Programmers with 15+ years of experience are burning out en masse — not because they’ve become redundant, but because the profession they loved no longer exists. There’s another role left with the same name.
Programmers with 15+ years of experience are burning out en masse — not because they’ve become redundant, but because the profession they loved no longer exists. There’s another role left with the same name.
Serhiy Nemchinsky, developer and founder of Foxminded, published a video where he analyzes one of the most resonant phenomena in IT right now: why strong, expensive specialists are leaving the profession themselves.
As an example, he cites Bulgarian developer Alex Kondov, author of the blog The Sinen Builder. He published a video with a simple confession: he is taking a month off from coding because he physically no longer delivers. Under the video are hundreds of comments from people with 10–18 years of experience with one thought: «I quit, went to drive a truck — for the first time in years I feel alive.»
Nemchinsky admits: no one has calculated exactly how many programmers have left their profession because of AI. But the numbers that are available are telling. About 40% of developers, he says, plan to change jobs within a year, and more and more of them say that they are changing not jobs, but fields. Almost half of engineers openly admit to AI fatigue. Burnout is recorded in 40–80% of specialists. And according to a Stack Overflow survey, 66% of developers are annoyed by «almost correct» AI code, and almost half say that debugging it takes longer than writing it yourself. By the way, it is the most experienced who distrust AI the most.
Nemchinsky explains: the complaints are not that it has become difficult. On the contrary, the excitement has disappeared. Previously, a programmer was like a composer: coffee, headphones, immersion in the task, the slow birth of a solution. Now you describe the AI task and in a second you have the code ready. You no longer need to think about how to write it.
«The composer has turned into a nanny who looks after someone else’s child. And when they take away from you what you came into the profession for 20 years ago, that’s when burnout begins,» states Serhiy Nemchinsky.
He separately analyzes the cognitive load from working with AI tools. Modern Claude Code, Cursor or JetBrains AI is actually pair programming, where the partner is tireless and constantly adds code, without natural pauses, says the IT expert. When you code alone, he adds, «you can breathe a sigh of relief while the build is being prepared.» With AI, this protective mechanism is not there: you are constantly at your peak, constantly checking, constantly making decisions.
Nemchinsky’s main analogy for such transformations is the appearance of the automobile. The driver loved the horse, knew its temperament, and enjoyed the process itself. When the automobile appeared, he did not want to get behind the wheel. The craft he loved disappeared, and the taxi driver was a different person: he was interested in speed, scale, and the next order.
According to Neczynski, there is a paradox: the rift opens up a profession for those who previously never even came close to code — because they hated memorizing frameworks and debugging parentheses. Now they have a place: managing systems, conducting AI, thinking about architecture.
