From the article: [...] [...] I relate heavily to this article. I'm not currently working in tech, but I have previously, and it was my preferred career for a long time. Well, mostly. I wanted to...
Exemplary
From the article:
Two weeks ago, I quit my job.
It wasn’t a bad job, not by most metrics. It ticked the boxes a job is supposed to tick: good pay. Health insurance. Remote work. Time off. Nice coworkers.
[...]
And yet, work was rendering me increasingly miserable. I questioned myself. Why am I here? Does any of this work actually matter? And if I stop caring about the quality of my work… will anyone notice? (An uncomfortable thought.)
I knew I was tired, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to quit. I took a week off to consider it, and told myself: if you still want to leave at the end of this week, hand in your resignation.
The following Monday, I handed in my resignation. I felt immediate relief. I had nothing else lined up, but I knew I needed to go. I’m unsure when (or if) I’ll return to full-time tech work.
What happened?
[...]
I use AI tools sparingly for assistance while refactoring code in languages I understand. I occasionally use it to help compose command line arguments for tools like ffmpeg. I never use AI to generate images, video, or prose.
The explosion of AI has played a significant role in my own burnout. Worse, it feels inescapable. Few tech organizations are taking a principled stance against AI use. But AI use is only one part of broader social trends within tech that leave me questioning whether I should remain here.
I relate heavily to this article. I'm not currently working in tech, but I have previously, and it was my preferred career for a long time. Well, mostly. I wanted to do game development, but that industry is having a grand old time and has been for decades, so I figured programming was safer, and it was still fun.
Emphasis on was.
I once wrote a post saying that "I feel like I could cleanly split my coding life into two phases: The part where I learned people found many programmers insufferable, and the part where I learned first-hand why that was." Neither of these two phases were to do directly with AI, but AI was still the context in which I wrote it. I understood before it, of course; tech fields have always had a big issue with understanding the humanities at even basic levels, unfortunately. But the AI boom has caused the issue to metastasize.
These days, I'll regularly encounter people on a few places who will tell me they understand why AI is bad – and sometimes even demonstrate proof of that understanding – only to cut down my relief with a shame-free admission of willful LLM use. And "willful" is a key word here, because I'm not talking about folks forced to use the tech or be fired. I've got nothing against them. I'm talking about people who've clearly understood the harm, yet still feel fine encouraging it by lending their contribution to usage metrics and resource consumption. It boggles the mind.
And that's some of the better things to find. Actual careers are rife with worse: Job after job where recklessness is practically the explicit goal, and understanding is nowhere to be found. I cannot imagine a scenario where I could work in such an environment and not become incredibly angry and depressed.
There's some hope to be had in the fact that the games industry seems better in this regard. Most indie developers hate AI, and many players are right there with them. There's some irony in that for me. But it remains the case that my ideal job appears to be trying to kill itself right as I was starting to develop a career in it, and regardless of if that actually ends up happening, it still really hurts.
From the article:
The whole system is broken; AI alone didn’t break it, but it is widening the cracks.
I guess what I’m trying to say is I wish none of us had to live like this. I would like to imagine a future that does not look like this.
Ironically, what I’ve gained from AI is a deeper appreciation for human communication, in all its messy imperfection. The point of a code review is not simply for good code to make it into a codebase, but to build institutional knowledge as people debate and iterate and compromise, slow as it may be. Friction is good.
From the article:
[...]
[...]
I relate heavily to this article. I'm not currently working in tech, but I have previously, and it was my preferred career for a long time. Well, mostly. I wanted to do game development, but that industry is having a grand old time and has been for decades, so I figured programming was safer, and it was still fun.
Emphasis on was.
I once wrote a post saying that "I feel like I could cleanly split my coding life into two phases: The part where I learned people found many programmers insufferable, and the part where I learned first-hand why that was." Neither of these two phases were to do directly with AI, but AI was still the context in which I wrote it. I understood before it, of course; tech fields have always had a big issue with understanding the humanities at even basic levels, unfortunately. But the AI boom has caused the issue to metastasize.
These days, I'll regularly encounter people on a few places who will tell me they understand why AI is bad – and sometimes even demonstrate proof of that understanding – only to cut down my relief with a shame-free admission of willful LLM use. And "willful" is a key word here, because I'm not talking about folks forced to use the tech or be fired. I've got nothing against them. I'm talking about people who've clearly understood the harm, yet still feel fine encouraging it by lending their contribution to usage metrics and resource consumption. It boggles the mind.
And that's some of the better things to find. Actual careers are rife with worse: Job after job where recklessness is practically the explicit goal, and understanding is nowhere to be found. I cannot imagine a scenario where I could work in such an environment and not become incredibly angry and depressed.
There's some hope to be had in the fact that the games industry seems better in this regard. Most indie developers hate AI, and many players are right there with them. There's some irony in that for me. But it remains the case that my ideal job appears to be trying to kill itself right as I was starting to develop a career in it, and regardless of if that actually ends up happening, it still really hurts.
From the article: