It often takes restraint to give form to thoughts like these, not because they are controversial or confrontational, which they are not, but because words, once spoken, tend to take form, and what has quietly present beneath the surface becomes heavier the moment it is expressed. This is not a rebuke or an indictment, and it does not point at any company, decision, or person. Rather, it is a reflection shaped by years of immersion in the industry, an attempt to describe how certain patterns have gradually become familiar, not through malice or carelessness, rather by repetition and the slow erosion of what we once considered exceptional. These patterns are not confined to any single place, and while no organization reflects all of them, most will reveal some, each in its own combination and form, though I can say with certainty that singularities do exist.

What follows is a reflection on practices, some new, some old (well, not that old), that have taken shape across the industry over the past decade or so. I don’t necessarily consider these practices harmful; many people, myself included, might, depending on temperament and circumstance, find some of them stimulating. They are familiar not because they belong to one place, but because they appear, with slight variations, in many. These do not seem to arise out of bad intentions, but from inertia or the anxiety of falling behind. Often, they are not crafted by those who carry them out, but shaped by external pressures such as frameworks, certifications, and clients who need to see process to believe in quality. I’m not aiming to trigger sweeping change. These dynamics tend to shift slowly, when they do. Still, it seems worth taking stock. Some distance, when available, can bring perspective. That said, if the weight of these patterns feels excessive, there is another path. And while not everyone can step aside at will, it is possible to build a space of your own, a project where you set the pace and decide how things are done. If that space grows into something sustainable, it can offer a kind of footing that softens the demands of the day job. And if not, it still provides an anchor, a reason to approach outside pressures with less urgency. In some cases, it might even allow you to step away entirely and return later, somewhere the weight is distributed differently. The system may not adjust on cue, but we don’t have to carry it whole.

Early on, the role felt narrower but more grounded. You were a developer, plain and simple, and your job was to write code, to take clear requirements and turn them into systems that worked. There were junior and senior distinctions, of course, but your value was measured by how well you reasoned, how deeply you understood your tools, and how clearly you could think through a problem. It wasn’t assumed you knew everything, only to go deep where it mattered, and that depth brought both clarity and satisfaction. Certifications required genuine effort and preparation, often tied to a specific stack or vendor, and although they came at a cost, earning one meant you could breathe a little. You did not have to reprove your worth at every interview. Updates came regularly, but there was tolerance in the air. Staying on an older version did not make you irrelevant.

That focus gave you the freedom to study beyond the task at hand, to dive into infrastructure or reconsider how systems are shaped, with no need to justify the detour. Nobody tracked your side quests. That was part of their value.

Work moves faster now, with responsibilities spilling across boundaries and roles growing blurred. Developers shift constantly between architecture, automation, deployment, and operations, yet without the time to cultivate mastery in any of them. Agility has come to mean movement without orientation, continuity without pause. The result is breadth without depth, survival without growth, all within lanes defined more by coordination and procedure than by the work itself.

A few times a month, developers, now called software engineers, perhaps in recognition of all that has been added, might be asked to screen candidates, assess technical fit, and support the growth of a team. It can be a meaningful task, one that connects people and sharpens perspectives. But it still has overhead. Another job folded into the one already being done. Developers often become a support staff for HR, just as they’re expected to support Ops, QA, PM, Security, and sometimes even Legal.

There is no denying that this growing breadth of responsibilities can be enriching, as it allows people to develop new perspectives and unlock opportunities beyond their initial scope, and some even grow into entirely different roles as a result, although that kind of evolution works best when priorities are balanced and the expansion is paced, because otherwise, and forgive the cynicism, one might end up putting out fires in the morning, calibrating the crispness of fries in the afternoon, and selling them minutes later in the name of freshness. What this expansion often lacks is room for cultivation, the quiet and deliberate kind of growth that refines practice rather than stretching it thin. Jiro Ono, the sushi master who spent decades perfecting a simple dish, did not achieve mastery by chasing novelty or diversifying his skillset every few months, but by returning to the same movements, tools, and ingredients with unwavering attention and care. His technique did not stagnate, it deepened. That kind of depth is difficult to reach when the expectation is to remain constantly updated, and perpetually responsive. True refinement, the kind that leaves a lasting mark, requires repetition, focus, and time, none of which thrive in a culture that confuses motion with progress.

Changes in direction can be valuable when they arise naturally, and there is room for this mindset within a deliberate, serial form of cultivation. But parallel threads of learning, when sustained in excess, do not foster depth. They may enhance adaptability, and sometimes serve the needs of others, but they rarely nourish the one who must endure that pace. This is not a critique of companies as engines of profit. Profitability is not inherently negative, and it is entirely valid that organizations optimize for it. Nor do I think companies must function as spaces of personal fulfillment. That said, it is worth noticing that engineers often find motivation making itself, in the challenge, the process, the gradual shaping of something that works. This intrinsic drive, when nurtured, can yield outcomes that align with business goals. But when enthusiasm is seen as incidental, or worse, as disposable, something is lost. Enthusiasm cannot be mass-produced, nor can it be replaced on demand. Yet the abundance of available talent sometimes creates the illusion that it can. There is a structural mismatch between the incentives that guide organizations and the subtler, longer rhythms that sustain individual motivation. And while companies need not promise transcendence, they may still benefit from fostering conditions where that deeper engagement can take root.

