Why is Everyone in Tech so sad?(noemamag.com) |
Why is Everyone in Tech so sad?(noemamag.com) |
the theory is not without flaws but it seems relevant to the topic and conversation
Noemamag is a propaganda rag for Berggruen.
Much of joy we got from coding was taken way, I can not even imagine anyone wanting to get back to a coding role to vibe slop all day long.
I even heard from colleagues that presented algorithms better than the AI slop and heard verbatim from their boss: I prefer the AI solution instead of your.
So yeah, AI lunatics are ruining tech
Eh, this is just the latest rendition. Before that we were still complaining about tech bros ruining tech.
With all this said, the demand for ever increasing profits squeezing everything that exists till it bleeds out will eventually ruin anything so even without AI tech would have reached that point.
This has been a meme in tech for decades. I seriously considered farming 20 years ago due to my dissatisfaction with tech, its nothing new.
I fall into the group of tech workers that never enjoyed their work, I still loathe it but it pays really well. Standups are the worst, every day its "what did you do yesterday". The number of hours worked are far above a normal 9 - 5.
Sections of sociery spent years telling people to learn to code and they did and they do. The issue is that for many people that just work to live and don't live to work, code is souless and there is nothing to show for it after decades of grind.
This negative outlook is not universal of couse, I am sure this site is full of people that love software and more power to them. For a good deal of us though, its just how we pay the bills and there is nothing else that will come close to paying them as well.
Now to add to the general malaise we see companies laying off tens of thousands of engineers to justify their token spend. The feeling of living on borrowed time is prevelant especially for those that never got RSU's or SF salaries
It was ironic that I was at my most miserable when working for FAANG. Allowed me to save to buy a house, but man, I hope I never have to go through one of those again.
Things got better after I started avoiding startup and US companies.
I'm pretty neutral. I was pretty neutral before too.
Things people say they want to and then don’t do is the dictionary definition of fantastical daydreams.
In 2012 - 2023, this lifestyle used to be at Google, and Facebook and everyone outside wanted to join.
In 2023 - present The day care lifestyle is at NVIDIA, OpenAI and Anthropic and everyone outside wants to join (they are too late) after getting laid off.
It's that simple. There will be a new day care somewhere but it if you are looking for a safe and stable job, it does not exist.
Many of us just wanted vaguely what the promise of a good job was supposed to offer. A decent wage, the ability to afford a home one day, support our families etc.
Maybe not everyone but up until about 2022 I had great job security and loved my work. I knew I was extremely lucky. I didn't have a crazy silicon valley salary but I was doing pretty well on any kind of global scale.
Job security went quickly out the window, with it came a sense of insecurity and the dread that most other working people live under. So I'd argue we aren't more sad than most people, just lost the warm bubble of being paid well to sit in a comfy chair and daily get the reward of solving interesting problems.
So did the people at car factories, at steel mills, at any number of places that no longer have that either.
Your last sentence is correct, we're just coming down to the reality that everyone else is suffering. But hey, tech unions are socialism, we'll pull ourselves up by our bootstraps at any moment now.
I really enjoyed reading this article. Thank you for sharing.
Imagine you are a master craftsman, a furniture builder. You sourced the wood, designed the furniture, built it by hand, took pride in your work. You adjusted your design or how you used wood based on a knot present in the lumber you got, made custom jigs to improve your efficiency or accuracy. You built skills, you were mastering a craft.
Now, suddenly, you manage a factory of outsourced workers who mass produce cheap particle board furniture. At the end of the day both the hand made dresser and the particle board one store your underwear, one is significantly cheaper (even if it falls apart on you after a few years.) so the cheaper one wins and that is what everyone starts producing. Good enough often wins, especially when cost is involved.
Some of these crafts people may have never got to the point of being masters yet either, they were working their way towards it, but now it looks like those skills may not be valued by the market, did they waste their most valuable years working towards a goal that no longer exists? A lot of these people in this situation are also millennials that are currently or nearing mid-life, hard to pivot to a new career at this point. That is not a good feeling. Perhaps a new kind of mid-life crisis.
A lot of the people I know that are excited about AI weren't craftspeople in the same sense, the process of designing and writing code was just a means to an end, they just wanted something to store their socks at the end of the assembly line regardless of how it was made, the cheaper the better.
The worse part is not only is it a craft, its a living and so even when the times are rough you still have responsibilities, housing, family, healthcare so you are forced to use AI even when you know you are feeding the very machine that will grow big enough to eat you.
