I will say that my enjoyment of it comes and goes. I hate to say it, but I think there was a huge problem with people rushing into this industry during the late dot-com boom and they had absolutely no business in the industry, and I see a fair bit of that again. Not sure if that is indicating another bust like that one.

What I’ve also noticed lately is that there seems to be a real culture of gatekeeping type of thing that has emerged - meaning, expecting people to grind away on algorithms and so on just to pass an interview, or expecting people to show all their free time doing commits on GitHub, as if everyone is working for FAANG and is going to be in their early 20s, no matter what the business is actually doing and what their needs really are. Very few places actually need people to do massively distributed systems, serving customers in the way that FAANG does, so the algorithms and the opportunity to try to see how much computer science [whatever] someone remembers at the whiteboard, as well as stats on Github have little to do with the actual job, but there are a lot people that want to make people dance this little jig, anyway.

That culture absolutely sucks, IMHO.