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.

As a software engineer I could say a lot of things that can affect the experience in a workplace, like tech stack, team balance, colleagues, coorporate politics, product/industry. In the end though, there’s one experience that I had that made me realize what can make work truly fulfilling and that was when I worked in a company that had flat hierarchy. You have the freedom and the responsibility to develop and deliver, participate in decision making from spending and product features to how many days we telework and what times. Of course, not everything was perfect, but the sense of autonomy and having a say on how we shape the product that I put all this energy to build really makes a big difference.

This has made me question deeply how in tech and in all companies, in general, we put up with so deeply hierarchical and top down structures where you end up being a cog in the wheel at best. At worst you get crushed in middle management trying to explain to stakeholders that they are definetely not better at estimating deadlines than engineers.

No wonder that most people try to find meaning and fulfillment in open source projects or other activities. It would be interesting to see us putting that energy in changing our main workplace.

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.

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

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.

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

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”

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.

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.

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

Reminds me of the Lying Flat movment in China. People saying F it to careers and just live as basic as possible.