Some craftspeople will say that the AI makes them better at their craft. They can understand and learn things they never could have done before. I think this is the ideal scenario and believed this at first as well but four problems emerged for me:
1. I kept getting lazier and lazier, letting the LLM do more and more until I wasn't learning I was just trying to get to the end goal.
2. The majority of my team pressed the easy-button slot machine and wholesale let the AI do everything, its practically impossible to keep up with the massive PRs and unbelievable code churn in a team like this especially with every level of management (who are not code crafts people) want that outcome.
3. I forgot how to do simple things, syntax, standard library functions, useful libraries. I started forgetting it, I kept finding myself reaching to ask the LLM how to do this or that, things I knew how to do by muscle memory only months prior.
4. You are giving immense amounts of training data to the LLM companies. Its already been proven they give 0 fucks about copyright in any sense, your code, your ideas, your products go right back into the LLM code blender in some shape or form.
Anyone reading this far that is the same kind of crafts person that I'm describing I will tell you what I'm doing about it. I'm going to starve the machine. I've cancelled all my LLM subscriptions, I've deleted the apps. I'm going back to hand coding. I don't care about the consequences. I will find a way to provide for myself and my family. I might get "left behind" but so be it, I'll do it on my own terms. I will no longer lose the sense of who I am for companies and people that don't care about me, or even humanity in the first place. Guess who's with us? Artists and Authors other creatives hate this shit too, software is a mix of creativity and engineering so its not as black-and-white as other fields but you get to choose what it is for yourself.
Good luck out there.
However, even if we accept oligopolies as inevitable, that doesn't mean the tech people cannot collectively own those oligopolies. A business does not have to be owned by just one person. Cooperatives are a thing.
Because we watched our careers go from being in service of an industry of tinkerers and designers, to being in service of the worst people attempting to maximize wealth extraction no matter the human cost?
Because Snow Crash wasn't supposed to be the goal?
Because our daily complicity in what's happening is also a daily reminder that we're not brave enough to be a Mangione?
Take your pick.
So it always amuses me when genAI advocates say things like "your job isn't going away, you're just going to be doing management" as if that is a good thing. To my ears, that reads as "you'll still be getting a paycheck, but your job is going to shitty."
Exactly this. We were (still are) complicit in our own destruction and worst yet when other courageous people spoke up we shout them down, hid away, laughed at their folly, or shunned them outright.
I've had maybe 2-3 years combined where I actually got to build something I could be proud of, and made all the red tape worth it. The rest has been navigating/paying down other peoples' technical debt and being forced to add some of my own when there's no budget for maintenance and the band-aid becomes permanent.
At the start of my career I wondered why anyone retired early when there was so much cool stuff to work on... now I get it. The cool stuff is the extreme minority of available work, and the odds of you getting to work on any of it are down to being in the right place at the right time. As for the rest of the job, I'd sooner step on a nail if it didn't come with the pay and benefits.
Sure are a lot of wannabe murderers on HN lately. Mangione, guillotines, what other thinly veiled incitements to violence are HNers using these days?
I fault the HN moderators for not following their own stated guidelines on most political submissions being off topic. "Most" needs to become "nearly all" since the submissions they allow through (or even explicitly unflag at users' request) are nurturing a very unpleasant breed of HN users.
The "no politics" rule is about not posting constant "x politician said this about tech" articles, not about banning all discussion of real-world consequences of the tech industry.
All options are good because they are all true.
I think you can extend them.
https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/51189-presidential-pardons...
Remember murder is only bad when it's not done with an algorithm and a bureaucratic process.
I got into IT because I loved working with technology, building communities and game servers and chatrooms and computers and the like. I got lucky that someone found me, my interest in these things, and showed me how it could be a career.
Nowadays though, so much of my time isn’t spent building so much as debunking the latest grift, scam, or lie. It’s spent unfucking arbitrary vendor changes that didn’t fix any actual problems but created a slew of new ones. It’s bristling at the notion that SAML, SSO, and SCIM remain Enterprise options so that a fraction of players can have total control over identity, instead of letting customers and users build solutions that fit their needs. So much time spent talking, not doing, and almost always in service of making some rich old billionaire fuck that much richer while I struggle to buy a home.
I got into this field because it brought disparate people together. People from all over the world, all walks of life, all backgrounds and belief systems and ideologies into a giant melting pot of community. Nowadays there’s so many corporate and nationally-erected fences that everyone is so carefully siloed into approved areas, and any attempts to cross imagined digital borders is viewed as suspect or criminal by default.
