I started my IT career in 2011, I have enjoyed it, I have got to do a lot of interesting stuff and meet interesting people, I will treasure those memories forever.
But, starting with crypto turing general computing from being:
“Wow, this machine can run so many apps at the same time!” or “Holy shit, those graphics look epic!” or “Amazing, this computer has really sped up that annoying task!”
To being:
Yo! Look at how many numbers I can generate!
That brought down my enthusiasm severely, but hey, figuring out solutions to problems was still fun.
Then came AI/LLMs.
And with it, a mountain of slop.
Finding help about an issue has gone from googling and reading help articles written by something with an actual brain to mostly being rephrased manuals that only provide working answers to semi standard answers.
Add to that a general push to us AI in anything and everything, no matter how little relevance it holds for the task at hand.
I also remember how AI was sold to the us at first, we were promised to do away with boring paperwork, so we could get on with our actual job.
What did we get? An AI that takes the fun and creative parts, leaving the paperwork for the workers.
We got an AI that we need to expect to be stealing our work and data at every point, giving us shit work back, while being told that we should applaude it and be grateful for it.
And the worst thing, the worst thing is that people seem happy with it. I keep getting requests to buy another Copilot license or asking for another AI service to be added to our tenant, I am sick of it!
We got an AI that somehow has slithered onto the golden throne and can’t be questioned.
I am not able to leave the tech market at this time, but I will focus on more tangible hobbies going forward.
This year, I have given myself a project, I will try to build a model railway in a suitcase. That will be a Z-scale tiny world in a suitcase.
I have never done anything remotely like it, but I feel like I need something physical to take my mind off tech.
Sorry for the rant, but I just came off of a high from realizing and putting words to my feelings.
Your feelings are valid. The “rise” of “AI” has been a net negative for my subjective experience, too.
On my good days, I still enjoy programming, but I just ignore AI, and if it is too forcefully suggested, I just blacklist the purveyor.
On my bad days, I don’t have enthusiasm for anything, but I still program because this project isn’t going to get done any other way. I’ve tried throwing AI at other things, and it screws things up so badly it takes me more time to fix it. And, sometimes it “lies” and I don’t catch it immediately.
I have a good selection of subscriptions on YT (and Nebula), communities on Lemmy, and Follows on Mastodon, and I start there when I just want to enjoy the web. I intentionally avoid following algorithmic suggestions of unknown quality (and defintiely turn off any sort of auto-play); I find I will spend time on that stuff nearly without bound, but it’s less enjoyable than what I (or other humans) have curated.
I started programming in '85 as a child. I used to be a professional Haskell programmer. I’m open for work. (All I need is vim and some API docs and I can write anything from C to JavaScript to Lean.)