tptacek3 days ago
Hi! I've been doing this since 1994 (I started in the industry instead of going to college). I feel this way approximately once every 7-8 years. What I think I've learned is that I make stupid decisions reacting to those feelings.
I've been job hunting since I was laid off last November, and I'm just over it. Everyone is unicorn hunting for X years in Y framework and if you don't have exactly that you need not apply. Meanwhile FAANG, Microsoft, and Intel keep handing out pink slips.
I still love coding, I've spent most of my non "job applications and existential dread" time since layoff building projects. But the thought of working for another company run by braindead execs that want to shove AI into everything, or sitting through another round of Becky from HR (whose most technical skill is sometimes using excel) asking me "so why do you want to work here" fills me with revulsion.
I've taken to telling people with absurdly high meeting count hiring processes and one way video screenings that I'm not interested. I find myself excited about the prospect of doing almost anything other than sitting through another planning week at some company that swears up and down they are "doing Agile."
I'm furious at how companies have decided to kick us to the curb, outsource our jobs to the cheapest country they can find, or whatever AI company has the tastiest complimentary crayons this week. I'm furious at the RTO nonsense everyone is increasingly pushing, because their managers are so awful at their jobs they can't figure out how to replace interrupting us in person with interrupting us via a slack message. I'm furious, and tired at the same time.
Anyone else?
Everyone technical has their "Did I just hear someone say that with a straight face?" limits.
Yea it seems like the right thing to do is to step away and take a sabbatical to cool down, and then remember that we like money, and that it's just part of the game to get paid.
It’s difficult to keep moving knowing that we don’t have the ability to opt out of the way our whole society works. This is a very broad discussion that I know has many different facets to it, but the grandparent poster seems to be calling out what a lot of people believe is true.
Pretty much nobody ever did, in any society, with few exceptions. "Going to America" was one exception, and then "going west". But for most people, for most of civilization, that has never been an option.
And, in fact, the whole system is stacked against us less than it has been for most of the history of civilization. You aren't a serf. You aren't a slave. You aren't an indentured servant, or bound to a ruler or leader in any way.
But I think what many people are feeling is the first derivative. There was a time when the system worked better for people (at least for white males) - say the 1950s or 1960s. People can feel the first derivative being negative. They feel the loss of something. I think that's behind the surge of this sentiment.
Even before adding qualifiers like “in America, in certain industries”, etc. You have to be very specific about what you mean by better and how you measure it.
There are certainly things that are worse now than then, but most of the time when someone actually measures it’s mostly true things were worse in the 50s and 60s.
Uncritical “this is great, that is awesome, things are wonderful” posts get a pass here and are not held to some high academic discourse standard, while “things are not so great, life is not that good” posts get responses like we’ve seen in this thread.
One doesn't have to subscribe to toxic positivity to see the childish absurdity of a statement like "It’s difficult to keep moving knowing that we don’t have the ability to opt out of the way our whole society works."
And you totally can opt out. You can go live in a mud hut in the woods. People do it all the time. But we both know that's not what the original commenter means by "opting out of society". They mean "I want to opt out of contributing to society while somehow still enjoying its benefits". Sorry, but it just doesn't work that way, and it is indeed childish to think that it should, at least as long as those benefits come from the contributions of other people.
An aside: I remember when I was a child, my dad’s favorite coffee mug was black ceramic with a white monotype slogan “Life’s a bitch and then you die”. If that made you chuckle, maybe you’re in a pretty good spot :)
Regarding “woe is me, I don’t get to do whatever I want”. No, that’s not the way that I’m thinking. It’s more that people CAN feel this way at one point or another in this society of ours. The original comment that I responded too was simply belittling the op for having those types of thoughts. It’s valid and important to address those feelings. Whether or not you can do anything to change the way society is based on those is another story.
I do believe that there is an actual discussion to be had about adjusting our society to allow for a more healthy balance, that’s not stacked against the middle and lower classes. I love my craft as a software engineer and I plan to continue working even if I make it to retirement. It’s just that the system we live in could be more kind to the people in it.
I love HN, but this type of mentality is pretty toxic and isn’t conducive to the healthy conversations that I enjoy in it AWAY from Reddit.
I don't "like" a hammer, but I appreciate what I can do with it.
