>> A shocking number of some of the best professional programmers I know aren’t interested in programming for the rest of their careers: 40+ hours a week for 40 more years. Sure, the high comp and benefits will keep a lot of them around for a while. But that doesn’t seem like a permanent solution, especially as we lose our most experienced engineers.<p>I feel myself growing weary of this field, but it's not because of the activity of writing code, but observing the same folly, again and again, at one company after another. And it's only getting worse.<p>To illustrate, when I worked a large corp, they had business analysts who knew the business, and actively engaged development. When I then went to medium/small companies, they typically had no business analysts, indeed no one who was capable of working with development to define projects and work out the edge cases.<p>Then seeing this formalized as 'agile' development were the developers become the business analyst, and devops where the developers become the sys admins, I wonder, what is it everyone else at these companies, what are they doing exactly?