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We’re sad because a lot of people have bought into overly-hyped bullshit factories made by assholes who claim they can replace us.
They can’t, but our employers are currently too uninformed (or addicted to the bullshit, or desperate to prop up their stock prices) to realize that the bullshit factories aren’t capable of replacing us.
That’s causing a lot of turmoil in the form of unnecessary layoffs and rehires, worsening software quality, and general job insecurity.
That and the entire purpose of AI is to reduce agency, which is arguably the single most important factor in job–if not life–satisfsction.
It’s like being shackled to an annoying and incompetent younger cousin for a summer and being held responsible for all the problems they cause while they reap all praise and rewards for anything they happen to do right. Your parents float the idea of adopting the cousin and disowning you. Oh, and the cousin’s parents are yhe Koch brothers.
true
this article is a bunch of doomerism commie noise
Working for psychotic assholes bent on destroying the world for profit tends to make people sad, whodathunk?
On a less sarcastic note, this happens to people who can see past the bullshit of the modern world, of this stupid culture that tells us that we should be defined by our jobs, that we should feel bad for being improductive, that we should kill ourselves for our fucking jobs.
It doesn’t even need to be full conscience of how insane the whole circus is, just enough to be self aware that “this ain’t right”
This is just the answer for me because I’ve had to think about this a ton since Covid.
I’m sad and depressed with work. It should not be the case. I’m a Data Architect and make decent money. I have family, house, and essentially everything else.
I realized that my main problem with tech work is how useless it is. I got into this because I like to make things. That first time your code works and does most of what you want is a high I still remember.
Nowadays, I’m in meetings 60% of my time and the rest of the time I’m working with on-shore/off-shore contractors. Even our own company junior and senior staff has a decent amount of people that got into Tech because it pays well. So we have a lot of people that are chasing down someone to help do their job for them. So the other 40% of my time is spent pointing or even giving people the answer.
I can’t point at something at work over the last 5 years and say “I had a hand in that” while believing it.
So I’m working for people in middle management that mainly care about padding their resume. They work for people that could not give a single damn about me. On top of this, it’s all pretend work to make people happy. So I stopped pretending any of this is satisfying
I worked in IT for years, I’m good at it, I like problem solving, I like fixing things, I like building things.
But as time went by, I found myself in a more managerial role and truth be told, that’s not really my jam. And when I wasn’t doing that I was the specialist who could support some of our organizations’ worst and most troublesome systems. I was also put in charge of training people to use the company’s new web app (which was supposed to make people’s jobs easier, but really didn’t). Let me tell you, I do not like supporting shitty software or hardware, and I really do not like encouraging users to embrace useless web apps that don’t work well and serve no real purpose. I hated my job and it was time for a change.
So at that point I decided to completely shift my career and learn to code. I figured, if I hate supporting shitty software, why not just build good software. So I took some free classes through MIT’s open course ware, and learned to code. I spent a couple of years coding, picking up skills, learning languages, working with different compilers, taking additional math classes. And by the end of it all, one of my major takeaways was that I do like building things. But… as a professional software developer, I probably wasn’t going to be doing a lot of that. At the end of the day I might be able to say, “I squashed some bugs in some code that I didn’t write and don’t really know the greater purpose of”. Or if I’m lucky, “I wrote some functions that took in some inputs and produced some outputs”. But that doesn’t really feel like building something, that just feels like being a cog in a machine.
Over that same period when I was learning to code I was also picking up a second set of skills. We inherited the home my wife grew up in (which to be sure, is a pretty great deal). But it’s a fixer upper, it needed a bunch of attention. And since I was basically home schooling myself I thought I’d earn my keep by doing a lot of that maintenance myself rather than hiring a pro. I collected power tools, I learned to use hand tools, I made a lot of trips to Home Depot. I went through the basement full of rusty tools and restored many of them, replaced handles, sharpened blades, greased gears. I learned how to replace drywall, how to install an electrical outlet, how to repair a dryer. I replaced thermal fuses in kitchen appliances to bring them back to life, I mixed cement and rebuilt a crumbling retaining wall in the backyard.
Over time I got good enough at this that I started helping some of our friends with their homes. I could strengthen a rickety front step, or repaint a room, or replace a toilet. I had skills that people needed and actually, I generally liked doing it.
TLDR: In the time it took me to discover that being a programmer might somehow still not allow me to build things, I also learned that being a handyman would allow me to build things.
So yeah, career changes are scary, and it rarely looks like a good choice, but it is an option. And honestly, I’ve been a computer guy my whole life, but seriously, working with wood and screws and PVC has been super rewarding. So yeah, I guess I’m saying keep an open mind, and consider trying something different, you never know what might work for you.
It is really nice to have something to show for your work besides just a paycheck. This is something many don’t consider when evaluating career paths. CS or IT related careers damn near require you to do something tangible as a side hustle or at least a hobby, because the outputs of “commits” and “ticket closure metrics” just aren’t a edifying use of our creative spark as humans.
