You must log in or # to comment.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Making full 3D models based on real art made by the concept artist on our team? This sparks joy.
Doing the same with AI images my boss made? This does not spark joy.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
It’s not just tech
As a software engineer I could say a lot of things that can affect the experience in a workplace, like tech stack, team balance, colleagues, coorporate politics, product/industry. In the end though, there’s one experience that I had that made me realize what can make work truly fulfilling and that was when I worked in a company that had flat hierarchy. You have the freedom and the responsibility to develop and deliver, participate in decision making from spending and product features to how many days we telework and what times. Of course, not everything was perfect, but the sense of autonomy and having a say on how we shape the product that I put all this energy to build really makes a big difference.
This has made me question deeply how in tech and in all companies, in general, we put up with so deeply hierarchical and top down structures where you end up being a cog in the wheel at best. At worst you get crushed in middle management trying to explain to stakeholders that they are definetely not better at estimating deadlines than engineers.
No wonder that most people try to find meaning and fulfillment in open source projects or other activities. It would be interesting to see us putting that energy in changing our main workplace.
I work at an MSP and see profound idiocy every day and nobody has the will or desire to learn anything. I had to give someone directions on how to plug a wired mouse into a computer the other day.
I see at least one functionally illiterate person a week while working.
For me its gardening
Ever since I regularly gave started hearing “EBITDA” my mind has drifted more and more to doing something with my hands, making something and then seeing it there in front of me. Something that gives joy.
I’m still spending time on my self hosted services as a hobby, but that too is just to bring joy. The family can enjoy jellyfin abf navidrome, for example.
I’ll still have to work IT for a while, I fear, but I can’t wait for the day I can stop doing it professionally
