A follow-up to What to do in tech after 20 years?*
Two years ago, I was between a rock and a hard place, thinking about what I should do with my career and my life. Screw with 20 years of my life and do something completely new? Continue working hard to ensure my bosses get a new yacht?
Then Google Now recommended a post on DEVto. Some nice ideas there, and the community was engaging. And then I wrote my first post here. I won't lie, it was a rant. I was lost, kind of tired, and wanted to know if anyone else out there had figured out what to do with themselves after 20+ years of IT work when the passion that brought them in was, for all practical purposes, gone.
26 comments came in. A lot of them were generous. A few were wise. One of them (mine, to be fair) ended with "my now public mid-life crisis :)".
I don't know exactly why, but I remembered that post last week and noticed that two years have passed. In internet terms, basically two centuries. It's weird reading that back. I don't disagree with past-me, but I barely recognize him either.
So here's what I've figured out in between.
The creativity wasn't gone, it was burnt out
Back in the old days, before my burnout process, coworkers used to say I was the "ideas guy". I had too many, actually. Some were good. Most were weird. A lot involved weird references to 80's movies and series. A few turned into things that actually got built.
After the burnout, that part of my brain just… switched off. Not in a dramatic way. Just... silence. I could still code. I could still ship. I could still lead projects. But the part that came up with the weird ideas stopped answering when I called. "Why should I care?" — "It doesn't matter" — "They don't respect my ideas" — my mind was filled with noise, and not the good type of noise.
What I didn't realize at the time was that burnout had stacked on top of something else I didn't yet have a name for: a brain that had been running on pure masking fuel for 35+ years. The creativity hadn't left. I had just run out of spoons to reach for it.
Getting a neurodivergence diagnosis in your 40s rewrites your whole professional and personal life in retrospect. Every "why can't I just…" and every "why am I the only one who sees this?" and every burnout cycle I thought was about the job. A lot of it turned out to be about how my brain works.
And if you read until this part, that's not a sad realization. It's actually the opposite.
Proof the lights came back on
A month after that first rant, DEV.to ran the Coze AI Bot Challenge. I was mid-diagnosis, reading a lot, talking to my therapist, trying to make sense of a life I'd been living on hard mode without knowing. And during this process, I built Auty. A friendly bot meant to help people on the spectrum: not as a professional, just as a cool friend. The name came naturally: gender-neutral, catchy, related to autism, and fulfilling my life's need to name every AI project with a pun. AutI.
And my idea won in the creativity category.
Considering where I was, no surprise to say that I was not expecting this prize.
Then, this March, I entered the Built with Google Gemini: Writing Challenge with a post about using the Gemini CLI to resurrect pet projects that had been sitting on a server, slowly dying, while I was busy being an adult. Two old MVPs that worked, won their little battles, and then aged in place because I didn't have the energy or time to revisit them.
That won too.
Somewhere in between, without me really noticing, this profile picked up 18,000+ followers. From 19 posts. I still don't fully understand how the math is "mathing" here. I'm not the guy who posts every week, I'm the guy who shows up when he feels that something needs to be said, even when it might not reach those who need to hear it. But knowing that many people felt I was worth a notification of a new post published is… good. I'm genuinely glad to be seen.
Two prizes and 18k people paying attention. For someone who wrote a rant about feeling creatively and emotionally dead, that's the universe being a little on the nose.
AI didn't bring it back. But it's part of what's keeping it going.
Here's where I'm going to contradict my old post a bit. Back then, I looked at AI and went meh. Considering the results I was getting, I thought it was just hype. The new NFTs (well, deep down I still think most of the AI talk is just smoke and mirrors, but that's not the point).
Two years of building with it later, I'm still not a believer in the religion. I've written at length on LinkedIn and Medium about AI slop, about AI regulations, about AI psychosis, and how AI is changing how people perceive reality. Every time someone tells me ChatGPT is their therapist or even their best friend, I want to scream.
But AI as a tool? Totally different story.
The reason it matters here is simple: when the creativity started flickering back on, I suddenly didn't need to 100% plan, execute, test, and market my personal projects alone. I've got a small team of junior devs (be it Claude, Gemini, Codex, or even a small local model on my home server) that I run like a very patient senior would.
