Maybe the future of software engineering is even more suited to me
The last time I was interviewing, I remember telling my friends that I felt I had indexed too much on the "talking engineer", and not enough on the "technical engineer". These two paradigms representing the two ways I thought most people went as SEs: into management, or into architecture. This was solely down to the rapport I was able to build with my interviewers and the difficulty I had in the technical sections.
I haven't thought about this deeply enough yet to have an informed opinion as to where I think it is going, but I do think that at least now, software engineering might be a little more suited to my working style.
This isn't to say I hated writing code by hand (even saying this 4 years ago would have been crazy?). In fact, my growth conversations usually ended with me hinting that I wanted to become more of a technical leader and leaning less into the "talking engineer" persona. I'll be among many who will have to grieve the loss of their trade mining with pickaxes as they continue to build shareholder value using jackhammers.
The shape of the job has changed, and we're looking at a different needle now. It's less about "the code should this good" and more about "how much can the product iteratively improve". I've always known this to be the more important metric, and by nature of our 8 hour days, it means that I reckon we'll be juggling more in the future. Discussion of running n-many agents simultaneously means the days of deep work are leaving, and I am not sure how I feel about that from a mental and physical health standpoint.
My take here really is that as someone who is bouncing off the walls and having idea "y" whilst I am planning activity "x" and executing plan "z" means that maybe this future is more suited to mean as a individual, even if the change into that directory is scary.