If software were "just" a job without any of the gratifying aspects, I wouldn't do nearly as good a job.
Last re-engineering project was mostly done when they fired me as the probational period was almost over, and seems they did not want me further - too expensive? - and anyone can finish it right? Well...
So i am finishing it for them, one more month, without a contract, for my own sake. Maybe they pay, maybe they don't - this is reality. But I want to see this thing working live.. i have been through maybe 20-30 projects/products of such size and bigger, and only 3-4 had flown. The rest did not - and never for technical reasons.
Then/now i'll be back to the job-search. Ah. Long lists of crypto-or-adtech-or-ai-dreams, mostly..
Mentoring, juniors? i have not seen anything even faintly smelling of that, for decade..
There are still junior engineers out there who have experiments on their githubs, who build weird little things because they can. Those people were the best engineers anyway. The last decade of "money falls from the sky and anyone can learn to code" brought in a bunch of people who were interested in it for the money, and those people were hard to work with anyway. I'd lump the sidehustle "ship 30 projects in 30 days" crowd in here too. I think AI will effectively eliminate junior engineers in the second camp, but absolutely will not those in the first camp. It will certainly make it harder for those junior engineers at the margins between those two extremes.
There's nothing more discouraging than trying to guide a junior engineer who is just typing what you say into cursor. Like clearly you don't want to absorb this, and I can also type stuff into an AI, so why are you here?
The best engineers I've worked with build things because they are truly interested in them, not because they're trying to get rich. This is true of literally all creative pursuits.