Into 10 years into the career, I have found that in the end its all about the people.
Most of the comapanies suck making life easier for software developlemt, with useless standups, lack of documentation, proper testing, quick tasks, and on top of it micromanagement, un-productive meetings and with no foucs on culture. To me, all this energy drainging activities.
It is hard to find the real joy for the job, in such cases.
There will be very few companies which will be really using the AI to solve problem which AI can solve, otherwise every next company slapping "AI" on their prodcut.
Same situatiom came in past, where CEO was trying to hire the agenecy team. I was senior dev into the team, opposed this idea. Their argument was hiring will take lot of time and we have to ship fast.
Worst happened ( although I expeacted that), slowly internal team had "no" work. all the work was directed to agency.
IMO, people who are running the company has very little or no perspective of software quality and how it will impact in the long run, specially if company is run by sales (CEO) guy. They just want to "release" feature, even if there is know bugs are there. Its a sad reality of lot of software shops.
Nested code with no tests or docs and devs are afraid to fix bugs. That's where i coined the term "Fear Driven Development". The code is so mess such that no dev wants to touch the code. when they do touch, something is surely broken.
After covid started, team started working from home. week into it, HR told team that screen tracker software is to be installed. so that CEO can track what team is doing. I objected to this and left the job. since i find this unethical also very childish approach to micromanagement.
Even in office CEO was tracking the "work" via installed cctv from remote since he was in US.
Totally agree, as one have to enjoy the time spent in code.
Also no pressure to make that perfect (although one may). Important thing that mentioned is project can be worked in "on-off" mode, because giving free time always not viable, specially if one has family.
Start with offical docs.