You join a meeting with a coworker. Your coworker has enabled an AI tool to automatically take notes and summarize the meeting. They do not ask for consent to turn it on. The tool mischaracterizes what you discuss.

I just had a Teams meeting where a business partner added their AI assistant to the call and said that it would record audio/video for training purposes.

They didn't ask for permission or anything, just joined and turned it on. Like wtf? Where does it store the data? What is it used for?

If I wasn't forced to attend I would have left then and there.

AI is rapidly eroding any joy or satisfaction I once derived from my development job. It's being pushed hard despite its many problems and limitations, and I'm pretty sure they'll eventually be considering your AI leverage when determining raises, layoffs, etc. I know better than to voice my concerns about it, I've been around long enough to know when the company has its mind made up about something and expects everyone to get on board or get out of the way.

I don't know where to go to escape it, though. Every company seems to be going all-in on AI and I'm not sure what else I could do with my education and skill set. And it's not like my family can afford for me to take a pay cut in the current economy.

Oh I've been on a similar journey, after a year long break I'm back in the education space and things have only gotten worse.

I voiced concern about professors using LLMs to create presentations. The sloppy images with nonsense text are one thing, but it's hallucinating on actual content. Since I'm learning, I can't be certain if something on this topic is true or an hallucination. My criticism was understood as me just not being tech savvy enough for AI.

I'll probably drop the course and get my money back, I could get a chatgpt subscription for a lot less..

I've beefed up my legal insurance because I believe the only way to hammer some sense into people and businesses is to sue when their agentic ai makes mistakes. Currently nobody seems accountable for the output and that has to change.

I'm also quitting or rather retiring this year. a couple years ago I pivoted from being a contract/consultant dev to doing consultation work to clean up AI slop that various companies produced.

I had hoped that eventually my clients would get it, would realize that utilizing LLMs for end to end builds and vibe coding your way to a final product didn't work but...no...they aren't getting it. They refuse to acknowledge it.

I'm tired. I'm tired of the same song and dance with every client "hey this app we made isn't scaling and there's a lot of issues with it, can you run a code review and tell is where we went wrong?" "sure you used AI to build this from end to end via a vibe coder who doesn't know any of the languages the AI used. you need to start over with actual real devs" and nope. they just find another vibe coder that they feel can write better prompts.

So I'm quitting. I can't do it anymore. I was hoping this bubble would have burst by now but the way, especially recently, companies are fighting tooth and nail to keep these shit producing agents going because they're way too invested now is worrying. IF this bubble bursts it's going to take EVERYONE with it. Everyone. so I'm getting out now and hope my money is still worth something when it does burst.

That's a good article, thanks. The core beliefs they articulate at the end really resonate for me, but it was getting hard to convince people they were worthwhile even ten years ago, long before LLMs were infecting people's minds.

• Things that are worth doing are worth doing well.
• Things that are done well require time and effort.
• You make meaning through the doing.
• Ideas are common; effort is not.
• There are no shortcuts.

I'm convinced that the way we use AI and the way it is marketed by corporations will force us to recognize the fundamental divide between people who genuinely care for human progress and building a better tomorrow and those who either don't care at all or have a very warped and egocentric view of progress. I'm glad that what is described in this blog post hasn't reached my day job yet, but I'd be lying if I said I'm not worried that it's only a matter of time. It's difficult to not feel extremely disillusioned by the current state of the world.

This one hit me hard. It described a lot of what I've been feeling myself lately.

2 degrees, 15 years of experience, senior level title and now I'm unemployed. I've never wanted to own a farm so badly in my life, but even the agriculture industry is a nightmare (Monsanto). I'm just applying weekly in hopes to secure a job that will probably be gone in less than 3 years.

just watching humanity burn hard-earned resources on something arguably worse than arms race and dotcom/blockchain craze combined. Got to outlast it, in spite.

Thanks for sharing this. I’m also quitting. I’m exhausted. My great pride has been rubbed from me. The morale code of this society has been turned upside down, and I do not wish to keep contributing.

I went to free gardening classes at the local library. I spent more time with friends. I am grateful that I have some savings to recover.

fired two months ago for bombing out of a PIP* and I feel so incredibly seen by this article. all my motivation and passion for making the linux and the kubernetes and the cloud things has evaporated and I have no fucking idea what to do next, thankfully I can also take some time off and I'm leaning into music as well, kinda in a cover band and likely joining another cover band.

*a PIP that my shithead of a former manager put me on the literal instant I returned to work from a double-whammy bereavement leave of first my grandpa dying, and then having to euthanize our beloved 12 year old dog. and the PIP's core requirement turned out to be technically impossible anyways, and yet here I am

I feil this one. I had co-workers that used the office picture of another one to give it to chatgpt to change it to a specific style. I was feeling so weird about this... it's hard to explain, like I was revulsed by this

Exactly what I'm feeling... I don't know of any companies that aren't drinking the koolaid. My friend recently got laid off. He suspects it was because it was constantly pushing back on AI slop from other engineers.

