Believe it or not, it's harder to be a software engineer in 2026 than it was five or ten years ago. I'm not talking about getting a job as a software engineer. I'm talking about being a software engineer. Let's assume you already got the job and you are a programmer. It is harder in 2026 than it was five or ten years ago, and the reason is very simple: the expected throughput of a software engineer is ridiculous. It's actually ridiculous. You are expected to spend less than one day on one ticket. And if you take beyond a day, it's like, what's going on? You have all these AI resources, we gave you all this AI budgeting. Why are you not finishing the ticket? Well, now we're expected to rush through our tickets, merge AI slop, and add more bugs to the codebase. Now we have to have future tickets to address the bugs that we introduced because we were told to rush. It's all mixed up. As a pre-AI software engineer, you could spend weeks or months on a certain ticket, and if it was a difficult ticket, people would understand. But now the understanding is, we spent all this AI budgeting on you. You have all these resources, what's taking you longer than 24 hours? Like, why are you still not done with a ticket? And because you have AI on top of the ticket you're currently working on that you're expected to finish in 24 hours, you're also expected to do other things, simply because you have AI, because you are a software engineer equipped with some magical superpower that makes you Superman. It's ridiculous, in my opinion. And I think before AI, there was a more realistic expectation of what a software engineer could do. And once upon a time just because of this, I got fired.