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 the executives either drank the AI kool aid or have FOMO, so they mortgaged the entire company’s future for it, resulting in layoffs, job insecurity, no clear plan or direction, and 0 morale.

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

It’s not just tech

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

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

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.

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”

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.

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.

AI fits very well into the “Workism” narrative. As LLMs generate the statistical medium of all the training data it has, the output is mediocre by design. That makes it an excellent tool for bullshit work, like creating an email summary of a meeting that no one will ever read, and countless other mindless and useless daily chores of the “knowledge worker”.

But the basic premise hasn’t moved an inch with AI. If you have a job which rewards creativity and needs you to develop new ideas, solve hard problems etc. then AI doesn’t do shit for you. AI gives mediocre answers to mediocre people. It’s not creative at all. It spits out the average of the sum of its training data points. If your job consists mostly of doing mindless chores then it is not a good job anyway. Nothing to be proud of, not a career, just a job.

I got about 3/4 through before I decided “TL;DR”. He weaves a well integrated story and many aspects ring true-ish. However, I disagree with the foundational concept - “Workism” - which renders the well woven narrative less “true”.

Let’s face it, while people generally would love to have a “vocation” in which they have positive impact on the world, they don’t need to make a religion out of “bullshit jobs”. We are motivated by survival. In our societies, we need money to acquire shelter, food, transportation, spouses (if you’re male), children, and the ability to have time for leisure. We choose our careers based on the signs of the times, a creative mental projection of possible futures, and what we enjoy doing.

If we’re lucky, we get to build a career on what we enjoy doing, even if it is abstract and has no direct, visible positive impact on society as a whole.

When one has one’s ability to survive ripped from them mid or late career (how come nobody talks about the ageism that throws so many people out of work?), it causes one to assess their situation and life. It is literally an existential catastrophe, never mind “threat”.

I was a teen during the bloodbath that was the manufacturing outsourcing. Millions of jobs - people - destroyed when the steel, mining, textile, furniture, and manufacturing industries were unceremoniously obliterated in the name of profit. Whole regions went through the equivalent of a depression for years during the decade of “greed is good”. I saw the fiasco of “job retraining” and the humiliation of workers 40 to 60 years old who couldn’t go back to college and train for a professional job, and those who did and still couldn’t get a job.

It was hell. I was in Pennsylvania. I know. We’re going through that right now. I’m going through that right now. I know what comes next and what my chances are. Thank goodness for me that I knew something like this would eventually happen and saved as much as I could for my whole career. I have just enough saved that I can scrape by - IF the stock/bond market doesn’t crash soon (and it will). I knew I would see Social Security collapse (and It is scheduled to do that two years before my “scheduled” retirement). Sure, it will limp along, paying 70% of what was promised - for a while.

The issue here is not “bullshit jobs finally being exposed as bullshit”. It’s much worse than that. I leave it to you all to ponder what that is.

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

I’m sad because I was in tech, then got laid off, and I’ve been trying to apply to various other tech jobs for the past year and a half, but my application never gets accepted.

So basically, because entry and mid-level IT jobs have gone the way of the dodo.

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