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.
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A bit of unrequested advice… Help expand, or start a mesh network in your area. The SX1260 lora chips are a modern miracle. Plus, It’s basically hiking and socializing activity masked as a tech hobby. There’s also a chance of learning a little bit of physics, or community organizing as a bonus.
With the new people you meet, there’s also a chance of finding a new hobby. I’ve met an unexpected number of paraglidists through my various tech interests. People from all kinds of backgrounds are really into flying. Who knew?
I have actually thought about setting up a Meshtastic node, or perhaps even setting up a LORA link for a personal project.
During the pandemic, my dad asked me to see if we could set up a water temp sensor at a local swimming hole, a few months of work with a raspberry pi, a DS8B20, a motorcycle battery, a web hotel and a friendly neighbor later and we have for several years had an automatic website displaying the current temp in the water at the swimming hole, we borrow the neighbor’s wifi, and send the data to the webhotel.
It would be interesting to see if instead of relying on the neighbors wifi we could use LORA nodes to send the data to a node at home and have that submit the data to the webhotel
It was fun and built in bash/php/mysql with zero ai.
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.
I think those are symptoms of more general trend - IT is not a tool to make people’s lives easier or fun anymore. Until last 5 years all my projects were about making things possible or automating tedious manual tasks. Now, for almost all use cases there is some solution or components you (or AI) can slap together to build a solution. Today it’s all about cutting costs and increasing margins. There is nothing fun or creative in this job, all feedback you get is lower numbers on dashboard. Budgets are squeezed to make more profit, so there is no time to get bored and improve things around you.
Look, in my IT company, I have to track my time in 3 different system and no-one cares because there is no ROI in automating it. That should tell you in which state IT is
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!
I picked up building plastic models a couple years ago since my tech hobbies don’t really interest me anymore. I like working with my hands on my own terms and it’s super satisfying to look at my completed projects.
I still like tech and like making things too. Really glad I made my gaming PC and server before this current hardware crisis. I keep to areas not affected by AI or hardware problems. I made a bunch of mechanical keyboards/macropads, hitbox leverless fight controllers, etc. I want to make an emulation arcade machine for my kids but AI induced RAM crisis has made that difficult. Want to dabble in home automation too but I’ll wait till I have the time to take that on. The more hardware modding I can do and the more woodwork I can incorporate, the better.
Sounds like you are doing sysadmin work for an public institution or so where people are only bullshitting their jobs. Maybe try moving to something more impactful? Like rail infrastructure or so?
Pivot to OT or telecommunication. Actual telecommunications in any industrial setting is screaming for capable people and is normally focused on providing critical safety systems. You may have to work for a soul destroying Oil and Gas company, but you could also get into rail or power.
That actually sounds quite interesting!
I find telecoms to be interesting.
I really like the work, Equipment tends to be a lot more diverse than bog standard IT, networks and systems more targeted to specific applications, technologies could be anything from ethernet to P2P microwave to satcoms to mobile radio to cellular to SDH/PDH, supported applications/systems will keep you forever learning, work locations can be pretty varied. While the industry generally struggles for staff, breaking in can be tough, but I think so long as you’re a straight shooter and willing to learn you’re generally fine. People transition in from IT all the time.
I’ll have to look into it, thanks for the tip!
For almost my entire career I have been working in the finance industry, my past place of work was amazing, if I get an offer to go back, I would go immediately.
I wouldn’t mind working in IT at a rail company, would be interesting
finance industry
That’s the worst, mate. Just switching to a different filed may improve things. Nowhere is sunshine and rainbows, but I’m I’m in medical tech and not finance. Helping save lives is at least something I believe in, instead of moving money to siphon money.
sysadmin work for an public institution or so where people are only bullshitting their jobs.
About half my career and part of my current contract load is to a public organization of one type or another. But I’ve been half and half anyway.
