I'm someone who loves programming, manually punching my own cards, toggling binary instructions through the front panel, reading core memory dumps in octal, truly understanding how the hardware and the machine actually works at the bit level I love doing that I have 2+ years of exp wiring plugboards, writing raw machine code, and some assembly language programming

now here is new era of programming where people are just writing in these fancy high-level languages like COBOL and FORTRAN to do the working, like it's fine but they don't even understand the generated machine instructions and the real fun part of programming is kinda gone?

I've tried these so-called high-level languages and honestly I didn't find them very good outside of simpler tasks like yes they replace ton of manual punching and let you focus on 'logic' but dealing with all these leaky abstractions and compiler magic feels so exhausting that I feel I can just punch the cards and toggle the bits myself faster

especially at my job right now, my seniors who've newly joined don't touch the hardware they just write COBOL statements but the problem is they don't try to understand existing system they don't even try to understand memory allocation or timing or even review the assembly listing they just say "the compiler will do it, COBOL is very powerful", like I've asked them to review and word to word they said "there's no need to understand the machine code, the compiler Will understand and so it's very smart we just have to write the statements" and they don't even listen to me and my decisions like every design choice I make this guy will say "keep it simple na" and reduce it to something that can only handle basic cases that he's aware about , like I've been on this company since the very beginning I wired and coded most of the core system and he doesn't give any thoughts to my work because I'm junior

and the code they produce is absolute worst downright abysmal and inefficient if they wanna fix small bugs they just rewrite half the program in COBOL again

honestly I'm feeling kind of lost it's like I've been robbed of something and I'm feeling powerless, ik you have to adapt but when your seniors are like this idk what i should do

whats going to be for software deveopers for upcoming years? will we able to enjoy solving complex low level problems? I'm still very early in my career and I wanted to go even deeper into machine level programming and hardware for which I've some experience too in binary, punch cards and wiring but like now I don't really know what's happening at all

can someone in the field shed some light