Absolutely right! And to be fair, sometimes you can get that tangible satisfaction in tech hobbies. You know, I’ve hacked some consoles, installed custom router firmware, built a crypto miner. Stuff like that can absolutely be personally satisfying.
But I think you hit the nail on the head, however you get it, I think we really do need some kind of tangible product of our efforts sometimes. You need to be able to say “yeah, I did that”.
I relate to this strongly. Many of us in this field feel catfished by our jobs. We took the role to get access to exciting emerging tech, or to fulfill some useful purpose and apply strategic thinking. Instead the reality of the day to day is business-led bullshit, drudgery of ticket work for issues affecting one user (and its probably a problem they caused), or having to report progress and “green” status to some talentless PM who doesn’t give a shit about you or your career. That and meetings. And fires and escalations and technical bridges.
I knew exactly what I was getting into. Office space, dead end job, doing the same shit every day, putting out dumb fires. What ever, I’m just doing it for the paycheck, so I can sometimes have fun outside of work
It’s the growing suspicion that all of the time effort and knowledge we are sacrificing is actually making the world worse and hurting people.
AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.
lol, way aheadaya, no need for AI
The mass layoffs, perhaps? Every job opening listing ai use in its requirements? Half those job listings not even being for real jobs?
Hmmm it’s a mystery
Cuz tech didn’t make our lives better in the ways we most wanted it to and, as an IT professional, it’s a stressful field where you endlessly rapid fire solve other people’s technical problems and most IT employers are dogshit and will replace you in a heartbeat with no loyalty whatsoever.
I feel exactly like that. I started in tech some 10+ years ago simply because I liked computers and what you could do with them and since then I changed jobs, got promoted several times but i never truly lost the passion. That is, until a couple of years ago, after I was once again promoted in a very senior technical position. Something happened after that, the amount of bullshit I had to endure was just immense. Day in and day out, it was more and more about the perception of doing work, the politics, the positioning against strategic direction, the revenue. BUT, I was still happy every now and then when I managed to do what I loved and what I was good at. And then LLMs happened and it’s been downhill ever since. No joy, no purpose, nothing that I can cling to for my own sanity. Almost every day I dream about being a bartender or a mailman or simply not doing anything. Of course, I probably will never actually do it, the amount of money I earn now simply doesn’t exist in other jobs and I’m not sure one can live off of “gratitude of a job that’s actually useful” and I’m getting older and that’s that. No happy ending here.
This is more or less how I feel as well. I yearn for something that I feel proud of again, yet feel held hostage by a salary. To add on to this…
I spent years studying and learning to be good at what I do. It feels like with the advent of agents, I’m suddenly less useful than I was before. Colleagues who were juniors (IC1 or IC2) are being up-leveled to staff simply because they started regurgitating agent output - essentially being meat proxies. They barely understand what they are saying and don’t hold up to scrutiny when I ask them questions in voice calls. They can’t answer without prompting an AI. It’s frustrating to no end. I thought I was having a mid-life crisis, but it’s the industry that changed.
Now I am trying to pull back and go offline when I’m not on the clock. If there is no difference between knowledge that is hard earned through study, exams, or degrees, and all it takes is to be a meat proxy, what is my motivation to improve my technical skills for a profession?
People in charge of the company I work for are actively delusional.
We had a four hour mandatory meeting to go over our product strategy. The high level vision. For the engineers. No rest breaks. It was announced there would be a test on the materials. Not as a joke.
The top question in the Qa section afterwards was “what is our product strategy?”.
The meeting had roughly 10k attendees.“AI agents are going to become so pervasive that we’ll need to put a computer on every desk in every office. I’m serious: have you tried to buy a Mac mini lately? They’re just not available”. “Datacenters in space”.
We think they were announcing a new product dashboard, but we’re not sure.
A huge amount of freakout about how AI will make everything different and better that most people on the ground don’t agree with, but we’re mandated to reorganize stuff according to the theory of how it should work in their vision. Teams that change and shift every few weeks. No fixed goals in the week to week timescales. Less planning, more demos, and development goals dictated by higher ups AI agents.
When it all shits the bed they won’t be the ones getting fired. They’ll be the ones collecting the same paycheck and talking about how “limited restructuring” is hard for everyone, but market forces dictate.
I’ve never been under the impression that my work makes the world a better place. I’ve always sold a product that goes to companies that do stuff that might help someone else help people.
It’s someone else having a goddamened coke bender on 50k people’s livelihoods with no consequences that has me down.Because tech isn’t fun anymore. It started before AI, but AI has really vacuumed every last atom of joy out of the work. That’s before you start looking at issues like the general lack of job security.
When you are in danger of losing your job even if you do extremely well at your job, it can be utterly depressing and stressful.
Depression might best be defined as an inability to see a viable future for yourself and they are working night and day towards their own extinction.
Because we sat around and thought we were special. We didn’t need unions, we had a rare skill. And now all of our labor power has been sucked away because the people that know nothing about software and infrastructure now think they can do our jobs because they saw a cool tech demo
Incompetent (at their job) leaders.
Corporate dreadmill.
As someone who’s applying to dev jobs right now this thread is not helping at all