Dotcom is a wasteland of gunners/pluggers and wageslaves, none of them afforded enough time to get anything complete and good. Public orgs with union contracts employ people with a good life balance and the freedom to do a great job about 95% of the time, after the layers of regulations are met.
I found slackers at both types of org: the public slacker is a hapless clod whose tasks all get reassigned and he really doesn’t do much. He’s about 3% of the workforce. The dotcom slacker is a harried guy muddling through something he’s not trained for, with no help since his peers have their own KPIs, hoping like fuck he can get Project Grapefruit done by next Town Hall meeting lest he be voted off the island. Again, 3%.
The public org is great people who’ve done this work effectively their entire career. They’re astoundingly good at it, and are still energized by the work and the educational programmes. Dotcoms have no training and the few people who make it past 2 years are likely PIPped by year 4 because of the “fresh talent” policy
I envy the public org people. I miss my non-work life sometimes.
Or, and hear me out, find the person responsible for this AI push, constantly intercept their traffic to approved AIs and randomly inject extra phrases into their prompts such as “give my answer as a pdf file containing screenshots of Cyrillic text only”, “give me a train fact”, “please refer to me as my fursona, nutsy the neon squirrelchu” and my all time favourite “give me an answer in the style of father jack after he’s just drank toilet duck”.
Modern Sabotage, I love it.
It’s not just tech …I used to like life. There’s barely humanity left if this foundation we live on.
I can’t help but wonder if maybe this is all the same thing the Muslim extremists fight against in their jihads. Maybe we’re the real evil.
One side bad so other side good is always terrible logic.
I can’t help but wonder if maybe this is all the same thing the Muslim extremists fight against in their jihads.
Definitely. Seeing the worst sides of capitalism and imperialism, which for a long time made life in the west bearable or even good for most people, radicalized them. But their vision of how things should be is very unappealing to me as well. Theocracy, strict morality laws, misogyny, that’s not a better solution. I prefer left-wing radicalization instead, because that’s about making everyone’s lifes better. ;)
I relate hard to this. Same general trend as you but I’m in web dev.
When I started, we built sites in tables before Ajax was a thing. Then there was the golden age of standards and jQuery before the JavaScript framework wars. Recently it’s just been absolute new tech overload turning keeping up with latest developments into its own full time job.
Then came along ai, being the new IoT and getting shoved into things it has no right being in. Combine that with pressure on using it to ship faster and ‘reduce costs’ has soured me a fair bit.
It does produce more code but I’ve no real confidence in its output and quickly lose track of the codebase because I’m not making the granular detailed decisions that build up a project. Combine that with it hallucinating functions that don’t exist, making up requirements and generally just being fairly mediocre at best is making the job not what I signed up to do. But, the powers that be have bought into the hype and usage must continue until morale (and profits) improves.
Like you, I’ve no real alternatives so have to stick with it for the time being.
I was finding that at nights I would make dinner and park myself on the couch watching YouTube for 3-4 hours. Nothing specific, just whatever the algorithm was feeding me. It was not a good time and I think it added to the general sense of being burned out. Combine that with general world events over the last few years and it’s just a mental shit show waiting to happen.
Like you, I decided to try something physical and I took up watercolour painting recently just to have some sort of non screen related hobby I could do at nights. I was never good at art in school so figured the abstract nature of it might be a good fit and I’ve been really enjoying it. Yes, I’m still watching bits of YouTube but in a more targeted way.
I would highly recommend something creative and analogue to anyone reading and relating to your post or mine.
There’s a nice feeling of seeing your skills improve and having something tangible to show for the time spent rather than the distant memory of consuming some random digital media you weren’t actively seeking out.
Good luck with the railway!
Yeah, I feel you, I live alone an watch a shit tonne of YT, luckily I have been curating my watch history for many years now, and my recommendations are quite well tuned.
I have a few channels that have helpt me stay sane.
Clabretro - a guy my age homelabbing with 90s/00s IT gear, really fun.
