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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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.
Id take it for minimum wage if there was a job here just to be doing something new and interesting.
Well, I have no intention of hitting CTO/CISO, so no goat farming for me
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
I have been getting into tech, but like ESP32s, Home Assistant, and fucking with old hardware. I’m building a 24 channel light controller with a custom remote right now.
I can honestly say that I dread the future of tech, and the goat farm thing sounds really appealing.
I went to a local store the other day and saw 2 new flock cameras that went up. There was one person manning 8 self checkout stations, and there was a camera watching me scan and bag my own stuff while displaying a live feed of me. I hopped in my car, which automatically turned on GPS and then my phone started giving me “helpful” suggestions like " have you tried out this restaurant nearby?" and “it’s been a while since you’ve been to the pet store to get stuff”. I suddenly felt like a boiled frog, because I don’t remember turning any of that shit on, or being notified about it being turned on, or seeing info about new surveillance cameras going up in the community. At this point, I want to buy some land in the middle of fucking nowhere and disconnect from all that shit, and I legitimately had a low-level panic about all of it.
We should start a community of like-minded individuals who live in the middle of nowhere, prefer simplicity, and communicate through dialup. The dialup thing solely because it’s easy to set up and has a low enough speed to avoid the mess the worlds turned into
“Community” and “Like-minded individuals” are mutually exclusive for my shut-in antisocial ass.
I can relate. I have been in tech for about 30 years now and have never been less interested in it. I used to love learning and implementing new things, and now I’d rather not. I think part of it is the changing landscape for tech but a lot of it is just me. I’m not really playing video games anymore, don’t read the tech-based posts on Lemmy or videos on any of the creator platforms. I don’t care about upgrading my devices, it just seems like a waste of money to drop $1000 on an incremental upgrade and AI that I don’t want.
Part of it is that I’ve just reached an age where I’m starting to think about what I have done, what I haven’t done and what I’m going to leave behind and what I’m leaving behind is game consoles and a collection of cables that I’ll never use. So, I’ve decided to move on. I’m volunteering at a local living history museum where we are restoring the waterway of a late 1700s grist and woolen mill, rebuilding and preserving something that the community can enjoy long after I’m gone. I’m also learning how to make things. I’m learning woodworking to start making shaker-style furniture and how to process wool and crochet. I’m crocheting a nice wool blanket for my wife so she has something tangible to remember me by if I’m lucky enough to go first. What woodworking tools I don’t have, I’m making. I’ve made a mallet, marking gauge, shooting board, and am just finishing a turning saw that I can use now and will still be usable to someone else long after I’m gone.
Anyways, to close out this ramble, take a step back from tech and think about legacy. Tech is just a tool and it’s rare that it will allow you leave behind anything lasting. It’s frustrating and lonely and it’s only getting worse. Get out and do something for your community or make something for your loved ones. Find the ability to take personal satisfaction in doing instead of consuming. You’ll be happier.
That can be a dangerous line of thought ……
Started thinking of my legacy and
- I’m divorced
- I’ve been bad at keeping up with friends
- I’m unlikely to have grandkids and am estranged from my only niece
- I live far from my family
- my kids can’t afford to live in my town
- I won’t be able to leave a house or other inheritance
- even if one of my kids has kids I’m not sure I can run around with them anymore
Everything I’ve done has no lasting value. I’ve always loved tech and can fix the problem of the day but a year or two later that’s no longer relevant
Its not fucking fun to be on the computer anymore. They changed it and now it sucks. It used to be so cool
- Conner O’Malley
It’s fun if you’re running Linux.
As long as you stay on your local system and dont browse the web or any modern apps.
When I became a sysadmin 24 years ago, I figured the general public was still adapting to the rapid overnight advancements and integration into the tech industry. I assumed that as people figured out how to use software and computer technology in their daily lives, help desk support would practically disappear and we’d be able to move our efforts toward fully maintaining systems instead of customers.
I had no idea how resistant the general public would be to actually learning and understanding technology. We went from recommending customers avoid certain bad programs and hardware, to being forced to incorporate them into our infrastructure because the general public didn’t want to give them up.
My professional opinion was overruled many times because someone higher up the food chain wanted to use a device or app that hurt our client base or mission parameters, but was familiar to them, so they wanted it included in our suite of tools.
I’m grateful to see a lot of public resistance to AI, even if corporations are doubling down on their investment into the technology. But I don’t have any hope for the future of technology or the general public who use it daily. AI is just the latest excuse for people to not learn how to use technology efficiently.
I expected younger generations to be raised on this tech and be absolute wizards in its use, understanding it even better than I do! Instead, they were raised on slop and ad-riddled ADHD-promoting garbage apps that rotted their brains and prevented them from learning basic tools and functions. As a millennial, I’ve spent the better half of a decade teaching boomers how to use this tech, and then the next decade trying to reeducate zoomers on how to properly use tech and break their life-long bad habits.
I retired from the IT industry after only 20 years. Now I enjoy tinkering with technology in my free time. I always enjoyed teaching people how to use their personal computers and smartphones, but I can’t spend another minute on a help desk, fielding calls from people who still don’t know how to read error messages that pop up in their face. AI will be the death of the industry if integrated into everything and left unchecked. Maybe it’d be for the best.
This is my story too. I hate what tech became, so I tried to pivot careers. I did a few other things, but due to a long list of reasons, I’m back doing tech work. I’m no longer help desk or working directly for an IT department. More of an in-house advisor and consultant with light sysadmin work.
I used to brew my beer and now I build and use 3D printers. The physical world is more interesting to me than all those extra numbers today’s processors can crunch.