I think of money as more like a love/hate/appreciate relationship. I hate what I have to do to obtain money, but I love living indoors, so I appreciate the benefits having money provides.
seeing up to 2400 lines a day in 4 hours of deep work. LLMs will greatly reduce the amount of people required, mainly seniors. erode the path for junior training and put further pressure in an industry continually contracting since 2021.
the amortization of software developing as R&D expense among many years implemented by the IRS didn't help either
For what time frame? A day? A week? A ... ?
> seeing up to 2400 lines a day in 4 hours of deep work.
Now I get it.
Lines of code is not a metric for correctness nor fitness of purpose.
> LLMs will greatly reduce the amount of people required, mainly seniors.
This is just high-grade speculative bovine excrement.
Nope. LLM is unable to reason about correctness of code, since they only regurgitate code based on "most likely to come next".
Rather, senior programmers will even be more important to check for correctness. And this will likely lead to senior programmer burnout.
One it’s a down market, the worst since the dotcom bubble. Companies are going to be needlessly selective to keep the hiring people busy, and also to get people who are the most desperate and motivated as they’ll probably get them cheaper. Being self taught may not matter practically speaking, but it's not doing you any favors right now unfortunately.
The other thing the bear in mind is - this is the norm at a lot of industries, we in software have just frankly had it really easy for a couple decades now. What seems unreasonable to you is what lot of people have to go through even in a good market.
Employers: Making it an obligation that I act like we have in house tools that were meant to exist 3 years ago, doing everything manually.
Customers: So beholden to their technical debt that they would rather pay ten times the opex than the capex to remove the debt.
Shits me to tears.
This is actually solvable but will need an "out of the box" thinking.
The box I am in has my employer on one side, happy to have made the suggestion to move away from old technical debt, but happier still to reap the rewards of a customer who will pay massive amounts of opex to keep shit running. And on the other side the customer, too lazy to have any internal conflict over technical debt and paying massive amounts of opex is preferably than directors having arguments with each other.
None of their technical debt is customer supporting. They do supply serial keys via a truly ancient aspx website but they can also port the backend component that handles those serials pretty much instantly. It really is a choice.
I found working at a restaurant as a cook delightful for 6 months, it wasn't at all fair as I was also still living off severance but it was very relaxing having straightforward work that was always done at the end of the shift as well as a creative outlet where I could do something with my hands.
The frustration is understandable but now you've got to find your new direction either a new way to approach tech work to increase your marketability and to find jobs where you'll be happier or a different direction and something different to do. You can be furious but unless you channel that into something positive it's just hurting yourself. Let yourself be mad for a while and then make yourself ready for whatever is next.
If you happen to know where they are posting jobs, aside from the normal terrible job sites because I've been on them since November, I'm interested.
I share your frustration with the fad-driven, cramming-AI-into-everything, rent-seeking model of modern software, and I wish you luck in your search.
I suspect all those great little companies are either laying low or staffed up with the glut of ex-<prestigious name> devs. Or the huge pool of ex federal employees who have lots of experience in "legacy" systems.
Industrial Controls Engineer
Chicago Dryer
Chicago, IL
$80,000 to $110,000 Yearly
Vision, Medical, Dental, Paid Time Off, Life Insurance, Retirement
Full-Time
5+ years of experience in controls & software engineering
High-level knowledge of one or more programming languages (C, Pascal(structured-text))
Familiarity with Windows, Linux & Realtime operating systems
Familiarity with electrical codes for industrial machinery
Electrical design & CAD experience for automation-controls
Solid knowledge of classical-physics (mechanics & motion)
Mechanical aptitude and ability to work with hand tools
Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
Ability to work well with personnel at all levels
Beckhoff TwinCat3 experience is a plus
Jira and GIT experience is a plus
Electronics design & trouble-shooting is a plus
That's what a blue-collar programming job looks like. But it will be a very clean blue collar.
I've never worked in Silicon Valley but every company I've worked for is infected with Silicon Valley brainrot
Thank you for the advice, I really appreciate that you took the time to do that. Very kind of you
Personally, I maintain a legacy codebase of a propietary application running several distribution centers. New feature requests, bug fixes, integrations, ever-changing business requirements mean its worth having staff on payroll to do it, as the contractor costs to do so are exorbitant.
