I have loved programming for 30+ years and still do the occasional project to scrape/automate things I find frustrating, but I also have afk aspirations such as thru-hiking around the world starting with the tour du mont blanc and moving on to the pacific crest trail and the te araroa trail. Also giving back as a volunteer https://www.justserve.org/ seems a lot more appealing to me than spending my golden years behind a computer screen.
I run software engineering for a 100% remote company with ~35 developers on 5 continents. In April 2022 I interviewed a senior Python developer from Austin Texas - camera on, full pair-programming exercise, etc. 3 interviews, the guy was awesome. We hired him and assigned him to a development team. A month later I hear from the team that the guy sucks, doesn't know how to program, thick accent, and says his camera is broken even though we just shipped him a brand new machine. We set up a sting operation, forced him to present/share his screen over zoom, and recorded the call. It was some random person in India connecting via a VPN in Dallas to mask the origin of his network calls. In the screenshare recording you could see him quickly switch to a chat window and ask someone else how to answer the question. We fired him and only lost 1 month of salary + a very nice laptop we'll never see again. I learned a valuable management lesson from that one. I bet at a larger company this guy could have flown under the radar for a lot longer than 1 month.