Sometimes they're rubber ducks, and I work through a problem just by explaining it out loud to them. Sometimes they're planners, drafting execution files I can work through a step at a time on nights when my brain is tired but not done. Sometimes they actually write code, and I review it like I'd review any other junior's PR: carefully, with the assumption that something in there is wrong. Each one has a different personality, a different set of bad habits, and a different style of being overconfident. Managing and understanding them is more like managing people than I expected.
And every single one of them runs with a human in the loop — that's me, signing the final result. My rule for every automation I build for clients is the same rule I have for my own projects: when it screws up (and it will), some person made of flesh and blood has to be the one explaining it to another person made of flesh and blood.
I don't feel replaced. I feel like I got a new tool.
The creativity doesn't only go into code anymore
Before the burnout, I'd started learning how to cook. Not the "here's my instant ramen, I put some crumbles on top" kind, but actual dishes I wanted to experiment with. I lost that love during the burnout period, and the recovery process quietly rekindled it. If I can understand patterns as few people can, maybe I can also mix spices for a new sauce.
Now it's a thing. I've got my knives, my stocks, my opinions about which pepper to use and when. I've ruined enough plates to know what I'm doing. It scratches a part of my brain that writing and coding barely touch, and in a good way. I'm still creating things and hoping someone appreciates them. And I know I'm doing it right in the same way I know everything else is working: when my wife says she'd rather I cook than we eat out.
There's also a home server humming away in the corner of my office. Nothing fancy: it started as a Raspberry Pi trying its best, and now it's 20TB+ of data sitting in a cool case. What started as a "why am I paying for things I could host myself" project slowly became where I keep the parts of my digital life I don't want a big tech landlord evicting me from someday. Having a machine in my house that does exactly what I tell it to, nothing more, is still one of the quiet pleasures of this job.
And I still write. Here, on Medium, on LinkedIn, on my own site. But I do it differently now. Not because I need to pay my bills (well, I still need to pay my bills, sadly), but because I love what I'm doing, the way I'm doing it. Writing about the imposter syndrome of meeting clients in English and seeing how people resonate with that feeling gives me a reason to keep going — even if sometimes "keep going" means writing 20+ pages of documentation for a project I know the client won't read and then ask me about it.
That's what I couldn't see two years ago.
So, to answer the question in the title
Two years ago, I asked thousands of people what to do in tech after 20 years. I didn't get one answer: I got dozens. I met lots of new people. Somehow, DEVto embraced me. In an internet full of hate and hot takes, this place turned out to be a community where I could talk with people, get new ideas, and be challenged in good ways.
Things are a lot better now. And DEVto has a part in it.
Turns out the question was wrong. "What now?" assumes there's a single next thing, a new direction, a pivot. Reality is a lot messier. I mean, even DEVto has changed a lot since then.
There was no grand plan. No career reinvention arc. No big refactor or a new layout that would change how people perceive me. Just slightly less masking, slightly more writing, and a lot more asking what I'm doing that actually gives me pleasure.
The passion didn't come back the way it used to be. And that's OK, I'm not young anymore. "What a shame to be 45 years old and not completely covered in scars." Go watch Shrinking.
Something else took the place of that passion. I'm still figuring out what to call this version of it.
What's yours doing?
Top comments (15)
Great to have folks with so much experience contributing to the community and having the energy to do some of these challenges. It really does help keep you connected and help other folks learn from you experience.
I'm very much on team anti-"ai", but beyond the boring stuff that I can do in my sleep, I've committed myself to my full-on range of neurodivergence - I'm AuDHD - and I'm just rolling with that hacker mindset.
Current things I'm working on:
Of course baking/cooking. It's engineering with ingredients! 😉
I can tell you that ASD burn out is real, but also that riding the chaos rocket is the way that I keep my own sanity.
There are two options in life:
But make sure you get that joy and fulfillment!
22 years is a long time and the fact that you're asking what am I doing? instead of just coasting says a lot about you.
Most people would just keep doing what they've always done. You're pausing. Re-evaluating. That takes courage.
I haven't been in tech as long as you, but I've felt that moment where the thing that used to excite you starts feeling different. Not bad. Just different. Like the fuel changed and no one told you.
Whatever you choose next whether it's deeper into tech, adjacent to tech, or completely away those 22 years aren't wasted. They're just the foundation.
Would love to hear what you're leaning toward.