Focus gave developers something increasingly rare today: breathing room. It allowed time to explore tangents, whether delving into systems architecture, experimenting with new tools, or refining techniques outside the scope of daily work, all without the pressure of immediate applicability or measurable return. Nobody was tracking those detours, and perhaps that is why they often led somewhere meaningful. The expansion of perspective was elective, self-directed, and grounded in curiosity rather than necessity.

Now, that spaciousness has collapsed. The pace has intensified, and the boundaries between roles have softened into something harder to define. Engineers are expected to shape solutions end to end, automate environments, manage releases, stay responsive to alerts, support QA efforts, adhere to shifting requirements, and occasionally address compliance concerns. What we often call agility becomes continuous motion, a kind of permanent availability that leaves little space for stillness or the deliberate work that sharpens a craft. Knowledge no longer accumulates through intention but is absorbed reactively, revised on the go, and discarded just as quickly when the ecosystem pivots or priorities shift.

Sometimes, this expansion reaches further. Developers, often quietly, become an informal support for HR, participating in interviews, evaluating candidates, and contributing to hiring decisions, not out of obligation but because they care about the people they work with and want to help shape the surrounding teams. Similar efforts appear elsewhere, offering guidance to PMs, assisting QA, weighing in on security reviews, and even contributing to documentation or content writing. Though not framed as extra work, it accumulates as a growing overhead, a cluster of adjacent responsibilities nested within the original role, rarely acknowledged explicitly but felt in the pace of each day.

This growing entanglement of responsibilities calls for a wide range of knowledge across systems, infrastructure, testing, documentation, security, and communication, yet much of that breadth eventually funnels into practices that prioritize fragmentation over coherence. Reviews must be granular. Teams split work into atomic pull requests. A comma here, an atomic refactor there. Everything must be traceable, minimal, and easy to comment on. This push for tightly scoped contributions often encourages context switching and erodes flow, not only for the author but for reviewers as well. The ritual begins to outweigh the substance, and the energy spent navigating the process leaves little room for holding the whole in mind. Paradoxically, while day-to-day work rewards minimal, reversible changes, candidates are still evaluated through meticulously precise algorithmic challenges and ambiguously broad system design exercises, as if the entry demanded mastery across wide domains only to funnel that breadth into a production line of two-line pull requests.

Then there is the politeness. The policies. The growing web of behavior guidelines. This is not to suggest that courtesy should be optional or that bluntness is a virtue. Respect matters. But mature teams once operated with a shared sense of conduct that did not need constant reinforcement. Lately, the workplace increasingly resembles a kindergarten with KPIs. Ironically, this formal emphasis on tone and posture coexists with a kind of procedural coldness, with off boarding processes, silent restructures, and decisions made with efficiency but little continuity. What used to flow informally now requires explicit scaffolding, and what once felt mutual is increasingly transactional.

Some of this change is driven by external demands. Companies must demonstrate alignment through visible artifacts: mandatory training and routine phishing drills are now standard, and regular behavioral refreshers have also become part of the mix. Entire departments now simulate traps to measure who falls for them, as if someone defined trustworthiness by clicking the wrong link on a random Tuesday. The outcome is standardization, which makes expectations clearer and enforcement steadier, while also reducing reliance on individual judgment. Much of this stems from regulatory and contractual pressure, where compliance frameworks, sometimes imposed by the state and often by industry standards, require businesses to channel energy into activities disconnected from their main purpose. But these systems frequently replace the maturity and discretion of adult professionals with rigid instruction sets, prioritizing traceability over trust. Security improves, yes, but continuity falters when automation wipes configurations, resets environments, and revokes access with little sensitivity to timing or impact. What once moved with professional ease now follows protocols that are accurate but unresponsive, unable to register nuance or adapt to the texture of actual work.

It is not all bleak. There’s value in flexibility and interdisciplinary knowledge that allows teams to move beyond rigid boundaries, but there is also value in depth. In knowing that not everything needs to be measurable to be meaningful. And in recognizing that the constant expansion of scope is not always a sign of progress, it can also be a symptom of drift. Remote work, for instance, brought undeniable gains: fewer hours spent commuting, better meals at home, a quieter pace. At the same time, it opened the door to novel forms of oversight. What began as a gesture of trust has in many cases turned into low-grade surveillance, quietly running in the background, watching every input and output with clinical precision, from keystrokes and storage devices to peripheral activity, folding presence into a stream of telemetry feeding remote dashboards. In some ways, one ends up missing the visible yawn after lunch, even if the manager saw it.

What exists today has not always looked this way, at least not as it has played out before our eyes. There was a time when things felt simpler. It wasn’t necessarily easier. What changed was the sense of weight. Things felt less encumbered. Over time, as often happens, the industry began to layer structures meant to bring order or reduce risk. Some added stability, others just piled on. And while it’s hard to picture a return to that earlier clarity, the thought still lingers. Less from nostalgia than from a quiet recognition that things have not always been this convoluted, that simplicity was not naïve. Occasionally, when strain builds or conditions shift, a new shape appears. Not by dismantling everything that came before but in letting something essential rise to the surface. It does not erase complexity, only renders it secondary. Rare, yes. But not unimaginable.

Some work does not need layers of micromanagement. It needs to be done by people trusted to care how it is done.