The technology of today does not enable, or empower, or bring us closer together. By design, it keeps us apart, distanced, agitated at difference or unbalanced from change. The stuff that fucking works - Home Assistant, the Pi-Hole, my Docker containers - are what is good, and leaves me time to deal with shitty OS updates breaking familial devices, or “smart” appliances that get unprompted updates that break connectivity.
We are miserable because those in charge of the direction of technology - the shareholders, the Boardrooms, the C-Suites, the VCs - all demand it be miserable and extractive, rather than empowering and liberating.
For a lot of folks, AI was the final canary in the toxic coalmine. The realization that this is not a noble cause or profession anymore. That we’re not helping people do better, at least not en masse, but instead making life actively worse for disproportionately more folks than those whose lives we make better.
And it’s a goddamn tragedy.
I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed.
Going online it's like everyone is really angry and tired and sad all the time, and it's getting worse every year. This really took a nosedive during the pandemic, but looking back this had been going on for several years before. Every election cycle makes things worse too.
It's just been spiraling in a very dark direction for a long time. You have these blackpill depression cirklejerks everywhere. Astroturfing is getting worse every year. Like what Bannon did with gamer gate is an amateurish precursor to what everyone with is doing everywhere now. With AI you can even run these campaigns with a very small budget.
All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. Used to be more tabloid territory but now I don't know if anywhere is spared. A lot of the focus now is on AI, but when it isn't the world is burning in some other fashion. Reading the news, we've been in a permanent state of crisis for years now.
This information diet just isn't good for your mental health. It isn't just tech workers, but they're probably more exposed than most.
Candide's closing remarks spring to mind. Tend your garden.
The way that people are described, and the conditions portrayed, have been this way for quite some time. The only thing that is changed is now there is a clearly defined boogeyman to point to that justifies it. Because the other boogeymen make the usual authors too uncomfortable to bring up.
Too inward for what?
And a lot of them don't?
A lot of people who work on a computer all day also have back pain and inflexible schedules. Hell, I'm sure a lot of knowledge workers in other countries work in places with no air conditioning, for example - not exactly "extreme" but not climate-controlled, either.
Then, at some point, being in tech became a gilded profession and everyone: salesmen, artists, clerks etc. joined in. Not because they wanted to be in tech.
They wanted gold.
For years it was working, but right now things shifted. You can no longer just do the thing you learned for a job and continue doing so, because landscape shifted. So they're miserable and they want to get back to knitting, pottery or whatever thing they want to do but not tech.
For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed. There's new tech in town, one has to adjust, and it's still possible to discover new things and pave new paths. Tech was always shifting and I suppose people who worked in it for it always knew it, and it doesn't derail them.
I noticed it most when the slurs they used against us became status symbols, as a hoard of grifters traded in their ties (remember ties?) and golf doodads for SF franchise bling and proclaimed themselves "geeks" and "nerds".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Scholar
https://andrewmbailey.com/papers/Higher-order%20truths%20abo...
"Bullshit Jobs"
SWE has negative social value. Saying you’re a SWE or god forbid anything in AI in a dating/courtship context is basically suicide.
We are paid so well as compensation for debasing ourselves socially. A lot of normies intuitively understand the concepts in that book even without reading it and either see you as evil or a grifter, maybe both, when you say you work in tech/AI.
A lot of people are going to have extreme schadenfreud as they watch tech workers take L after L. They really hate us, they want us bullied or dead or wishing we were.
Still, it was totally worth it because the blue collar pricks that dislike tech workers are even worse in so many ways. At least I’m not a shitty construction worker responsible for contributing to the pathetic state that our housing industry is in.
> The second group has an experience-first perspective. These workers love the messy middle. They value the journey. They want their organizations to perform well but as a natural consequence of collaboration, debate and shared struggle with people they actually like. Many experience-first people are artists outside of work. Photographers, directors, screenwriters, sculptors, painters, poets, writers. Many are active volunteers. For these people, to be pulled away from their economically unviable passions requires something in return: a company experience with freedom for exploration, creativity, problem solving and cool colleagues.
The first group appears to be correctly compartmentalizing work into its correct location, this is a job I do to meet a goal, how are we doing on that goal, they have healthy limited expectations of the experiences there.
