I want to point at the discouraging framing of developers who learn to be helpless whenever they are stuck in an organization for long enough where they start to believe they cannot do better and there is something that cannot be changed.

The majority of people I met started out in the former group but have been reshaped by the environment they are in.

If you are in the former group and find yourself turning into someone from the latter group, becoming unrecognizable to your past self, ask yourself if you have been reshaped by the organizational experience you were having and where that spark went.

The chance is very high the organization figured out how to keep you in your position or you have internalized things about your professional self at face value that do not depict reality outside the org and that start to affect deeper layers like your confidence and outlook.

You start to identify with the made up labels or arbitrary hurdles of reaching some next level that will change everything. Essentially you are in a box and you developed tunnel vision, could be dept, org, branch or industry wide.

Just bash your head against a project away from work for 3 months on the side and gauge for yourself how capable you are with no economic intention disregarding time and value investments and so on. Repeat this long enough to fill any gaps in knowledge you encounter and at some threshold the coin flips again.

You will do DevOps but you are no DevOps guy, you do Frontend but you are no Frontend guy. Just a free flowing human walking through the layers that create something real.

There is an art in unplugging yourself from economics and thinking in organizational hierarchies and patterns and I think if most of us see it for what it is, software would turn into a calmer place, grounded closer in reality.

The distinction between junior, mid, senior, lead is a facade. It is a soft gradient that spans multiple areas, but is tainted and skewed by the technology du jour.

Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. It boils down to your personal willingness to learn and invest time building.

What companies seek these days are people having the experience with (dysfunctional) organizational structure and working around the shortcomings of the organizations communication and funding patterns, nothing more.

Does that really make you senior or just politically versed?

The pattern shows up the most whenever failing software pokes holes in perception.

It is just mismanagement of the money they earned with fortnite, they failed to keep the momentum and stopped taking risks. The technical incompetency doesn't stop with UE5, it shows in the store, which is laughably bad and inefficient since forever. I think its good these people get a new chance to start working for companies who can put their skills and time to good use and value their expertise. Long term nobody working there would be happy with the way the software portfolio is moving downwards.

Currently companies start to shift from enhancing productivity of their employees with giving them access to LLMs, they start to offshore to lower cost countries and give the cheap labor LLMs to bypass language and quality barriers. The position isn't lost, it's just moving somewhere else.

In the field of software development this won't be a an anxiety of an elite or threat to expertise or status, but rather a direct consequence to livelihood when people won't be hired and lose access to the economy until they retrain for a different field. So a layer on top of that you can argue with authority and control, but it rather has economic factors to it that produce the anxiety.

In that sense, doesn't any knowledge work have a monopoly on knowledge? It is the entire point to have experts in fields that know the details and have the experience, so that things can be done as expected, since not many have the time nor the capabilities to get into the critical details.

If you believe there is any good will when you can centralize that knowledge to the hands of even less people, you produce the same pattern you are complaining about, especially when it comes to how businesses are tweaking their margins. It really is a force multiplier and equalizer, but a tool, that can be used in good ways or bad ways depending on how you look at it.