I spent my entire career from 1996-2020 working locally in Atlanta - 7 jobs in all - until my last three jobs that have been remote.
They definitely can't pay inflated Silicon Valley salaries, but I'm also at much less risk of getting that pink slip when some far-off executive decides I'm extraneous. I'm two hops from the company CEO, and even though I haven't met him, he's quite aware of my contribution and has requested projects for my skillset. I have direct lines to most of the executive engineers. That's gratifying.
Yes, but no. I'm in hardware. I deal with hardware engineers. This part of the industry is alive and well. You might not see it, but it's there.
> Once you design a piece of hardware that works well, it can be re-used ad-infinitum, and most hardware today is really firmware running on microcontrollers.
Yes to the first part, it's just like code. Write once, then run it perpetually. Except that isn't really the case. There are still jobs for maintaining COBOL systems. Likewise, legacy hardware needs to be replaced, improved, or repaired. Old companies die, new ones swoop in and capture market share. My employer is the only manufacturer I know of for a legacy system component. They have a captive market because no one else wants to take the two weeks in CAD, and phone time with the contract manufacturers. This kind of thing is everywhere.
> So it is a natural evolution that software is becoming automated.
Again, yes, but no. We automate things as a matter of course. We are engineers. This doesn't mean fewer jobs, it means a shifting job market. IE loom operator vs hand weaver.
Day after day here watching people with no substantive activity on their account spam their endless shovelware slop projects, I just can't feel like I want to be a part of this anymore.
Edit: I did see some news thing about trying to undo/keep 174.
I am tired of the interview process. Here’s a take home assignment that you’ll code in isolation without feedback or interaction from us. Completely opposite of how you’d do the job. You’ll have to justify any assumptions you make. And if we don’t like your justification, pass.
Took 2 days on the assignment - this is kind of simplistic, not what we’d expect from a senior dev. Pass.
Take 4 days on the assignment - what took so long? We’d expect a senior dev to knock this out in 2 or 3 days. Pass.
Maybe we’ll tell you’re out. Or we’ll just ghost you. Depends on how our recruiting team is feeling that day.
Behavioral is generally where I “blow” it. I won’t lie and answer the “so tell me a time about xyz”. Sometimes xyz was terrible, and I didn’t handle it well. I know how I’d handle it now and can articulate that. Sorry. We’re looking for someone that handled this exactly right already.
Personally I screwed myself over the years by not chasing titles. I’ve done Staff and Principal level stuff. For years. But I didn’t fight for the title. So I generally get screened out of those pretty quickly because past titles don’t match what recruiting team has been told to look for.
But this is the price that must be paid. So I can work/play in a lot of different playgrounds. Keep applying. Keep trying. Eventually I’ll find something.
You can think of it in terms of time commitments. I could have applied to 30 places. I don't have four hours or 16 hours or whatever, times 30 different places. Ain't nobody got time for that.
Or you can think of it in terms of, they can waste hours of my time at the price of maybe 5 minutes of their own. This leaves them less incentive to be efficient.
Net result: They're not respecting my time. They're probably not going to respect me in other ways. So, no. Just no. I'll look somewhere else.
But I live and breathe tech even in my spare time[1]. You gotta learn to roll with the sh-t and set boundaries. I hate to say it but turn off HN, this place a hype machine designed to make you feel bad. It's like "Roast and Toast" x 1000 on here, not reality. It's toxic in a very passive-aggressive way (rather than reddit toxic, which is just aggressive).
I've been at this since 1988. (Made a few personal bad choices so not retired, lol [2]) I've changed jobs every 5-7 years since the post-2000 implosion. Don't bother with the FAANGs, its all style over substance tossing-off investors: they don't care about you at all and their top level management just want to be centibillionaires (or trillionaires).
Find smaller companies, that's what I started doing 20 years ago. I started a new job as a senior director at a 5000 person company 3 years ago, most money I've ever made in my career, great people who enjoy their work, no pressure to move up the ladder unless you want to (not much ladder for me, but the younger devs are happy to stay put without the dumb pressure to give 150% every year). Our revenue is <10B, and it is a German company so there's minimal (unremarkable) equity, but the base salary is great.
