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.
You must log in or # to comment.
The problem isn’t the tools, but rather the sociopath executives and the individuals who won’t stick up for themselves. Everyone loses when people don’t stand up for what’s right.
Everything is a scam. It feels like no engineers exist any longer. It’s not even just tech it’s everything. I bought a jar from a major retailer and the lids don’t fit right on them.
It’s pretty obvious capitalism has run its course. What i don’t get is the amount of people helping destroy the world they have to live in or worse—they are having kids in a world they are actively making shitty for six figures.
Then they use their kids as the excuse to make the world worse for everyone else! “I can’t afford not to!”
Well, what you actually can’t afford is to keep doing this. Quit working for these public corps. Sacrifice everything to not work for them. I promise you’ll be better off after some pain. Coming from someone with no actual education that made it out you college grads can do it. I believe in you.
And your kids don’t need large Christmas’s and a new car at 16 with private school. They do need a functioning world.
I can honestly say that I dread the future of tech, and the goat farm thing sounds really appealing.
I went to a local store the other day and saw 2 new flock cameras that went up. There was one person manning 8 self checkout stations, and there was a camera watching me scan and bag my own stuff while displaying a live feed of me. I hopped in my car, which automatically turned on GPS and then my phone started giving me “helpful” suggestions like " have you tried out this restaurant nearby?" and “it’s been a while since you’ve been to the pet store to get stuff”. I suddenly felt like a boiled frog, because I don’t remember turning any of that shit on, or being notified about it being turned on, or seeing info about new surveillance cameras going up in the community. At this point, I want to buy some land in the middle of fucking nowhere and disconnect from all that shit, and I legitimately had a low-level panic about all of it.
We should start a community of like-minded individuals who live in the middle of nowhere, prefer simplicity, and communicate through dialup. The dialup thing solely because it’s easy to set up and has a low enough speed to avoid the mess the worlds turned into
“Community” and “Like-minded individuals” are mutually exclusive for my shut-in antisocial ass.
The IT worker pipeline:
help desk > sysadmin > CTO/CISO > goat farmer
Still on help desk and can’t seem to get past it. Goat farmer is already appealing but I can’t afford it. There are few job opportunities where I live too.
Hey, look on the bright side…
Most people can’t even get help desk jobs these days.
I’m devops? Horse shit. Maybe you ain’t making 150k right out of college but there are PLENTY of devops jobs.
Its not that no one is getting jobs, its that the market is saturated and getting worse. Tech firms have layed off or off shored hundreds of thousands of workers and with “AI” the number of roles is dropping quickly; especially entry level roles.
Yep. Wages and 160k+ out of school are slowing down and mostly going away. Still plenty of the regular stuff left.
If you know TF, and container deployments you can find a job for 120k all day at the drop off a hat in the states. Send me a resume and I’ll ping you to a role we are filling for 140k.
As a senior I found a role for 210 and turned down 3 150-175k offers 3 months ago.
It’s harder, it’s still not physical labor for slave wages.
There is a right sizing of over hiring as well as everyone scrambling to find what real efficiency AI brings. It’s bringing variability.
The irony is that the subfield with active hiring is the one that will ultimately make the very work they are doing redundant.
The magic is gone and the intellectual challenge is fading fast. I saw the writing on the wall and am jumping ship to something decidedly non-tech 🙂
Id take it for minimum wage if there was a job here just to be doing something new and interesting.
Well, I have no intention of hitting CTO/CISO, so no goat farming for me
I don’t have any advice because I’m in exactly the same boat. I think finding other hobbies is probably the best option. It sucks because things were looking so good there for a while until the fucking tech bros ruined it. My problem is all my other interests require workspace that I don’t have.
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 used to make miniature buildings out of things like balsa wood, spackle, etc for D&D. It became a challenge to see how closely I could simulate things like grass, torches, etc.
I hope I never have to buy a car with one of those damn screens controlling everything.
I love Carplay, that being said it should be built to be controlled with buttons and knobs on the steering wheel.
When I became a sysadmin 24 years ago, I figured the general public was still adapting to the rapid overnight advancements and integration into the tech industry. I assumed that as people figured out how to use software and computer technology in their daily lives, help desk support would practically disappear and we’d be able to move our efforts toward fully maintaining systems instead of customers.
I had no idea how resistant the general public would be to actually learning and understanding technology. We went from recommending customers avoid certain bad programs and hardware, to being forced to incorporate them into our infrastructure because the general public didn’t want to give them up.
My professional opinion was overruled many times because someone higher up the food chain wanted to use a device or app that hurt our client base or mission parameters, but was familiar to them, so they wanted it included in our suite of tools.
I’m grateful to see a lot of public resistance to AI, even if corporations are doubling down on their investment into the technology. But I don’t have any hope for the future of technology or the general public who use it daily. AI is just the latest excuse for people to not learn how to use technology efficiently.
I expected younger generations to be raised on this tech and be absolute wizards in its use, understanding it even better than I do! Instead, they were raised on slop and ad-riddled ADHD-promoting garbage apps that rotted their brains and prevented them from learning basic tools and functions. As a millennial, I’ve spent the better half of a decade teaching boomers how to use this tech, and then the next decade trying to reeducate zoomers on how to properly use tech and break their life-long bad habits.