I've been skipping the AI questions on recent company surveys... a few days ago, my manager directly asked me for "my thoughts on AI" during our 1:1... kinda freaked me out... I didn't say anything bad about AI, but I also wasn't gushing over how much I love AI (I hate AI)... I feel like they're watching me a little more closely now... I'm going to start answering that I love AI on our surveys now... 😢

I don't feel like they genuinely care about discovering if AI works. The AI questions are usually like: "Do you like AI?" and the answers are like "A: Yes", "B: FUCK YES", or "C: omg please more AI!"

Same. Been looking close to 9 months after being laid off but it's only to pay the bills, I know I won't enjoy what I find, if anything. That ship sailed 10 years ago.

Ouff, this article hits hard… and makes me rather glad I'm trying to do my own thing.

I know I'm in the minority here, but I don't blame AI for the conditions he's describing at all. I'm a little jealous that as an older millennial, he got to experience the golden years of tech work where everyone was getting rich off work marketed as meaningful and socially progressive. Us younger folks that got into tech because of that era are kicking ourselves for not being born a decade or two earlier.

As a gen z-er, I've only experienced exploitation. Skeleton crews where you are saddled with way too much work at all times, and your seniors have no time to train you to do it properly, so you bury yourself in a cycle of burn out and tech debt. Oh, and our starting wages have likely not increased since OP graduated college. So my perspective is that work for large corporations is a joke, and no one actually cares about the output beyond how much money they can extract out of shittier (i.e., cheaper) work. This enshittification of the workplace is why people are using AI first and asking questions never. I don't blame them. I'm using copilot for side projects and it's 10x faster at coding than I am, although I agree with OP, the code can be sloppy and should absolutely require human supervision.

I think what he hasn't quite arrived at as the logical conclusion of his laments is that tech workers need to unionize. It sucks because I do think people of his generation who benefited most from the tech boom would never consider that they would benefit from class consciousness (a lot of them aren't just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, they are actually ashamed millionaires). But yeah, if he wants privacy protections in the workplace to be taken seriously, if he wants assurance that AI will not literally take his job because it was trained to do just that by his company, if he wants to find meaning in human connection, he's looking for a union.

I keep having impulses to quit my job, find an old lathe and milling machine, and just do metalworking things and brew beer until I retire. The siren song beckons.

7 months ago I quit my job for this reason. I thought long and hard about it even bought a ranch. I have joined another team, but one that is pretty critical of ai. They aren't anti ai, but using it needs to have good reason. I figure this is my last bastion and I'll ride this.

It's hard having two decades of experiences in a domain I suddenly find myself at odds with. Reading about others having the same qualm reassures me that I'm not going crazy. On the other I feel drawn further into an untenable contradictory position.

Once in a while I give in. It's typically when I'm faced with a non trivial problem I realize will take me days of learning before I have any chance of tackling it. My colleagues start suggesting it or share some slop to "help out". So I think fuck it I'll study later for now AI will solve it I need this ticket closed asap. I fire up a "decent" paid model and I start feeding it context. Every time it's a nightmare. Hours of trying stuff that doesn't stick, of questioning, of arguing with a chat bot, of wading through "here are the facts" and "good catch" and "I owe you an apology". It's not a shortcut it's a fucking dead end. Then the bitter aftertaste can only be cleansed with cold hard time consuming actual learning.

I think we might need a support group for disillusioned tech workers.

If my current employer goes bust and I lose my job (which doesn't seem unlikely right now), I think I'm out. I'll have about 1.5 years to reinvent myself somehow. But at this point I can't really see myself working in tech for the rest of my life.

Real

I started my job just a few years prior to this AI boom. With a shitty company and now AI on top, I'm really trying to think of other jobs I would be okay at/with doing.

I feel extremely lucky to have been able to retire when I was laid off after 30 years at the telecom company I used to work for.

The guys who are still there have been on a roller coaster of crazy in the last couple of years.

I feel this. 5 years ago I was a radar engineer making ~200k/yr. Today I'm unemployed and just submitted an application to a law school. I love technology and I'd love nothing more than to continue working in STEM fields, but I just cant justify it when the torment nexus is the only project those in charge are willing to fund. I cant bring myself to continue letting the rich harm people with technology I make, hopefully I can at least get involved with the law and try to create conditions where people in the future can work on tech without building the torment nexus

Sounds like an opportunity for malicious compliance.

Auth is down? AI did it.

This is the sign I needed to call in sick for the next few days. This shit is so tiring.

Go to the homepage and click Samwise :D

I think the problem has always been there but now with ai it is magnified. There are always those people who don't care about quality and want to get it over as quickly as possible. Before ai they could not push so much work so their dumb low quality work was not so prominent. With ai, they are 100x faster than your high quality work. Your work isnt even seen anymore because it is overwhelmed by the low effort work.

Tech sucks now.