Find a company that makes boring products that sell. Mine is a stable boring company, making real-ware silicon products and associated cloud services for medical and automotive industry. Look for a company trying to grow profits at a normal rate, not a FAANG rate. Avoid the hype. Be boring. Slow and steady.
[1] also, if you're only in tech because you think that's where you're supposed to be, and don't have a deep passion for it, you're gonna have a bad time.
[2] Oh, and don't accidentally get someone you don't like pregnant. Because then you're completely f--ked.
That's a smaller company?
The biggest company I've ever worked for was 400 people
The smallest was 4
I worked at FAANGs so I consider 5000 small.
I have a completely different experience of HN than you do. There are the stray toxic folks, sure, but overall, this is one of the best dev forums--actively moderated, generally filled with intelligent comments, and often offering good advice. Just look at the thoughtful and understanding answers to this very post.
But they also have only had an account for an hour and clearly didn't read the whole post so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One time accounts.
HN ain't safe from stylometry.
The last thing I want to do when getting off of work is spend time coding and I haven’t written a single line of code that someone hasn’t paid me for in 30 years.
Sure is a whole lot of demand to show up just so from ossified gerontocrat pols who can’t provide for themselves and mock us to our faces about freedom.
A bunch of randos socialize we’re off the hook for each other, good luck! While also expecting we show up for jobs that secure their investments or they send out the riot cops. It’s a fucking brain dead social culture of learned helplessness copy pasted around office worker meat suits. An obvious, making it pointless, LARP.
Zero flexibility in human agency when too few know how to fix their stuff and need these brain dead jobs to trickle down to the poorer service workers.
You can have that job. I’ll put up with 8 bosses, tps reports and air conditioning.
I don't know your background or experience but I do know there are a lot of people in tech now who have never experienced a recession. Also, this startup image (which persisted to these being big companies) of them being employee-friendly, maverick and casual was really just a function of the boom times.
That veneer is long gone. We are now in the era of permanent layoffs to suppress wages and every one of us that can be replaced by AI will be.
I think for many tech workers, they're in for a rude awakening that they're just like any other worker and not special or somehow immune to the adversarial nature of the employer-employee relationship.
Back in 2000 and 2008 it took sa few years but the jobs came back. One might assume that'll happen again but I'm honestly not so sure. 2008 saw the elimination of a whole class of entry-level professional jobs for millenials that never came back.
Thing is, I don't think much of the economic activity in the tech sector is actually creating value anymore. Big tech are milking their respective golden geese until they inevitably die. Startups are largely just angling for a buyout in the AI gold rush that'll largely benefit the founders and the employees not so much.
Also: I lived through both 2001 and 2008 and today seems very different. During the previous downturns, life was still basically OK for those who managed to keep their jobs. All they needed to fear were the next round of layoffs. Today, executive leadership seems hell bent on both reducing staff AND griefing those employees they keep in various ways to make sure they know their place. Perks and benefits disappearing, compensation frozen, expanding work expectations, general antagonism, and so on. I don’t remember any of that happening in previous downturns.
I'm exhausted and burned out too. I'm fortunate that I can take some time away from work to recover and hopefully regain some passion for this, but I'm strongly considering retraining for a different industry
I'm happy to talk, as someone also going through the same stuff. Let me know, I can drop some contact info
I've been working in web and I really do like building front ends, but I'm very tired of being "full stack", especially when the stack is a cobbled together mishmash of microservices and cloud architecture that just keeps growing in complexity
I just want to be able to focus on one thing and get good at it. Being "full stack" feels like it's preventing me from really focusing in and becoming an expert on any one thing
There is still no demand for physics. There is a world where we are heading for another bull market in tech but there is a also a world where this slump remains here forever. My guess is on the latter. The talent in the global south has considerably caught up in the last 15-20 years in terms of skills, language and numbers.
The downside is that this kind of job is rare. If/when this ends I'll probably need to go right back to the corporate grind. I don't have any other marketable skills, nor a financial runway, so.... realistically I need to do this until I die/retire.
I'm both excited and terrified about how the AI thing is going to play out.
I'm a fan. It's obviously the future. But I think it might entirely replace us, or at least 95% of us.
I think I'm going to change country, I wish Scandinavia.
