I have been in tech for the tech for over 20 years now, heck over 30 years as a hobbyist. I have lost almost all interest in it these days. It feels increasingly meaningless, and actively harmful.
I know it is my own fault for neglecting my health and relationships, but I can't help but feel this career makes the most important things more difficult.
> I have lost almost all interest in it these days. It feels increasingly meaningless, and actively harmful.
Everything has this arc.
A civil engineer who signed on at a firm that did sewers, culverts and irrigation in 1970s was doing real work his customers wanted to pay for because they had water that needed to be elsewhere.
By 2000 the bulk of his trade was providing compliance solutions for customers who didn't want it, it didn't provide value for and were just doing it to check a box and get permission from the government to do the thing they actually wanted.
At my job in 2023, after the staff engineers quit, new-hire engineers backed by new-hire managers pushed through a series of 5,000-10,000 line GPT 3.5 PRs affecting ludicrously convoluted, critical Makefiles designed and maintained by engineers who had left the company because of AI initiatives.
Even when AI couldn't write a line of code to save its life, I watched this company push out its strongest engineering talent to replace a series of well-constructed codebases with subhuman AI slop. They hired a wrecking crew of managers and engineers who were incentivized to ram the AI slop through as quickly as possible.
> But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.
I’m genuinely curious about your perspective as I have almost the diametrically opposite view. I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally. The speed makes me feel, sometimes, almost superhuman.
Do you take emotional ownership in the shape output artifact itself, or merely that it works?
>I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally.
The output, in my case, feels just as mine as the toppings I tell my local pizza store to add to whatever they're about to cook for me. It's tasty, and fills my stomach, but I didn't make it. I ordered it.
Ok. I had pizza last night. It was delicious. Most meals are packaged protein workout food. But I have a griddle and I love to make brunch, burgers, sliders whatever.
A lot of my job is really pizzas. Massive scale pizzas but still pizzas. God I hate making pizzas. Now I don’t really have to. That means I can focus more on a perfect burger. Or cooking a massive brunch for a crowd of friends. (Think: refactoring some giant hole that 5 years of pizza dug us, or rearchitecting an application rather than just porting it).
I’m definitely in the vocation not job position. I would do this even if we got post-scarcity utopia tomorrow.
I just remembered I used to make pizzas in college if they were short and I drew the short straw. Fuck me that was soul destroying. Much better to be working the bar.
The burnout is a separate topic, and it was always difficult to balance in this specific industry.
All these "Working in IT isn't stressful at all - John 25yo" memes didn't come come from nothing.
But I wouldn't really put it on LLMs/AI. It was always like this. Jokes about how hopeless development cycle is, and how everybody have impostor syndrome etc.
I find technology's evolution to be a continual recursive loop of "intelligence building on intelligence" to create systems that extract increasing amounts of energy from the environment with increasingly smaller input. And to me coding has now been better integrated into the tech stack. But still a long way to go.
With coding, so far it has really pushed the use-case for English too and people have reverted back to using language for its more conventional patterns. Coders have stopped coding, so shouldn't that be a relief? If only we could stop using cars too! But code is gradually taking over the driver's seat.
Hunter-gatherer societies were very advanced in many ways just by being in tune with natural processes in order to support life. They didn't even need to drive cars! Long-live the camp fire!
Well, being harmful is the whole thing about tech. Economic and technological development happens through harming people, this is how society grows. Finding new and new ways of harming ever larger groups of people, forcing them to adapt.
Why? Every significant invention extracts value by putting someone out of work. Putting people out of work is the whole point of progress. Cinema, Radio -> money made by putting musicians, theatre actors, etc. out of work. Internet -> putting newspaper journalists, printers, real estate brokers, tour agents, etc. out of work. Cars -> putting everyone in the massive horse ecosystem from breeders to vets and horsheshoe makers out of work.
And i don't even mean predatory ones, like Uber -> highstreet robbery, grabbing capital from taxicab medallion owners. This too, is progress, and makes lives of humanity overall, better.
Positive civilisational impact of an invention can be directly measured by number of people it put out of work. Harmful inventions usually don't do that. I can't think of anyone who lost a job because a nuclear bomb was invented.
I didn't use the internet until 93, and didn't own a modem until Christmas of 94. I'm part of eternal September, but I always identified with the elders of the internet.
I know it is my own fault for neglecting my health and relationships, but I can't help but feel this career makes the most important things more difficult.