The latter group sounds childish or unprofessional or at least unrealistic in their expectations that a job you do for a living will be all you want it to be. I laud people who volunteer, I do as well, I laud creatives, we need more of them, not less of them, but somewhere along the way, people need to work at the sucky starter job so they grow out of wild-eyed views that all jobs will bring one satisfaction. Some jobs are more cushy and give you more of a sense of fulfillment, true, and those are vocations in the article's sense, but most jobs are just jobs, therefore it seems unrealistic to me to expect them to make one happy.
Satisfaction in life comes from service to others, because said service drives strong trusting relationships with people, you love what you serve, and those trusting relationships mean you get to see more people and they often reciprocate, thus families (in the nuclear, community, and found senses, all apply) are formed and meaning arises as the gestalt of that support and forward progress gets us what we can handle for this-side-of-life eudaimonia.
Beyond that? That's the nature of religion and I know I'm already annoying someone with my too-strong opinions as is, so I will spare you my thoughts there this time.
1. Do I want to have the kind of lived experiences that the field has to offer? The answer can come through some introspection to questions like: "Do I have a good devx talking to AI and understanding how it works? If not am I willing to learn how to?" or "Am I ok if development has become more intense than it was — because you will talk to AI/Machine more than before?".
2. Whatever your introspective questions are, if there answer is: "Yes I am more or less ok.", then pick a goal that lets you get those experiences and hack away.
I feel this decision making is more important than ever for people who are banked on more their skill to write decent code and not much else in the recent past. And also people with mental health issues should be more deliberate about their choices.
I feel like this can be applied to a lot of things, but this is pretty much how I've felt working in tech for the last 2ish years.
Tech for me is that third variation. Sometimes you get nothing and sometimes it totally delivers (and more!) on what it promises. This is as a user and even as a provider. You take various bits and bobs and suddenly with a slightly clever idea and you've got something that's more then the sum of the parts. Sometimes. Other times it just never comes together.
I'm not sure if that makes me happy or sad. Bit of both I suppose but I keep going back to the well because you never know.
Flame wars used to be about distros and code and now it’s about how people think and opinions.
Everyone needs to go outside for a second, smell the flowers, hear the birds chip and calm down.
Really, noemamag?
I see a lot of people hyping AI and condemning it, but very few seem to be interested in working on what our future should look like.
[1] https://deanclatworthy.com/2026/02/09/the-joy-of-programming...
I flipping love AI.
This is literally what I dreamed about as a kid. I feel like we might get to witness the singularity, and that's exciting.
To live and die under cellphone incrementalism is what's depressing. I hated where we were. I love where we're going.
it's this that AI is stripping. the work is becoming systems thinking. not bad per se, but removing the small scale puzzle aspect of the job
This is a universal concept across the Internet.
If you’re on your phone all day doom scrolling you’ll only encounter sad people.
Agreed.
From TFA: "This disillusionment is infectious."
I would suggest it is in part being spread by articles like this one. If you look at the press surrounding earlier advances, it was largely neutral to positive. Nowadays, as you note, it's doom stew everywhere, and the beacons of solace are pieces like this one driving home to anyone who's missed it how demoralized their peers are.
I think you make a strong point here. I will add a note of hope.
In my opinion, besides the 'this too shall pass' nature of life meaning this outrage-focused moment, we on HN have hope here.
I've been a lurker for a while around here, IDK when this account was made and I don't care, I feel confident that I've been watching the great techies of our era and HN celebrities and dang and other mods presiding over it all for at least a decade.
It's probably my own media bubble bias, but I have noticed this trend where HN is discussing a given subject that the general public is not aware of, and it after years filters into the greater consciousness. I don't think HN is necessarily magically head of the curve, but I do think it concentrates where curious and possibly-open-minded people's thoughts are at, before internet-point-seeking/popularity echo chamber communities like Reddit/FB/Twitter or algorithm-driven hivemind homogenziers like YT/Reels/TikTok/Periscope all become aware of something.
HN saw the centralization of control with the SOPA/PIPA/encryption in public fight, that has been ongoing since the clipper chip and before, but in this modern form with end-users not needing PGP and friends and just getting to have e2ee with Signal, HN was talking about and using Signal for years before now our government figures and traditional + social media companies have talked about Signal.
Similarly, the broader privacy questions, turning off Google Location History was happening on HN (and XDA back when custom android ROMs were more popular) as soon as Google Reader was axed, people only now have learned to fear 'the internet' because of how many more egregious things have happened across all powerful web platforms.