Currently working in a kitchen for schools, I will probably lose weight. I go home around 3pm, nap, and do some 3d modeling and "level design".
You are also right in that the more deliberate way to get an increased salary or position is to change jobs. Yes, it happens internally as well, but it's harder to achieve. Also, going through multiple jobs is better for both experience but also in seeing what the industry actually looks like. When you work at the same company for many years, especially if that's pretty much the only job you've had, then you have just one data point, which is to say, you really don't know much.
The job market isn't booming, though it does seem to be picking up.
-But I would caution against treating life too much like an Excel spreadsheet, too. It's never going to turn out anything like you plan, and I'd advise to critically examine wealth advisor boilerplate. At least for federal US tax code filing HoH (which is what I'm familiar with), we get >$60k tax-free to realize in long-term capital gains each year. If you can generate what you need now to live on with investment growth at least matching inflation -- and I'll point out you can get a serviceable house on an acre in a safe neighborhood for <$150k in most US states if you're willing to live away from a major metro -- you can likely generate enough to live on in retirement, especially if social security and medicare still exist. I take ~$20k/year in contract work and keep my unearned income under $11,950 for EITC purposes, with remainder/majority of my annual deduction eaten at least partially by my daughter's capital gains (she gets SSI survivorship which I dump directly into an individual/unsheltered brokerage account), and without mortgage payments, things are peachy -- I don't even spend that much per year.
I don't mean "become a professor"; I mean be a software developer at a college or university. They need them in large teams (IT department of a larger university) down to solo devs (working for a single department at a small liberal arts college—this is where I've been for 15 years).
It's true that you won't get the same level of pay—frankly, I've been woefully underpaid—but, by and large, they're not trying to replace everyone with AI, they adhere to basic standards of ethics, and they don't subscribe to crunch culture. If you're working in an academic department, chances are your bosses will basically think you're doing magic all the time and give you massive respect. Plus the job security is overall much higher. (Well, it has been. I suppose the current political situation may create some extra instability, depending on the position.)
And yes, I am very personally aware of just how time-consuming and frustrating that can be.
He was forced into retirement after half a decade of what sounded like tortured politics, gross mismanagement and fiscal waste.
Many times they said they wanted something, he would do the legwork, collect requirements, and put up preliminary PoC, it would be approved, but then they scrap it at a cost of hundreds of thousands only 6 months later and then go with the 2nd outside vendor at a greater cost doing half of what was asked with 4x more people required on staff.
It turns out the first outside vendor was lied to initially by the Administration, they asked for and reviewed the existing work already done, and said they couldn't match or do better for the locked in budget amount already paid which met the needs they asked for, but ultimately didn't use at all. This almost never happens.
Those people who initially got hired as a result of that, were laid off within 1-2 years, and the work fell to helpdesk (without the resources).
The last few years they removed the various positions he had started with, eventually throwing him on helpdesk in-person and on the phones when they laid off the student/staff helpdesk people.
This was following Covid, and he was in that 90% fatality band of age demographics related to Covid, and they still forced him to in-person work.
In many areas, there is a large gap between needing something, and getting something. They may have a need, but they don't have the demand, and that's a structural issue that only gets worse over time until it fails and must be rebuilt from scratch.
Its really telling about these type of employment structures when the public data is known and shows certain age groups are at extreme risk, and they choose to put their workers in harms way anyway.
Given the many horror stories I've heard through the grapevine about academia (over decades), as well as the experiences that confirm many of those stories;
Sure there is a great need but through decades of scandals, mismanagement, and crises they've burnt the bridges and have a rightfully earned infamous level of notoriety.
The reason the need is so high is because they largely can't find anyone willing to subject themselves to that level of organizational malice.
The competent people won't even bother applying because there is no amount of money they would trade for their personal sanity.
I'm very sorry about what happened to your acquaintance, but I guarantee their experience is not representative, based on 30+ years of living and working in and around academia.
