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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.I have 3 decades of experience in programming. I started with QBasic on an IBM386. I learned what system files to not delete out of Windows or Linux. I went to university and learned Java and .Net and SQL. I’ve done web. I’ve done server admin. I’ve got decades of Windows and Linux and shell scripting and databases of every flavor and just… All of it.
What do I do lately at work? I fill out spreadsheets with information that already exists in 7 other spreadsheets, but we need this in THIS format for THIS VPs request. And I fill out status updates. And I go to meetings and listen for an hour as everyone talks about their status updates on projects I don’t even know anything about or care.
My manager asks us to make sure we are learning and using AI. Why? Well, the C and VP suites think we should be. Does it actually help or make anything better? Not really. But ok, fine.
And then the real irony kick in the balls. As we push literally everything in the company to be “Cloud This” and “Distributed That” and “AI more!” and “Be flexible !” … and they did the big RTO mandate last year. The fuck? You want everything to be remote and cloud and distributed and modern and agile, except employees must commute in and sit in this specific chair to join their video call meeting. And 3/5ths of my team is out of state and so exempt from the RTO mandate, including my supervisor. What the fucking fuck? I have to drive in and sit in a shitty cube while they get to kick back at home? Fuck that.
Decades of knowledge and experience and talent, and I fill out spreadsheets with duplicate information IN PERSON while coworkers get all the benefits of WFH and the same damn pay.
I don’t even know what my supervisor does except ask us “is XYZ done yet?” a couple times per week, that seems to be it, I don’t think they even know what we do tbh. They just sit at home and make sure all our check boxes get checked. But if you mention a single detail of a project beyond “done” or “not done” they get confused. Fucking hell.
And it hurts even more knowing the CEO makes 100x my pay + benefits + stock + who knows wtf else.
What are we doing?
Addon: Oh! And then there have been layoffs. And cutbacks. And hiring freeze. And no promotion or raises beyond a basic 2-4% yearly “cost of living” raise, even though the cost of living has fucking gone up like 300% in the past few years.
I haven’t actually programmed anything in so long. It’s depressing to be wasted pointless effort in a bureaucratic corporate nightmare.
I resonate so much with a good chunk of that. I legit left my job because I couldn’t take it anymore. My job while different went from negotiating multi-million dollar contracts, and securing pricing agreements with manufacturers to essentially being a spreadsheet jockey after a re-org. They wanted all the interesting parts of my job done by commodity management and reduced my role to something a fucking monkey could do, but asking for 47 different reports that essentially all had the same data just slightly different for dickheads 1,2, and 3 in the C-Suite, and overloading us with so much of it that it took 80 hours a week to complete. It was a fucking nightmare.
What did you go to? Still in tech or did you go down the pipeline to gardening or become a cryptid in the local forest that scares people?
I’ve been taking a sabbatical essentially. Living off savings that was supposed to be for a down payment on a house (lol). Got to do a lot of traveling with the kids and I’ve been looking for a similar role elsewhere but haven’t secured anything yet. Thankfully, my wife still makes good money and we’re doing OK financially, but I’m not thrilled about my prospects in my field. It’s hard to be optimistic in a fascist AI hellscape.
Real.
Glad you have the ability to take that time with family, that is awesome!
Yeah, it really is rough right now. Fascist AI hellscape is accurate.
gwbasic on an XT here. Automate yourself out of that particular job. If not you, someone else probably will, or some expensive outside consultant will identify it for the chopping block. Find something of more value to do within the company, and slap an AI label on it for good measure. You are in the trenches now and you see the dysfunction… It’s likely the same company-wide, so rife with opportunity.
Automating my own job was what I did do for decades of my career, the problem is that SOMETHING changed in the past year or two. I don’t know what it is or was. AI speculation and fears? Late stage capitalism? The govt? The economy? All of it?
