a bit more difficult to love where the shift goes, but that is no different than loving being a artist which often shares a bed with loving being poor. What will make you happier?
Especially on the topic of value! We are all intuitively aware that value is highly contextual, but get in a knot trying to rationalize value long past genuine engagement!
Imagine a senior dev who just approves PRs, approves production releases, and prioritizes bug reports and feature requests. LLM watches for errors ceaslessly, reports an issue. Senior dev reviews the issue and assigns a severity to it. Another LLM has a backlog of features and errors to go solve, it makes a fix and submits a PR after running tests and verifying things work on its end.
At a company I worked for, lots of senior engineers become managers because they no longer want to obsess over whether their algorithm has an off by one error. I think fewer will go the management route.
(There was always the senior tech lead path, but there are far more roles for management than tech lead).