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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
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.
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.
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