If anything, the current era looks like how 1995-2015 was for me.

Back then I was not in the “nitpicker’s radar” yet. I was working in small teams and shipping like crazy, sometimes fixing small bugs literally in seconds.

Things worked, were stable, made money, teams were fun and code and product had quality.

The post-Thoughtworks, post-Uncle-Bob world of 2015-2025 was absolute hell for a maker. It was 100% about performative quality. Everything was verbose and had to be by the book, even when it didn't make sense from an engineering or product point of view.

Different opinions were simply not accepted.

It was the age of bloat, of thousands of dependencies, of nitpicks, of infinite meetings, of quality in paper but not in practice, of doing overtime, of being on a fucking pager, of having CI/CD that took 10 hours to merge, and all the stress it comes with.

I would be totally ok if all those “professional” engineers from that generation were to be replaced with hackers, both old and new.