I'm only 10 years in and currently at a science non-profit using a dead/toy framework, and honestly woefully unprepared for market at the moment. I'm constantly looking at job listings, though, and engaging with scads of recruiters to maintain a good feel for the market to inform my next steps. I see plenty of ads that are hyper-specific about the tooling du-jour, but a non-trivial percentage of the listings I see make it clear that higher-level prowess, like understanding a language and best practices, are more important than what ultimately boils down to the ability to RTFM for whatever widgets the CTO/CE is currently enamored with. These are the jobs I'm looking at. Sure, this could narrow your pool during what appears to be a tight market, but you're more likely to have worthwhile interviews. I'll apply to less intriguing jobs to avoid getting rusty at interviewing, though.
This kind of funk also inevitably drives me harder to just _do what I want to do_. What language and tools _do I want to use_? _What kind of problems do I want to solve_ moving forward? If you've sorted these out, great. Sure, this could _also_ narrow your pool even more, but you're more likely to find a high-quality match.
Finally, all of these companies foaming at the mouth to replace people with AI will regret it; it's already happening, in fact. It's happening in less/non-technical jobs (lol Klarna), so I'm not worried about coding jobs at all in the long run (not to diminish and current or short term turbulence, though). Smart execs/founders will see AI for what it is: a force multiplier, only as good as your existing staff. That said, I think it behooves devs to get right with AI/chat-assisted development. Of all the buzzy tools people fall in love with, I think this is the highest ROI I've seen yet.
TL;DR: I'm just not going to apply to jobs that don't give me "smart exec" smells, and I'm only applying if it really looks like something I'll care about doing. I realize this exudes some degree of privilege, hubris, and/or naivete, but I work my ass off and you only live once.
Niches from motorcycles to tech to music have become a punjab yellowpages and no one is even talking about it.
Google the most popular korean boyband in the world "BTS"
6/7 of my results are indian domains. What's the point of even trying anymore when ESL slop like that gets a massive SERP advantage for years now and is only getting worse?
An accountant, proper CPA, needs like 5-10 hours of training per year to keep on top of their industry.
IT? Are we on mainframes? no we moved to individual pcs? I mean we moved to the mainframe in the cloud? No we moved to individual ai on GPUs? No we moved to the ai in the cloud?
IT is constantly changing and 10 hours per day of training isnt enough and if you're caught on Y framework when the industry moved on from that framework. Then you're SOL. Not many people still got those fortran jobs.
I've luckily managed to avoid too many brain-dead execs, but there have been spells that the gig is boring.
Looking back on it, there have been very few spells in which I have not been programming, if not for a gig, but on my own to explore my curiosity.
You're experiencing what people in every other industry have dealt with for generations: being treated as a disposable cost center when it's convenient for ownership. The solution isn't individual resilience or '''grinding harder''', it's collective action.
Tech workers need to organize. We need unions. We need to stop pretending that stock options and ping pong tables make us anything other than workers whose interests are fundamentally opposed to those who fire us on a whim to boost quarterly numbers.
The people who laid you off, who are outsourcing jobs, who are trying to replace workers with AI — they are not on your side! They never were! This is class warfare, and we tech workers have been deluding ourselves supporting the wrong side.
The main advantage is that under this arrangement the people who are your bosses, or otherwise rule over that you do, in a normal corporate job, such as sales people and accountants, become your employees and have to answer to you and your peers. Technical merit and knowledg becomes the driving force, not fantasy sales pitches and bean counting.
The main downside, besides the business risk, is likely going to be lower pay. But you'll be doing what you find valuable, so you'll have much higher enjoyment at what you do.
Never felt so relieved.
I realized that the depression I was experiencing was caused entirely by leadership, not my job. No matter which products I worked on, the same feelings of depression and ultimately loathing of the environment and process kept returning.
Don't get me wrong. My employer is world-class, and the benefits were amazing, but the software development and engineering culture are destroying their employees.
A sabbatical to rethink my career is in order.
I've saved for the past 20 years and realized that unless I take time now, I might never have the real opportunity to enjoy life the way I’ve dreamed. I now have two years of savings set aside, so we will see where life takes me. I might work for myself or simply step down from technology development into a new role.
Modern software engineering is killing its employees. Global teams across time zones working from 5:00am to 10:00pm., on projects that aren’t even mine—just because someone else left and needed someone competent to pick up the slack and carry the project to completion. Leaders overpromise and commit to deadlines without even asking if the solutions are feasible. Being reprimanded when you push back and say that the solution they just promised isn’t realistic or even possible.
