Read the Tea Leaves Software and other dark arts, by Nolan Lawson

You had a story you used to tell yourself about how you got here in life.

You’d share the story with others. Maybe you’d be at a party, and someone would ask what you do, and you’d say, “I’m a programmer.” And their eyes would perk up and their mind would fill with images of ball pits and propeller beanies and that funny movie with Jesse Eisenberg, and they’d say, “Oh yeah, like you build apps?”

And you’d proudly brush it off and say something like, “Yeah I work on the backend, you don’t know what that is, but it’s basically the magical thing in the cloud that makes your apps work.” Or you’d say, “Yeah I work on the frontend, it’s the thing you touch all day long on your phone, I make it look good and run fast.”

And if you thought about what it took to get there, you’d think of the lines of code, fuzzy green text in a black terminal, the mystical incantations that lit up the glowing rectangles that everyone else was staring at all day. They didn’t know the effort, the raw-adrenaline flow of code bursting from your fingertips as you wove dreams into pixels. Or the writer’s block of the showstopper bug that nagged you on your jog and in the shower until suddenly the answer came to you when you awoke, as if from a dream, and you rushed to the keyboard to pound out the solution, the pure exhilaration of making the computer obey you.

Then someday somebody took that story from you. They told a different story: one where someone on a stage, in a business suit that you’d never wear, with a smug grin that you’d never wear, talked words into a computer and, the little traitor, it obeyed him. He talked words like you or I would, like any simpleton would, and it obeyed him. And the crowd cheered because they knew that now the glowing rectangles belonged to them as well, and not just you, with your wizardly spells that took years of study to master.

When you see your brother at Thanksgiving, he’s excitedly showing your parents an app he built to track football scores. Except he didn’t really build it, you think to yourself bitterly. He’s not a programmer, he’s a mechanic, and maybe he knows his way around cars, but he never grinded LeetCode to pass an interview, or stayed up late studying Data Structures and Algorithms to pass an exam. “Let you brother have this one,” your dad chides you after an outburst at the dinner table. “It’s just an app.” Just an app, you scoff with amazement.

When you go home, you pour yourself a stiff drink and wonder what kind of story you can tell yourself now. You were Superman, and now every schmuck puts on a cape and thinks they can fly. The fools! They’ll fall. They’ll fall and crash, you reassure yourself as you take a swig.

Your friends agree. “This stuff will never work,” they say, as if with bored detachment. “Remember low-code? Remember no-code? What a joke.” But you notice something: a fear in their eyes that you’ve never seen before. You don’t feel reassured.

Eventually you find that your own colleagues are warming to the stuff. “It’s actually pretty useful,” they say. “Give it a shot.” You’re astounded by the pure treason. Don’t they realize this is a rejection of everything they’ve done their entire careers, an insult to their very dignity as a programmer? They shrug. “Sure, but times change. I want to have a job in five years.”

Five years. Your retirement is looming. And you were looking forward to leaving at the top of your game, maybe to tinker on some side projects after money is no longer an issue. But now you don’t know about the money, or the side projects, or whether you’ll be at the top of your game anymore or just a washed-up has-been. The panic is really starting to set in now, and you’re looking for an out.

You approach the tool out of resentment – cautiously, like a cursed artifact. You hold the dead thing at arm’s length, as if its very aura might poison you. You try it out, and it chirps happy success but everything it spits out is failure. You close the laptop lid. Vindication! The thing truly is dead, a fraud, a sham. You can return satisfied to your beloved craft.

Except your craft doesn’t feel right anymore. More and more, you read about astounding feats created with the accursed tool. Colleagues you trust and admire are now reconfirming, in more strident tones, that it actually works. The treason is all around you, choking your joy, ruining what once gave you so much meaning. You can barely stand to look at the blinking cursor in your text editor anymore, which has also betrayed you with its daily offers to steal your voice, retire your fingers, extinguish your spark.

You start to wonder if this industry is even right for you anymore. How can it be right when everything around you feels so wrong? And always, there is the fear: fear that you are losing ground, fear that you won’t make it past the next layoffs, fear that you’ll be joining your brother in the auto shop and he’ll be showing you the ropes, you with your fumbling fingers that can barely hold a wrench, and oh by the way did you see the app he built to replace his content management system?

Where the story goes next is for you to decide. Maybe you can skate by for a few more years in a sinecure, holding onto a payslip for dear life, while the world moves whooshing around you. Maybe you’ll give in and learn the new tools, but with a kind of detached ambivalence, going through the motions but no longer feeling joy or meaning or like you have something worth talking about at a dinner party.

Or maybe you’ll look around and study those who have adapted to the new world and are thriving. Maybe you’ll notice the coworker who brushed off all the doom and gloom and just says, “Hey, look at this cool thing I built.” And maybe you’ll notice that this coworker has their own kind of mastery, their own tools and workflows with odd names that turn you off at first but ultimately pique your curiosity. Maybe you’ll wonder if it makes more sense to hang out with the people building and sharing and having fun instead of those who mope and whinge and cry for a lost golden age. Maybe instead of being ruled by fear, you’ll find your creative spark again.

Because isn’t that the point in the first place? Isn’t that why you got into programming? Wasn’t it to make something, to put it out in the world and bring joy to others with your creation? Wasn’t it to make a song out of sand, a painting out of pure thought, a miracle out of nothing, regardless of how you did it?

If it is, then you might find that the story you need to tell about yourself, about who you are and where you came from and why you create, was right there all along. The story has been told hundreds of times throughout history – only the characters and the scenery change – and you still have it in you. You found it once before, and if you search for it with curiosity and an open heart, you’ll find it again. It never really left you.