But it shifted pretty heavily from development and code and a desire from all aspects of the company of wanting automation and UIs and scheduled jobs and better reports and just… You know, the useful corporate crap. It used to be in constant demand It was “boring” because it was corporate pie charts and data, but it was still coding and problem solving and technical and engaged more than 2 brain cells. I enjoyed it. I was useful. It made sense. And it all shifted and is now meaningless bureaucratic corporate bullshit. I can’t tell if ANYTHING tangible is actually being done at the end of the day anymore. It feels like 100% fluff and no meat. Ya know? I don’t feel alone in that feeling either. I think a lot of us are feeling a weird and sudden disconnect.
It’s depressing to be wasted pointless effort in a bureaucratic corporate nightmare.
And depending on the details of your employment, if you code for fun, on your own time, at home, using your own equipment, the company still owns it.
Weird coincidence, all my hobby code I’ve ever done at home is “drop database” and corrupt system files scripts. If they want them they can have them. 😈
I don’t get how anyone could EVER enforce a law or agreement or rule that says something I wrote at home on my device on my time is theirs. Don’t touch my files with your gross corporate fingers! Ahhh!
I don’t get how anyone could EVER enforce a law or agreement or rule that says something I wrote at home on my device on my time is theirs.
Check your employment terms. I’d wager the first step of that is seeing if you have a paper copy. I know I don’t for all the places I’ve worked or acquisitions I’ve been through.
Something like an ALCU or Second Amendment Foundation that focused on nothing but that would be a nice-to-have. I think it overall destroys creativity in the industry.
No no, I mean, how could they possibly ever know: A. That I wrote a thing. B. I did it within a timeframe. C. It should be theirs.
Etc.
Like, if made “Flappy Bird 2” this weekend and made money on it, how would they ever even know? I did it on my PC, on my time, in my home.
I guess only if I made mega money and they found out, but couldn’t I just say I wrote the game years ago, but just published it now, so it still isnt yours?
Just seems impossible to enforce.
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.
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
As someone who’s applying to dev jobs right now this thread is not helping at all
It’s a clusterfuck.
IMO tech sucks because it is full of turbo capitalist tech bros who idolise people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, especially in leadership positions. Workers realise they are creating nothing of value, or even actively harmful things, just so a line can go up and make some ghouls even richer. Of course the tech bros love to talk about how revolutionary the product that the workers slave over is and how passionate the company is about it, only to enshittify it the instant they think it would be more profitable to do so.
Meanwhile the higher ups don’t care about the workers and get a boner from gloating about how good the last quarter was and laying off half the company in the same townhall meeting. These days they don’t even care enough anymore to say the company is a big family and put a fruit bowl in the break room.
None of this is new to tech workers. The deal has always been, that the douchebag tech bros get to feel important and the workers get to enjoy the relatively good wages and a stable career (if they got downsized someone else was always hiring), while sarcastically joking about the situation and making fun of their idiot bosses with their colleagues. The only new thing about AI is that now those careers are no longer stable. Not because AI can actually replace them, but because the tech bros insultingly think that an LLM can do the work of actually skilled workers.
Because many tech jobs have become glorified vendor management. You don’t actually support anything yourself, you have a vendor sales rep and a technical rep or maybe two.
When something breaks or needs an update, you call/email the rep, go back and forth a few times, schedule a date for patching, and then create your 10,000th email Chain/Teams group chat with all the various people internally and externally who “need visibility” into the process. Everybody says their piece, argues about coverage or pricing, asks the same basic questions 5 different ways, so on and so forth.
Now multiply this by all the unique software/hardware components of your infrastructure. Add to that the AI executive-led slop fest, angry sarcastic, tech-illiterate end users, corporate software enshitification, etc.
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.
Everyone in tech isn’t sad. Some are. Some aren’t. It depends the day, the job, and the person. I’ve been in tech for 21 years and I’m very happy. I work hard, and an satisfied with most of my job.
Incompetent (at their job) leaders.
Corporate dreadmill.
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 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.
It’s because the decision makers are fucking stupid.
I would be happier at work if we could just solve interesting problems. Instead we have mandates from management to do nonsense, or work in nonsense ways.
The people at the top are so removed from how work gets done, and how normal people live, they’re useless. Worse than useless.
