Do I belong in tech anymore?

coinfused

I think a lot of people relate with this but kind of sit with this silently for reasons the author mentioned: “ Would initiating these discussions result in interpersonal stress? Should I just let things slide? Would I become known as a “difficult” coworker for pushing back on AI use? Does any of it really matter? Does anyone really care? “

brewcejener

Thank you for writing this. I didn't realize it, but I feel a lot more of this than I thought.

Paul-Craft

I'm asking myself the same question for a different reason: nobody will even interview me. I've been out of work for a while. Savings are running out. I apparently don't even know how to look for a job anymore.

baCist

I see this as a temporary phase driven by AI hype. In the long run, strong senior specialists — in design, development, and other IT fields — will likely be more valuable than ever. Meanwhile, those who rely entirely on AI without developing fundamentals may never reach that level. AI isn’t really capable of creating truly complex solutions or top-tier UI/UX — it mostly recombines existing ideas. So it’s probably better to focus on your craft and avoid burnout — that’s what will matter.

coffeebeqn

The worst part so far has been some people have Claude write tickets and they don’t check what the very detailed piece of crap ticket says. Just tell me the few pieces of true knowledge you know rather than a full page of AI slop that has multiple errors in it that causes me to waste hours trying to figure out what’s true

cbreynoldson

No comment on the ethics; however, I think when people's instincts to survive kick in, many of these larger goals get sidelined. There's a growing belief that it's now or never as far as accumulating wealth, securing a house, etc. go because people think once AGI comes their chances of having the lives they want will diminish. The bay area has only gotten more expensive to live in, and that's where all of the AI folks are, so no surprise. I think in general, if it were cheaper to live, we would see a shift in priorities, what people focus on, etc. More art, less grift. Genuinely good people get caught up in rat races trying to reach their ceiling while they can. If they didn't feel that pressure, maybe they'd be doing something else.

imiric

This resonates a lot with me. Long breaks help. Take your mind off of things that bothered you. Do things you enjoy. Which may include tech work, but on your own terms. I wouldn't be surprised if you decide to not go back. The status quo of most organizations is grim. But there are still people who care about the same things as you. You can seek them out and work together, much like you did 15 years ago. This is more difficult now among the noise, but you can tune that out. The industry will never recover altogether, but this current period is a blip of high insanity, which will subside in a few years. Good luck!

LVB

Can definitely relate. It is no more complicated than I really enjoyed designing and writing code by hand, and get very little joy out of agentic processes. I use the tools and see the velocity increase, but it has just become… bland work. I completely get others’ excitement around the tools and the newfound “super powers”, but it hasn’t much resonated with me. That’s ok! I was fascinated by coding when many others weren’t and found a great career as a result. A different cohort will love Development 2.0.

erentz

The way AI is being used feels like it is proving that, in many orgs, what has always mattered has been the appearance of work, not results of work. Will we wake up in a few years and find out we’ve fired all the doers and are now overloaded with the fakers?

casey2

This happened once with open sores now this behavior has turned up to 11. People taking dependencies they don't even know what, full of incorrect code, vulns intentionally or not, delegate everything take no responsibility.

somesortofthing

Obviously the author's experience is a nightmare but what was this place like pre-AI ? I have a hard time believing people who are this willing to hand over all of their thinking to LLMs were doing anything productive beforehand.

dgb23

> 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. I feel like this is a very profound insight. Of course processes like this can become about the immediate utility. Reviewing is then checking work so, it can be merged and used. But the process is more about us than the code. And we lose the deeper part when we only care about the superficial one.

AbbeFaria

I work at MSFT and I feel burnt out too and am in a similar situation where I feel like resigning would be better for my mental health but AI isn’t a big contributing factor. I do have some arguments against speculative uses of AI though. Experimenting with speculative uses is fine, technological breakthroughs require lot of iterations and some would naturally never make it but with the enormous amounts of capex that companies are investing, these have to impact the top line and eventually the bottom line as well. I just don’t see that happening now, I could be wrong. 1. To me speculative uses of AI like meeting notes summarisers seem to add little value if at all. First off, most meetings are performative work especially at big companies. Add to this, when someone just casually pastes the meeting notes from an AI summary and asks the meeting organiser to “pls check for correctness”, my blood just boils. Are we spending billions of dollars of capex for this ? 2. Every team builds their own “agent” for diagnosing incidents which is announced to huge fanfare but people rarely end up using it irl. 3. Devs and PMs chasing “volume” of work. You prompt GPT for an issue and it is bound to give you pages of text that you can use to show how much of output you can churn. I have seen excessively verbose design docs that only the writer (and prompter) could understand and all this was accepted because “Hey, I caused AI for this and it must be good”. There are legit uses of AI and I do have a 20$ Claude subscription which I like and use but at big companies they are shoving AI into every nook and cranny hoping it shows up in the top line and bottom line and so far it doesn’t add up. Lot of these uses are driven by fear, by repeated exhortations from upper management about shoving AI into every nook and cranny when they are just as much clueless as us. People’s mortgages, their children’s education and their retirement, in short their whole livelihoods are at stake even more so when companies will happily lay off workers without a second thought. So people have to use AI even when it adds questionable value, if at all. I don’t want to and am not an AI Luddite and am happy to use AI to become a better developer but most current use cases seem to add questionable value.