I agree and I am far from being a senior engineer. I'm only in the market since a few years and started out just before the whole LLM stuff started to pick up. So I have been grinding a lot (2nd job I've learned, am in tech since ~2020) only to be confronted with permanent existential fear of having to possibly learn a 3rd job (which takes 3 years of full time work for neglectable pay in my country). I dont want to start from zero again and I am tired of corporations that are shitting out money to be cheap on their employees. Starting from zero is never fun, going back into debt is never fun and having to leave a job/career you like also is never fun. I'm 30 now and only ever have been making (noteworthy, still below median) money since 1.5 years now. I cant afford starting anew and there is little I can do about it which is extremely frustrating.
I work with/am friends with many junior-ish developers who are in the same place as you (got into programming in their late 20s around the 2020 hiring cycle). I'm very sorry for the stress you're dealing with.
I don't know if this describes your situation, but I know many people who are dealing with positions where they have no technical mentorship, no real engineering culture to grow in, and a lot of deadlines and work pressure. Coupled with this, they often don't have a large social group within programming/tech, because they've only been in it for a few years and have been heads down grinding to get a good job the whole time. They're experiencing a weird mixture of isolation, directionless-ness, and intense pressure. The work is joyless for them, and they don't see a future.
If I can offer any advice, be selfish for a bit. Outsource as much as you want to LLMs, but use whatever time savings you get out of this to spend time on programming-related things you enjoy. Maybe work the tickets you find mildly interesting without LLMs, even if they aren't mission critical. Find something interesting to tinker with. Learn a niche language. Or slack off in a discord group/make friends in programming circles that aren't strictly about career advancement and networking.
I think it's basically impossible to get better past a certain level if you can't enjoy programming, LLM-assisted or otherwise. There's such a focus on "up-skilling" and grinding through study materials in the culture right now, and that's all well and good if you're trying to pass an interview in 6 weeks, but all of that stuff is pretty useless when you're burned out and overwhelmed.
Yea I never had real mentorship and I am responsible for 6 projects as solo developer. I am heavily against using LLMs for my tasks as thats just passionless mind numbing back and forth with a machine trying to get it to spit out stuff I actually understand.
I also learned that I absolutely hate most programmers. No offense. But most I've been talking to have a complete lack of ethics. I really love programming but I have a massive issue with how industry scale programming is performed (just offloading infra to AWS, just using random JS libs for everything, buying design templates instead of actually building components yourself, 99% of apps being simple CRUD and I am so incredibly tired of building http based apps, web forms and whatnot...)
I love tech, but the industry does not have a soul. The whole joy of learning new things is diminishing the more I learn about the industry.