I'm genuinely glad that you said enough is enough. I hope you go make something rad and never need to go back to that world.
I don’t care what people say online, I’ve seen excellent engineers treated like trash recently, some of which are also thinking of leaving the industry. That’s everyone’s loss. I’m so tired of all this short term thinking.
If you live in any major city in the US, as a software engineer you are probably making twice the local median wage and should be able to build up savings.
I just came away from a 3.5 year stint at AWS - the most toxic of the big tech companies - the year before last. While many were losing sleep, overworking during their “focus”, I didn’t cancel a single vacation, refused to be overworked, and when they gave me the choice of accepting the severance and “leave immediately”, I accepted the severance without even listening to what I could do to possibly stay, reached out to my network, started interviewing and went to NYC for a week two weeks later to go to the US Tennis Open.
I had an offer ten days after my last day.
The next year in 2024, I got an invite at 7 PM for a “1-1” with my manager the next morning at 9 AM. I told my wife I’m about to be let go probably. She asked me was I okay. I said yes, set my alarm and rolled over and went to sleep.
I said thank you to my manager, asked them about the process to turn in my laptop (worked remotely) and asked about my severance and started interviewing that day - I had an offer within two weeks - staff architect working full time at a cloud consulting company.
I’ve been working since 1996 and I’m in my tenth job. I don’t panic, I don’t work over 40 hours a week unless I’m spending time learning something new to me, I don’t sacrifice my health or well being. I’ve been through the dot com bust, the 2008 recession and the shit show of the last three years.
It’s not “doing damage” to people who stay prepared. I don’t do the leet code grind. I don’t do take home test. I’ve never struck it rich in either BigTech or startups and I was a mostly your standard enterprise dev until 2020.
I mentioned my background here:
Because salespeople promised the client.
Terrible.
Offshoring massively increasing, Scrum, story points, poor leadership with no vision, pointless projects, working across timezones, different language levels, having to understand 2-5 cultures, no in-person interaction with my colleagues, haughty Product Managers...totally burnt out.
The lyrics were inspired by Anthony de Mello's observation that most of us are like people on a bus, passing through the most beautiful country imaginable, but the shades are drawn and we are arguing about who has first place on the bus.
The music and song title were inspired by Warren Zevon - Lawyers, Guns And Money.
So inspired by two great philosophers.
https://lynkify.in/album/bus-rides-shades-and-windows/auUoEfA7
Same here — it’s gotten way out of hand.
I absolutely resonate with how you feel and what you have written though.
I still love programming and making things. Fortunately, I have the means to go off and do my own stuff for the foreseeable future.
Blind people have taken hold of the reigns, and they believe that they can do whatever they want because you don't have a choice. This continues right up until it can't, and they learn the hard way that there is always a choice.
Quite a number of us feel this way, and its not just dev work either.
Many SA's, SREs, IT Architects etc all feel these things, and there is a lot of nonsense across the board both with and without AI.
The borderline coercive exploitation, and market manipulation of factor markets, are driving a lot of people to other areas disruptively at great personal loss.
This transition naturally happens anytime the personal costs of work involved exceed the pay being provided in a workplace or business sector, and these blind people believe they can get ahead, and continue full steam ahead by imposing costs on others through chaotic distortions, without any real consequence.
Someday they will the consequence that shows they are wrong, but they won't recognize it, and those consequences are real.
Let them get what's coming to them, and just step out of the way. Do what's best for you.
It sounds like you should look at taking a break/breath then begin retooling so you can do something that you can support yourself with, and just let those people who are exploiting others burn themselves down. Karma can be a bitch.
Goodwill in such environments inevitably runs out, and people quiet quit and just collect a paycheck. Any intelligent person rolls back their individual production as the pay gap vs. personal cost increases. It is not your job to educate these suka people, and they wouldn't listen to you if you tried.
I would suggest meditating a bit on what exactly drives you and aim towards productive activities that follow that path, and finding like-minded people who do listen, this is quite hard today given Ahriman's influence but is still doable.
Inner clarity is inner strength.
Have better tools made software engineers irrelevant before? Lol no. They've meant more software which meant people needed more software engineers. AI is exactly the same.
It's like saying Ford's assembly line killed the automobile industry.