And of course we can't ignore HN playing with cleverbot and that dall-e precursor who's name I forget, ML models and markov chains and tech beyond my ability to teach about, before OAI ever released a single product like ChatGPT.
HN still has heavyweights of each industry and titans of tech who pop by on occasion to grace us mere plebians, pushing back the Eternal September for just a few happy moments (looking at you BWK, Walter Bright, and other famous names I can't rattle off) to share with us what happened 'in the room'. Just the other day someone posted 'I was the guy who controlled the rollout for Apple MacOS X Snow Leopard, it was a bugfix only release no really' ... only on HN by the power of the internet do we get that, we don't get that on a TikTok. So HN has still got 'it' at least for now, and therefore I can make a broad observation.
If the HN being directionally appropriate even if getting particulars wrong is true, I'm seeing future trends that will lead us out of this populist/blackpill moment.
People will get emotionally overwhelmed/numbed to overwrought angry moments, they will want to move forward. Americans tend to be keen as a people, whatever the 'thing' is. 90s tech utopia optimism was a keen-thing. Support for or opposition to the Iraq War was a keen-thing, whatever we Americans do, we do with gusto.
So right now, we are all in on outraged doom/gloom/anxiety/this sux!! feelings.
I'm hopeful that perhaps we as a people go with a decision to move in what a figure from my current media bubble named Aaaron Renn says where there are New Constructivists, who are intellectuals on all sides of American political aisles looking to revitalize and create new institutions.
I'm fearful that we will have to fall down hard to learn our lessons first and/or learn the wrong lessons where we decide the fix to ennui is to blame 'those' people over there (whoever that happens to be). The fix to the fear and ennui won't come from us fighting with our families, community members, internet strangers, or political opponents, it will come from us choosing to change our media diets away from garbage in/garbage out (I Know, I know, you who read this and disagree with everything I say and my media diet sources want me to change my media diet, that may very well be true) that is focused on emotional inflammation (didn't we used to ban people from our forums for flaming?) instead of genuine debate and encouragement and online civility.
It's boring and its lame, but circling all the way back to the parent comment: the web used to be a homogenous unified place made up of professionals and nerds and group think. We need more diverse opinions than that, but what has happened is that the internet (and its mobile app/web/private chat mediums) has become a borderless place where people who never encounter each other have diametrically opposed views constantly, and so retreat into echochambers and don't get the media literacy experience needed to peacefully coexist with the rest of the online anglosphere without constant acrimony. Grifters feed the flames for likes/subscribes/patreon subs/etc.
I was in the doctor's office and a person was on the phone talking in the waiting room. I thought it was weird. But then I thought "if a person was sitting in the seat next to them and they were talking, would that be weird?"
I don't think we'd see two people talking as being weird. Why is it weird if someone is by themself speaking to someone that isn't around on the phone? If two people can speak in that place, it's not weird for someone to have a phone discussion.
Now playing music speakers or watching TikTok videos on your phone in a public place...psychotic!
Would be nice if people could keep their noise levels down in general.
Only poor people are required to humiliate themselves by asking every tom, dick, and harry for their opinion on if their behavior is acceptable.
If Mangione had killed the UHC CEO by being his insurer and denying his claim for cancer treatment that his doctor said he needed, nobody would be saying anything.
Yes, that person is MY DOCTOR. There is no world in which it is reasonable that my health care team says I should have particular treatment, and insurance executives get to say no I don't. Sadly I understand this is not the case, and we value money more than human life, but I do not find that reasonable, no matter how common it might be.
I also understand that medical fraud happens, but I'm not sure the tradeoff to reducing it is worth the lives it's taking when we refuse claims.
The insurers are hardly running up against hard resource limits, where there just isn't enough to go around and they have to triage. They are profit driven entities, and if they were legally allowed to deny all claims they would be required to do so by their shareholders.
No system is perfect, but patients shouldn't die to boost a stock price. And no patient should be required to fight for coverage at their most vulnerable.
I'm not going to wade into the murder tag, but is this the actual incentive? The health care execs don't have enough money to save everyone so they pick who they can help strategically, making sure to help as many as possible, or is the system incentivized to instead maximize finding who can be denied so that the company makes the most money?
Oh didn't you realize that some people actually READ the books people reference here?
For-profit claim denials should be abolished unless there's a public backstop.
No one beside myself has ever told him to stop because I think being old gives one a bit of a 'get out of jail free card ' with regard to social behaviors.
I would love for you or someone like you to happen upon him and tell him to knock it off, but alas that seems fleetingly rare.