Thanks for sharing this. 🙌
I love a good rant blog.
I've always struggled a bit with being a developer whose hobbies mostly existed away from the computer. Sure, I enjoy video games, but over the years I've really acknowledged that I don't want to sit at my desk outside of work hours. I don't even really want to open my computer on the weekends anymore. So to hear you say the "creativity doesn't only go into the code anymore" and talk about learning how to really cook makes me feel like we are both heading to the same middle ground, just from different directions.
I started getting into stained glass. But that's partially because I was already cooking, though recently that's lost a bit of appeal.
I haven't been in tech quite as long as you have, but I think I'll keep trying new things and seeing what brings me joy.
having a hobby that isn't related to tech is important these days. I was talking to a chef today, in the restaurant I usually eat after going to the therapist, it's cool how cooking and coding can be so similar.
This was really honest to read.
The part about creativity not being gone but just buried under burnout hits hard. A lot of people mistake “I can’t create anymore” for “I’m done,” when it’s actually exhaustion and noise taking over.
Also liked your take on AI — not magic, not a replacement, just a tool that helps you keep going when energy isn’t always there. That “junior dev you review” framing is probably the most accurate way to look at it.
The shift from chasing passion to doing things that simply feel meaningful or enjoyable feels like the real evolution here.
Curious — do you feel like writing played the biggest role in bringing that clarity back, or was it more the combination of things over time?
Hey, thanks for the comment. About the writing part, I love reading, and I have always loved telling stories, teaching people, sharing my knowledge with others. Writing is a way.
As a person on the spectrum, talking sometimes is complex. Am I being clear? Will the person receive it with the same emotion as I'm trying to convey? And so on. When I write, I don't have these thoughts.
Really appreciate you sharing that.
That part about writing removing the “am I being clear?” pressure makes a lot of sense. It’s interesting how the medium itself can unlock expression, not just the intent.
Feels like writing isn’t just a way of sharing for you, but also a way of thinking without interference.
Kind of explains why your posts hit the way they do.
Great post! Nice to hear about someone else's struggles. I'm in a somewhat similar situation but just starting to figure it out. I'm closing in on 22 years as a professional software engineer and suffering a great deal of burnout.
A large part of that is the push for higher income led me into a Fortune 500 company that exposed me to previously incomprehensible depths of dysfunction. Like, seriously. I don't think anyone who hasn't been at a company like this (if there are any others that are actually this fucked up) can possibly understand how bad a tech company (or really, just a tech division of a much larger non-tech company) can be.
I have survived several rounds of layoffs but I am quite sure that I will be shown the door soon enough. Knowing your job is going to end for over six months is a mind-fuck. The typical response would be to suggest that I jump ship and find something more sane. But here's the thing: I am 61 and managed to negotiate my way into a very good rate... like $60k higher than my previous role. That started in early 2023 just as the bottom fell out and rates dropped precipitously. I have done some interviews but they have all been for at least $30k less. That is probably worth it for my sanity but I also didn't save as hard as I should have until later in life. I need to sock away as much as possible at this point. So walking away from the prime cheddar has been a non-starter. (Going forward I am going to be much more flexible... assuming I can get hired.)
On top of this, I have come to understand that untreated ADHD can lead to actual physical issues. I had some pretty severe symptoms last winter from low dopamine. Luckily I reached out to my doctor about this (something that was very hard for me to do) and we're working on figuring out a fix. It seems like there is something else in the mix other than ADHD though. Let's just say I learned a new word: "Anhedonia; the reduced ability to experience pleasure or a diminished interest in previously enjoyed activities". My later adult life has been a whittling down of things that I enjoy to the point where there is almost nothing.
Bringing this back to coding, I'm basically given nothing to do at my job (how is that for dysfunctional?) and I have been finding it very hard to get motivated to work on any of my own projects. Your post resonated with me because I have pretty much zero ideas for software projects. In my case though, I think that has been going on for quite a long time. I remember just a few years into my career, I moved to Honolulu to work for a startup and soon after experienced my first symptoms of what my doctor at the time called "ennui". I wound up getting tested for ADHD there and had a borderline case. I was on meds for a bit but failed to restart them when I moved back to the mainland.
