Programmers are mourning, and I get it

Home

Programmers are mourning, and I get it

28.10.2026

I’ve been writing code since I was 11, starting with a Visual Basic 5 book at my grandma’s house. From Macromedia Flash in the early 2000s to a computer engineering degree and six years engineering naval combat systems for the Spanish Navy, programming wasn’t just a career for over two decades, it was my identity.

In the summer of 2021, that identity collapsed almost overnight. My wife was pregnant, and I took the civil service exams to become a vocational training teacher. I passed, landed a life-long position, and was thrown straight into deep waters: setting up a basic vocational program from scratch in a school with literally zero computers, working with teenagers facing complex educational and personal challenges.

Almost simultaneously, my son was born. The sheer weight of fatherhood hit like a freight train. Within four months, I went from being a software engineer with endless hobbies and total free time to an exhausted teacher with a newborn and zero bandwidth for myself. My motorcycle was sold, my 3D printers went dark, and coding stopped completely.

Looking at the panic in the software community today, as AI makes developers feel undervalued or redundant, I recognize that existential shock. To be fair, my transition was my own choice, backed by the safety net of a tenured civil service position. I didn’t lose my livelihood to an algorithm, and I won’t pretend my situation equals the terrifying prospect of economic displacement. But when it comes to the death of the “coder ego” (the sudden realization that the skill you built your self-worth around no longer occupies the center of your universe) the grief is remarkably similar.

I mourned the night-long coding sessions. I mourned the thrill of fixing a bug after so much time. I mourned the sense of achievement after reaching 10k points in my StackOverflow score. None of that makes sense anymore. And I’m certain none of that would have any value today.

Yet, life went on. I learned to appreciate my new reality. Teaching turned out to be deeply rewarding—there are no two days alike, and the real-world impact on students is immediate in a way software rarely was. Slowly, I’ve even started clawing back time for tinkering on my own terms.

If there is any perspective I can offer programmers navigating this shift, it’s this: your ability to write code was a craft, not your core identity. Losing the world where coding defined your value is painful, but surviving that loss proves your worth was never tied to a compiler in the first place. Don’t give up.