Similar trajectory for me, but I’m now being micromanaged on the daily. We got a new CIO recently who is micromanaging his direct reports and our culture has evaporated overnight. The shit is indeed rolling down hill and the writing is on the wall to leave. I know it’s not just me either. There will be an exodus when rates get cut and hiring picks up again. This place is fucked.

But that’s the key. If you can find something and lay low with minimal annoyance, hang onto that for as long as you can.

For me it’s the “Stop responding” button. Sometimes I’ll neglect something in my prompt, such as the fact that I’m stuck on ES5 javascript in my job (ServiceNow). It’ll spit out ES6+ with let declarations or something like that, and I have to go back and qualify my limitations. So I click stop responding. What used to happen was that it would stop and allow for additional prompting. Now it’s just like a client side trick. It hides the output but the server is still returning shit in the background, so if I try to re-prompt or add context it finishes what it was originally saying first, then tacks the new answer onto the old one without pause, separation, or human readable formatting that would indicate that there is a new output. It’s an awful experience.

I’ve been using perplexity.ai but my company thinks its agreements will stop Microsoft from training their AIs on our proprietary data, so I have to be more careful with perplexity than Copilot.

Chuck Palahniuk leaking into my writing like the carrot out of the protagonist’s ass in Guts.

Lmao my job announced layoffs a few months back. They continue to parade their corporate restructuring plan in front of us like we give a fuck if shareholders make money. My output has dropped significantly as I search for another role. Whatever code I do write now is always just copy pasted from AI (which is getting harder to use…fuck you Copilot). I give zero fucks about this place anymore. Maybe if people had some small semblance of investment in their company’s success (i.e.: not milked by shareholders and beaten to dust by shitty profit driven metrics that take away from the core business), the employees might give enough fucks to not copy paste shitty third party code.

Additionally, this is a training issue. Don’t offload the training of your people onto the universities (which then trap the students into an insurmountable debt load leading them to take jobs they otherwise wouldn’t want to take just to eat and have a roof over their heads). The modern corporate landscape has created a perfect shitstorm of disincentives for genuine effort and diligence. Then you expect us to give a shit about your company even though the days of 40 years and a pension are now gone. We’re stuck with 401k plans and social security and the luck of the draw as to whether we can retire or not. Work your whole life for what? Fuck you. I’m gonna generate that AI code and enjoy my 30s and 40s.

A workforce trapped by debt, forced to prioritize job security and paycheck size over passion or purpose. People end up in roles they don’t care about, working for companies they have no investment in, simply to keep up with loan payments and the ever increasing cost of living.

“Why is my organization falling apart!?” Fucking look up from the stupid fucking metrics that don’t actually tell you anything you dumb fucks. Make an actual human decision and fix the wealth inequality. It’s literally always wealth inequality.

There is a vast frontier of knowledge and value to be gained in renewable energy, fusion technologies, CRISPR/medical science, systems integrations and automation, environmental cleanup, food science, etc.

These all take hard work and knowledge and aren’t quick fixes, so of course it seems like all the low hanging fruit is gone.

There are a ton of problems that need solving. It’s not the dog eat dog universe you say it is.

I used to be nihilistic and cynical for a time as well. Then I went through a divorce, went deeply into debt, became an alcoholic, lived in my car for a while and got sober and got my shit together. Not to say I recommend it, but the survival instinct is strong, and a wife and kids are a wonderful thing to wake up to every day.

I hope you can get some distance from the drugs and you might also get some perspective.

Your story is at least interesting, and if true, it sounds like you at least have the resources to improve your mindset and lot in life.

Well naturally, but I was and still am a dumb hick from Appalachia, so I didn’t understand that at the time. I’m a senior engineer now who does system integrations. I was speaking of the cliché advice given to people without marketable skills in a bit of a tongue-in-cheek way.

Is it not work to make connections? Is there no value in learning to learn? I think this is a pretty short sighted way to go about life.

You seem like you’re younger than me and also not from the USA, so I can’t understand the exact realities of your situation without more info.

I got straight A’s in school (1992-2005) and found later in life that I was learning what other kids already inherently knew or learned way earlier. My “AP Calculus” was algebra I for the kids in the larger/wealthier cities in the state. Once I got to college/university I made up the difference somewhat, but I still felt very out of place.

Grades are not the end all be all, but learning to learn is important and it shouldn’t be reduced to just “testing once or twice”. How will you pass the test if you don’t know how to study or have at least some underlying knowledge of the test subject? Maybe I’m misunderstanding your meaning.

I may regret engaging, but I can say as someone who grew up in Harlan County, KY (one of the poorest places in the USA), hard work and education absolutely do still make a difference. You can get educated in a variety of ways, and you can meet people and lean on those connections even if your family isn’t born with them.

Raging about the world on the internet won’t fix your problems even if it does provide catharsis for a brief time. You’ve got to do some work. Whether that’s learning to grow a garden and giving produce to your neighbors, or learning music to join a band and connecting to others through songs you write. Those things take work. People want to connect with others who have skills, even outside of a capitalist system.

Anecdotally, I “LeArNeD tO cOdE” instead of bitching that all the mines closed, and it’s worked well for me. Wrapping my head around coding concepts when I objectively got one of the worst educations available in this country has been hard work and I’m proud to be where I am. I hope you find something you can work towards.

We do.

“If something goes down over the weekend, fewer people see it” - my leadership team.

I guess Asia can report the problem on Sunday and I’ll get a nastygram and fix it that afternoon.

We order a lot of baby stuff on there. They’ve accepted returns on everything that didn’t work or wasn’t what we anticipated. We can walk to a UPS store from our house and drop it off. Anecdotally, they also have the best deals about 50% of the time on PCPartPicker.

It does take longer to fulfill some orders for us. But others show up a day or three early even though we don’t pay for Prime. I used to work for the post office before they switched to their own delivery, and they would drop off their pallets to us in the mornings to be taken out for the last mile by our carriers. It seemed like that was a better experience. It has definitely enshittified somewhat since their golden days.

Yes but I don’t want to type my billing details every time I need some thing. I don’t want to wait 6 weeks. I don’t know if other sites are reputable. I don’t want to pay shipping. I like being able to wishlist stuff or store stuff in my cart for later and read lots of reviews on products (I’m aware many are fake).

There’s also the fact that nearly every website runs on AWS, so even if I boycott Amazon (I’m sure they’ll miss my $100 a month in purchases), I’m still providing them money by visiting the sites that are hosted on AWS. Pretty hard to completely avoid them in this day and age.

I don’t use a single Meta product on purpose. I’m sure they scrape my data despite my best efforts to not be tracked online.

I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience, use Windows for gaming and at work, and occasionally use Google search with heavy boolean search, custom search engines, and browser extensions for filtering out the garbage. I also still use Google Maps and I have an Android based tv where I occasionally watch SmartTube.

Hell I even get Netflix included with my T-Mobile subscription. My wife watches that.

And for now, I have an iPhone SE until it dies and I make the switch to a Google phone or something.

Typing this out makes me wonder what I’m waiting for to find alternatives for this FAANG garbage, but I have no idea how Facebook still exists.