Yes that is true. But now we have a situation where in 5 years, the pool of available software engineers might grow from, I don't know, 10million people to 200million. Just like every person became a photographer with smartphones. This makes being a software engineer not a great career anymore. Unless you are a great programmer, just like the great photographers. But that will be a way smaller pool than the current highly paid software engineers.
Aren't they? I work with a few people that I'm sure the productivity would be higher without them, and that is not my first team like that. As I'm not the owner, I don't care, better to get this money out of tech to people's pocket. Stocks are already too high.
The bar in FAANG, which I've been luckily employed at for 9 yrs, is to i) identify an important business problem ii) propose a design to solve it iii) implement the design yourself or with the team iv) demonstrate solution and/or real world impact.
Coding, it turns out, is the easy part, which can be done by AIs as of 2025 :)
Identifying important business problems to solve, and translating those into engineering systems is still beyond the reach of AIs (luckily).
That said, human's job is getting harder everyday. Expectations go up every f'in year. The demands often look impossible (it turns out this is how you get the most out of people).
So best of luck! It's pretty tough out there. Too many new grads struggling. And relatively few jobs.
That said, this too shall pass. I've seen 3 major downturns since 2000, and this is just one of them. Boom and bust happens...
After a few months I finally got a job interview this week. Someone called back from a previous job I worked on.
I have noticed that a lot of places development is offshore in India or eastern europe.
It's not just ai that is taken jobs, but also cutbacks in government contracting. The tech layoff wave that started in 2022 was partially fueled by a change in the US tax code, specifically Section 174 of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). This change significantly altered how companies could deduct research and development (R&D) expenses. Previously, companies could fully deduct R&D costs in the year they were incurred, but the TCJA mandated that these expenses be amortized over several years (5 years for domestic and 15 years for foreign). This resulted in higher tax burdens for tech companies, especially those heavily invested in R&D.
Here people are comparing software development with minimum wage jobs and saying you should be thankful. Ok try comparing with equivalent jobs.
Many non-tech corporate jobs have similar or better work life balance. I have friends who were recently hired with one or two interviews. Pay may not be as high but their stress levels also seem a lot lower.
So I came close to switching career, took classes, talked to potential employers, they seemed eager to hire me. But I got cold feet. I thought about my dreams and decided to pursue one of my hobbies as a side business with ultimate goal of doing it full-time. At this point, job is simply a means to end
Yeah, I have heard that one way to ruin a hobby is to monetize it. Maybe it will happen to me eventually but I don’t feel burned out anymore. I’m energetic every morning, I work hard at my current job because it is providing seed money for my dream business.
This is to say go ahead try switching industry, take classes, make new friends, figure out something. Talking to various people actually helped me figure out my dreams.
But I find that whinging that work should fit my worldview becomes dis-empowering quickly. The temporary dopamine hit from getting sympathy venting and believing that the rest of the world is crazy makes me feel like something has changed when nothing has or perhaps will. And that just causes me to feel worse over time.
It's also interesting to see how opinions of what is fair, right, reasonsable, etc start to change as the contributor becomes a manager of a team and then an owner. The individual's context can have a lot to do with shaping the opinion.
Honestly, I’m one of those brain-dead folks, trying to jam AI into everything. Not because it’s always smart, but because I don't have a choice. We pitch anything without AI, and no one even listens. No budget, no job—simple as that.
It’s a social epidemic. People look at each other. We all keep pushing things too far in one direction, even when it makes no sense. There are many ways to do some other things. (I'm reminding myself here, not you).
Bottom line: pick yourself up, find your crew, and start building. Then, lead like a brain-alive exec.
Don't confuse business with a humane enterprise. It operates according to a vague informal internal calculus, has little loyalty to staff or communities and will happily eat skilled, conscientious contributors. The utopian stuff about being intelligent and progressive is hyperbole; a side effect of a privileged class of the labor sector for 50 years for the simple reason of growth. Morals and ethics are after-thoughts. Communitas is to the FAANG nothing more than growth. As smart as this class thinks it is, it will wither and die when the corp welfare dries up.
Many people worked day and night to become a well paid engineer. And some rich founders of companies still do, coming from nothing.
also commies and alternatively-minded people
Conservatives. And commies.