Do you still take pride in your work?
The other day, I was preparing for my annual employee review. As part of the review, my leadership always asks for a snippet of code to review that you're particularly proud of.
Usually I find this quite easy. I take a lot of pride in writing very clean code, so when I feel like something 'Just works' and looks good, I feel good sharing it. However, this year was different. I was thinking about it, and while I definitely had some cool things I put out into a pull-request, I kind of felt like a poser sending it. I always think it's so funny when people post their AI generated images of themselves on Facebook and say things like 'Look what I made!'. You didn't make it. AI did.
So, here I was being asked to 'Show me what you made!' and honestly, I didn't feel good about sending any of it.
The code I sent, I felt more proud of it in a 'It solved a problem in a non-conventional way' kind of way. It solved a real problem on our project, and it wasn't my responsibility. In that way, I felt good I was helpful. It wasn't hand written, though.
I still love working in this industry, but it's just different now. Quite different.