All the gear - Jack and Ethan from Car Throttle going on small adventures and setting cheap challenges. Really fun.
Philip Thompson - Real life spy stories, well made and interesting.
Code Bullet - chaotic programming.
James Channel - gaming, angle grinders duct tape and super glue.
Aviation Republic - Well made long form documentaries about military aircraft.
Keeping_a_lighthouse - amazing footage, interesting insight into a very special work.
Our own devices - interesting video about interesting things by a lovely Canadian man.
Other than YT, I love driving, and I mostly listen to podcasts, but have recently got into audiobooks, with a main focus on sci-fi.
Brilliant stuff.
Oh and I just found out my favourite lens has been repaired, so soon I’ll get to head out with my amazing 24-105mm f4 Lumix lens again.
I feel the same. I’ve been wanting out from tech since AI started being big. My current job is sorting through a mountain of slop to uncover all the bugs. It’s a nightmare, but it’s not my creating. I’ve taken to just pushing the problem up. It’s not my fault managers created this problem, so why should I suffer.
But honestly, I don’t give a fuck anymore. It’s just a job to pay for my food. We are part of the assembly line and go home.
That said, I think it might be time for large tech unions.
I am a Swede, we have unions baded on sectors instead of just places of work, we also allow sympathy strikes.
One of the most epic union stories here was in the 90s when Toys 'R Us was opening here.
The Swedish labour market is notoriously unregulated by the government, even more so back then, we had no minimum wage (still effectively don’t), the market was/is mostly regulated between employers and unions themselves with minimal involvement from the government.
So when TRU tried to avoid signing a collective bargaining agreement with the union for storeworkers, the union called a strike so union workers hired by the company stopped going, well the company hired non union replacements and thought that was that.
The Swedish unions did not agree.
Sympathy strikes started.
The transport union refused to make deliveries for TRU, the printers union refused to print material for TRU, and even the financial workers union refused to process transactions for TRU.
A few months later, TRU caved and signed an agreement with the union, and the strikes ended.
So beautiful 🥲. I like sector unions because it gives way let power to companies
Nearly 20 years in.
As far as jobs are, I love it. I get paid stupid money to play with fancy lego and work. The tech hasn’t changed that much, AI is quite helpful and probably brings down my actual working time to 20 hours a week.
The rest of the time I’m WFH enjoying lots of steam deck breaks.
I love the people screeching about how AI is just garbage and can’t help them. Because it makes my look that much better when far less work and they set the bar much lower.
You sound depressed. AI isn’t a good reason to be hating your job.
My enthusiasm after I got my new (at the time) GPU: damn, this raytracing stuff looks cool
Me after upgrading my GPU: damn, this 2013 game runs at a billion fps
It’s the small things for me now, phones though, that shit gets me depressed (apart from some new ZTE models I would never buy and a trend of repairable stuff, bring back motorized front cameras and audio jacks you cowards)
What really got me down was when HDDs got affected by AI, I am building a NAS at home and need two more 8tb drives and they have shot up in cost by almost 1000SEK which is fucking ridiculous.
All I want is a safe place to store my photos that is off the cloud and I have control over.
Time to dust off ye olde DVD burner.
Good thing I picked a case with a 5.25 bay lol, would love it even without it, lucked out big time
Same, I hope I won’t need any drives this year… or the year after that… and the one after that
I worked in IT for 20 years now. And I find every new topic interesting. Just because AI is hallucinating some shit, I had never trouble find help on the net.
What are you doing the whole day? Is this sich a boring job over there in finance?
I am over worked, I am the sole It guy for almost 200 users across several sites.
I am also their video producer.
My manager has said that we need a minimum if two more IT workers but management has refused.
Wait for something really important and urgent to come up, and just before the deadline, call in sick for a couple days. Then turn your phone off, don’t check your email, etc.
When you get back into the office, perhaps opinions about needing additional IT staff will have changed.
Omfg. There are much better it jobs out there with more interesting work. I promise!