I retired from the IT industry after only 20 years. Now I enjoy tinkering with technology in my free time. I always enjoyed teaching people how to use their personal computers and smartphones, but I can’t spend another minute on a help desk, fielding calls from people who still don’t know how to read error messages that pop up in their face. AI will be the death of the industry if integrated into everything and left unchecked. Maybe it’d be for the best.
This is my story too. I hate what tech became, so I tried to pivot careers. I did a few other things, but due to a long list of reasons, I’m back doing tech work. I’m no longer help desk or working directly for an IT department. More of an in-house advisor and consultant with light sysadmin work.
I used to brew my beer and now I build and use 3D printers. The physical world is more interesting to me than all those extra numbers today’s processors can crunch.
That train sounds cool.
I’ll hope it will be cool (:
I’ll try to remember to post a follow up in a year here.
Ask chatgpt what the best way to go about it would be. I’m sure it’ll save you a ton of time!
No need, here let my give you the response completely unsolicited:
Microcontroller projects, CAD, and 3D printing were my model train. They got me away from the keyboard warrior parts while still feeding my love for tech and building things.
Honestly building a Voron kit felt like the first time I built a PC, where you know enough to do it but learn a lot along the way. It was great.
Its not fucking fun to be on the computer anymore. They changed it and now it sucks. It used to be so cool
- Conner O’Malley
It’s fun if you’re running Linux.
As long as you stay on your local system and dont browse the web or any modern apps.
dont browse
the webFacebook or anymodernGoogle/iPhone Store apps.The internet used to be a space for weird geeky hobbyists that more traditional plebs couldn’t access or couldn’t be bothered to fuck with. Now it’s still that, but it has a bunch of shit for the rubes, too.
At some point, I feel like I’m talking to someone who says “I fucking hate Florida. Every time I go, I spend a week at Disney World and it’s expensive and awful and loud and stupid.” And here I am, out in the Keys, working on my tan and fishing and hiking and hooking up with cuties, having no problems whatsoever.
All modern web browsers are ass, even Firefox (though considerably less so than the alternatives that arent forks). So even browsing the web sucks now because most sites are business or corporations. So yes, you can visit your favorite blog, but its still not the same as it was in the 90s or early 00s. Fucken computers bullshit, its fucken sick
So yes, you can visit your favorite blog, but its still not the same as it was in the 90s or early 00s.
It absolutely is. I might argue podcasts have kinda usurped the old blogging space (or, at least, supplanted it). But I’ve got an RSS feed full of blogs I follow that are barely different that what I was looking at 30 years ago. The 90s is alive on Feedly.
Fucken computers bullshit, its fucken sick
Lolz.
I would ssy Usenet is the only place left that gives me 90s vibes besides maybe like batMUD and other old games. I literally stay away from the rest of the web thats not the fediverse, Steam, or GoG. The woods I grew up.in has been turned into a tacky suburb.
What? Sounds like the last time you tried it was a decade ago.
I was alluding to the wider web being fucking ass now. It has nothing to do with Linux. Thats why staying on your machine is a nostalgia trip to the good times.
OHHHH. In that case BARTENDER this person’s next drink is on me.
I’m personally focusing on the parts of tech I still find enjoyable. Chip / circuit design, OS and low level programming, and Formal Verification.
All of the patient detailed work that AI is never going to be able to do, because it has to be perfect to work. I feel lucky that I enjoy this type of work, it seems to be very much against the Zeitgeist.
That sucks, that your passion for your job got eroded to this point. The z scale train in a suitcase sounds like a really cool project. Share some updates along the way.
Hey now, also don’t forget that the Epstein class is forcing OS level identity verification on all devices now
Trains are cool. I started woodworking because of the same thing happening to me.
Please share pics of trains
Building a model railway in a suitcase is one of the most random and “out-there” things I’ve recently heard of someone setting out to do. This is fucking awesome. Props to you. How the hell did you come up with that idea?
I’ve been in IT since 2008, and got into building guns as a means to distract myself from working in tech, which I now abhor. Maybe trains would put my head in a better place.
Hehe, I have been aware of suitcase model railways for a long time, probably about two decades or so, but never felt like I had the skill to build one before.
At the end of the pandemic I got hit with dual flat feet, dual heel spurs and a bad knee at the same time.
It was a bad time for me, every step hurt, to the point that I ate six paracetamols and a few ibuprofen every day just to cope, and when walking home from the bus after work, I cried hard due to the pain of every single step.
During this time, I snowed in on videos about making dioramas, especially this video stuck with me:
I loved the weathering and how real it looked.
Anyway, I got help for my feet and knee, and mostly moved on from the videos, but never forgot about the above video.
I got laid off at my earlier job and got this job, it is far more stressful, and I have been feeling depressed, so I have been looking for something to do.
I recently did some simple wood working stuff, and found I quite enjoyed it.
So I decided to give this a try.
I have a workbench at home, in a utility room in my apartment, it used to be occupied with a shit load of rum and other alcohol, but last weekend I went and bought a small Billy bookshelf at IKEA and turned that into an fairly elegant bar shelf.
(Just a quick note, just because I have a lot of alcohol at home and live alone doesn’t mean that I drink a lot.
I mostly collect because I find it interesting to have a selection to pick from.
I drink alcohol maybe once every other month, often less.)
So now I have a workspace, I need to make room under the workbench, get a chair and some proper lights and I can start the project.
