TBH it sounds like they're not very good as a programmer or they're not at a good company to be one. I'd expect if you're still doing this at 50, you'd have a g

TBH it sounds like they're not very good as a programmer or they're not at a good company to be one. I'd expect if you're still doing this at 50, you'd have a good amount of experience at navigating through stuff and getting to the key parts with deep understanding of the languages, infrastucture, tools, and APIs that are being used. What's different in my experience, is that my this is still technically interesting and far preferable to not this. An IC role (including staff level) is largely dictated by technical concerns of correctness, efficiency, and comprehensible structure--all things I enjoy making. When I encounter folks who used to be like me but moved on to non-hands-on roles, they lose their technical depth and can't evaluate things first-hand, having to delegate technical issues and making best guesses based on who/what to trust without full understanding themselves. That's not a position I want to be in. There's truth in "trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand..." but I don't agree with "...and don't have time to understand." When in a new area, I'll make a partial solution that's "the simplest thing that could work" and make iterative refinements as I understand more and more. I occasionally do extended deep work at odd hours, but that's by choice since working from home. I never feel like I have to work at 2am, except for the rare times that I'm on-call for my area and get paged. I've never come up with an answer to "What would I prefer to be doing instead?" Working at a small, stable company with a good product would be nice but doesn't pay nearly as well. My advice would be to try a number of different companies until you find one that suits you, or try to put yourself in a position at a company that fits you. I've done both and satisfied with my results. At a large company with good engineering culture, you can move between domains to keep things fresh if you get too settled-in and bored. OTOH the author may be well suited to using AI tools to automate "skimming great oceans of APIs" to make their work more fun and cut and paste from generated solutions. They'll still need to have some picture of the current situation, where to go, and evaluating the steps taken to get there.