Around three years ago I made a career change into software development. I really enjoy coding especially the creative side of building things. It's very different to my previous career which was more social and involved dealing with people.
I've had a lot of insecurity about my technical skills compared to other colleagues, and to be honest I don't think I was ever as good as most of the others at the technical bits of my job but I was good at communicating, presenting and contributing. People liked me and I got a lot of praise.
AI has started gradually being used more, although we were one of the last departments to adapt it. Once we did adapt it, it felt like it just took over overnight. It seems to basically be expected now that we don't do any actual coding - we just use AI and then review it and it's expected that the speed we finish tasks will reflect this new way of working.
On one hand this should be (on paper) better for someone like me who has never been as strong technically, but it's completely thrown me. I no longer enjoy my job at all. The bit I enjoyed and that gave me satisfaction is gone. It's much harder to review code than write it and I find that I just can't spot mistakes in the same way others can. I'll be looking at something that I should see is a mistake and I just don't see it. Then someone else points it out and it suddenly seems so obvious.
For a while, I've been manually rewriting what the AI generates, just so I can see the issues more clearly, but it's meaning I'm working slower than everyone else.
In our team, the output has really increased and I'm constantly getting pinged to do code reviews on other people's work. This is a normal part of a developer's job and code reviews need doing - in lots of teams it's explicitly said that you should stop what you're doing to review people's work asap because otherwise we get a bottle-neck of work that needs reviewing. Now with AI, there's a lot more work going in and I'm finding the constant pinging really hard as I'm finding it hard to switch between tasks.
Reviewing other people's work has got even harder. AI tends to write a lot more flowery code than humans and I find it harder to parse.. I'm finding myself overwhelmed and paralyzed by it.
There's a lot of redundancies happening in the organisation - not yet in our team, but I worry it will come. It's causing me to spiral even more - I worry I'm underperforming and that I might end up with no job which makes it even harder to focus. For the past few weeks I've been really unproductive, and not as present or visible day to day e.g. I'm not the one volunteering first to look at issues or joining in conversations about how we should tackle X. I can feel this happening but I think I'm getting burned out as I'm struggling to actually go back to my normal self.
The job market for software development is really really bad right now and people with a lot more experience and better skills than me are struggling to find jobs. For a while, I was very sceptical about the AI-panic but I've seen even seniors who maintained scepticism for a long time start to express concern and make comments about putting extra money away so they can retire early if needed.
I keep telling myself to just force myself back to my normal self - present and visible and taking initiative to prove my worth but it's so hard to actually do it when I feel so overwhelmed and demotivated. I work from home and often I'm waiting for responses from people who don't get back to me. I'm having to switch between tasks constantly and feeling like I don't get anywhere. Some days I feel I can barely focus, and don't do much, then the next day I feel tremendous guilt and overcompensate by working extra.