I know it is my own fault for neglecting my health and relationships, but I can't help but feel this career makes the most important things more difficult.
Everything has this arc.
A civil engineer who signed on at a firm that did sewers, culverts and irrigation in 1970s was doing real work his customers wanted to pay for because they had water that needed to be elsewhere.
By 2000 the bulk of his trade was providing compliance solutions for customers who didn't want it, it didn't provide value for and were just doing it to check a box and get permission from the government to do the thing they actually wanted.
Maybe instead of engineering, you’ve been subtly shifted into project management and hate that career.
But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.
There's more toxicity, more waterfall, more authoritarianism, less autonomy, more pressure. Consequently lower productivity, too.
Sometimes AI is just the label that gets slapped on "all the ways the tech industry has changed over the last 3 years".
No exec wants to chalk up a layoff to a faltering company that can't grow sales even if it's not their fault.
Even when AI couldn't write a line of code to save its life, I watched this company push out its strongest engineering talent to replace a series of well-constructed codebases with subhuman AI slop. They hired a wrecking crew of managers and engineers who were incentivized to ram the AI slop through as quickly as possible.
I’m genuinely curious about your perspective as I have almost the diametrically opposite view. I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally. The speed makes me feel, sometimes, almost superhuman.
Do you take emotional ownership in the shape output artifact itself, or merely that it works?
The output, in my case, feels just as mine as the toppings I tell my local pizza store to add to whatever they're about to cook for me. It's tasty, and fills my stomach, but I didn't make it. I ordered it.
A lot of my job is really pizzas. Massive scale pizzas but still pizzas. God I hate making pizzas. Now I don’t really have to. That means I can focus more on a perfect burger. Or cooking a massive brunch for a crowd of friends. (Think: refactoring some giant hole that 5 years of pizza dug us, or rearchitecting an application rather than just porting it).
I’m definitely in the vocation not job position. I would do this even if we got post-scarcity utopia tomorrow.
I just remembered I used to make pizzas in college if they were short and I drew the short straw. Fuck me that was soul destroying. Much better to be working the bar.
For the production stuff I still learn and watch it more closely.
Yes, and it lead to ruin before llms were viable.
All these "Working in IT isn't stressful at all - John 25yo" memes didn't come come from nothing.
But I wouldn't really put it on LLMs/AI. It was always like this. Jokes about how hopeless development cycle is, and how everybody have impostor syndrome etc.
I think it's pretty strongly related, honestly
With coding, so far it has really pushed the use-case for English too and people have reverted back to using language for its more conventional patterns. Coders have stopped coding, so shouldn't that be a relief? If only we could stop using cars too! But code is gradually taking over the driver's seat.
Hunter-gatherer societies were very advanced in many ways just by being in tune with natural processes in order to support life. They didn't even need to drive cars! Long-live the camp fire!
And i don't even mean predatory ones, like Uber -> highstreet robbery, grabbing capital from taxicab medallion owners. This too, is progress, and makes lives of humanity overall, better.
Positive civilisational impact of an invention can be directly measured by number of people it put out of work. Harmful inventions usually don't do that. I can't think of anyone who lost a job because a nuclear bomb was invented.