I then worked for another startup for over a decade and thought that my disconnect with coworkers was because I was older. I've come to understand that that may have been part of it, but I'm also just very different from most humans. I have never found most of the things that most humans are super excited about (sports, religion, rituals, accumulating stuff, travel, etc.) even remotely interesting.
Really, I should be tested for ASD as well as retested for ADHD. It's great that American society has started to understand and (maybe) embrace neurodivergence... but I feel like the tech industry is one sector where there is still some resistance. They pay lip service to accommodations but the interview process is all about finding ideal, type A cogs. Interviewing has always been rough for me but it is even worse now. I think there is rampant ageism and it is very demoralizing to be treated like a scammy liar (at least, a 21-year programming resumé doesn't seem to mean much).
Bottom line is that I'm actually questioning if I even want to try to find another software engineering job. Oh, and said job would hardly be the same anyway with the proliferation of LLM coding tools. I've always considered myself a builder rather than an algorithmic nerd. I hate puzzles. I just want to put together interesting and efficient systems that do neat stuff... even if I don't actually get anything out of the stuff they do. So being able to crank out apps in record time should be exciting to me. But again, no ideas. Also, I worked my way into feeling like a solid and compassionate craftsman in a respectable niche (Elixir). Abandoning coding conventions and ideals for the sake of speed is horrifying to me. But maybe I'm just a relic.
Anyway, the next six months should be interesting. I am likely to see some big changes in my life, one way or another. Thanks again for the thought-provoking post. I hope my sharing of my experiences helps someone and isn't just incoherent rambling of an old man.
postscript: re-reading this before posting I realize it may sound like I'm just a bad programmer. I'm not. I can always figure things out and I write good, easily understandable and maintainable code. I don't argue or fight with coworkers and I am helpful and supportive of others. I know I have done great work over my career and I know I can keep doing that. But the gatekeeping is insane.
I think you are on a right path. I also like the dev.to community, which is also help me to live peace with my - not so standard mindset. I am a bit earlier started IT. But now finally I reach a state where I can describe my core mental model - which is also a big help.
what has become of passion? ask yourself the same way you would question a marriage. passion becomes a ritual, a routine, you know what to do, when to act and how, no surprises, many folks may be totally accepting that and even call it arrival... but IMHO we just have to face the fact that the industry itself doesnt have a soul. Every engineer should be aware. whether we use AI or not, if the project is soulless, theres nothing we can do, except abandon the job ASAP as time is money. When you have lost your passion those are indicators of low-key burnout even if you keep going. I completely stopped thinking in terms of career, because that will render one always dependent. Of course in this business we can not be so picky on jobs and just to ball it, thats normal almost everyone successful does compromise at times. But when the passion is gone, there are underlying subtler reasons, technology alone doesnt make one happy. It is not the TB amount of data, but what importance those hold. I am a technocrat too, but a part of me is very critical and even anti technology. We must give a meaning to our life, a bigger picture that makes us strive, a ground where passion can actually thrive and evolve and produce meaningful results... only then technology has a chance to serve us instead of us becoming servants of the tech industry, creating nonsense products and schedules just for keeping us busy.
I can definitely relate. I left corporate IT in 2015 and moved into sales, and let’s just say I have a lot of respect for people who love sales, because it was not for me. It only took me five years to figure that out. Different industries do not mean different job, it just means you are trying to sell a different widget.
My wife and I also run an event production business, where I’ve always been the IT/developer/“figure it out” guy behind the scenes. For years it was seasonal, but this year we had eight events, so I’ve basically been working two full-time jobs for the last five months.
I’m now in year three of teaching high school Computer Science, and while it’s not terrible, it has definitely been more draining than year one. So, when you mentioned creativity fading, that hit home. I used to feel full of ideas, and lately it feels more like trying to put a fresh shine on the same old ones.
Thankfully, our last show is next week, so there’s a little light at the end of the tunnel.
Yeah, and it's kinda crazy when you leave the "corporate life" and discover that you need to have a lot of soft skills to live as a freelancer/consulting person.
I lived a softer version of this last year. Six months stuck on a side project, mostly because I was iterating on the same screens instead of letting users hit them. The unblock wasn't more code, it was forcing one weekly release cycle even when nothing felt finished. After 850 commits the project ships every week now (TAMSIV, voice task manager) and the boredom dissolved as soon as the feedback loop closed. Curious if your shift includes a forced cadence too, or just permission to wander again?