A shift in developer culture is impacting innovation and creativity

Money, Housing, and Why People Become Devs

• Many argue the median developer now optimizes for income and stability, not fascination with computing.
• High housing costs and weak alternatives to tech careers push people into software primarily as a way to afford a home or basic security.
• Some older devs note they also “did it for the money” in the 90s, but that CS was then a harder, less glamorous path; now it’s marketed as a straightforward route to riches.

Burnout, Agile, and Process-Over-Craft

• Repeated complaints about Jira, Scrum/SAFe, and “ticket/OKR chasing” replacing exploration and tinkering.
• Developers describe days dominated by meetings and coordination work, with microservices complexity and compliance overhead draining cognitive energy.
• Many say they now “just collect a paycheck,” having given up battles with product/management to do deeper technical work.

Curiosity: Lost, Diluted, or Just Harder to See?

• Some feel the “curious hacker” culture has been squeezed out by risk-averse corporations and productivity metrics.
• Others counter that curious devs were always a minority; absolute numbers may have grown, but are diluted in a much larger, more conventional workforce.
• Life stages (mortgages, kids, general world anxiety) and lower psychological safety reduce willingness to tinker for its own sake.

AI, Vibe Coding, and New Patterns of Learning

• “Vibe coders” using LLMs are seen by critics as shallow, product‑only thinkers who won’t develop deep skills.
• Supporters say learning still depends on attitude: AI can accelerate exploration and help individuals tackle domains (e.g., signal processing, devops) they’d otherwise avoid.
• Several experienced engineers report more finished side projects now thanks to AI help with boring or weak-skill areas (CSS, deployment).

Industry Maturation and Demographic Shift

• Software has industrialized: more specialization, more oversight, more “professionalism,” and far less greenfield work.
• The field’s explosive growth—especially outsourcing and global hiring—changed the median developer profile and made “it’s just a job” the norm.
• Some blame “MBA-fication” and proliferating management/PM roles that centralize product decisions in people without deep technical or user empathy.

Open Source, Side Projects, and Social Pressure

• Economic precarity and higher living costs make unpaid open source work feel less viable; people no longer want to subsidize billion‑dollar firms.
• GitHub and “social coding” introduce metrics (stars, activity) that make finite, “done” hobby projects feel like failures or “dead,” which some find demotivating.
• Others point to thriving examples—new languages/tools, hobby OSes, hardware hacks—as evidence that curiosity is alive, just less centrally visible and less web‑dev‑centered.

Nostalgia vs. Structural Change

• A recurring meta‑debate: is this simply “good old days” romanticism, or has something truly worsened?
• Skeptics say every era had boring enterprise work and money‑motivated devs; the frontier has just moved (AI, hardware, niche verticals).
• Critics respond that corporate concentration, compliance, and constant monetization pressure have structurally reduced space for playful, curiosity‑driven work inside mainstream software jobs.