- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
You must log in or register to comment.
I gotta say, I’m pretty fucking far from OK.
I THINK im burned out but I might just be dying slowly of some mysterious illness.
If your company sucked before this, it sucks 80x as much now.
I switched companies this year, and there’s a big difference between working for a company that is shrinking and one that is growing right now.
I’m fine with the work. I use AI to help make some bricks, but I still build and design the tower.
I feel like I really earn my paycheck by needing to interact with clueless people/managers.
When it comes to my actual core work and getting things done, I’m still content. Even with the pressure to “use AI”, it’s usefulness is limited enough in my specific niche that I actually still do most of it. There are a couple of more mainstream components that it did accelerate, but the core of my job it kind of just isn’t good at. I still have authority over it and how it is done, and I can keep it pretty solid.
However the phenonomenon of people telling me how I should be doing my work who know absolutely zero about my work is exhausting. Someone who has never written code or used any version control, even with AI for some reason is telling me I should stop using git because it isn’t AI friendly because he read some article and he thinks it sounds smart to say it. Someone telling me they vibed up a solution for something and sent it out to our customers and then I get stuck trying to repair the customer relationship when it is crap, and expectations are that I should be able to fix it real quick because “the AI did all the hard stuff already”. So much harder fixing slop from someone that vibed without knowing than starting from scratch, but no one believes it because it almost looks right and how far off can it really be of it looks that right?
Most days I avoid that and I do feel like it’s getting better as the novelty wears off and these people with no stake in things are getting bored of slopping up stuff they find out they don’t actually care about, so it is fine.
However, I would absolutely suggest not trying to get into this industry. It is an absolute shit show to onboard into now. I am so glad now that my kid had zero interest in this stuff, saved them a bunch of disappointment.
I’ve just seen a draft PR with 60k lines added.
No, I’m not OK.
And I’ll definitely go: TL;DR , I refuse to take any responsibilities about this.
You should choose random parts, and add “I don’t think this makes sense, can you explain this part?” or “Why didn’t you use <something semi-related> instead?”, “I think you should have done <random similar pattern>” here." to random parts of the PR. No need for it to be true or read it, not like it matters. You can keep doing that for quite a long time :D Sure, they’ll just copy-paste it to their agent, but the longer you keep that going, the more unsure will they be, probably.
Or even better, just message him that you have questions about the PR, if they can come over because it’s more things, and ask these comments directly.
If I could make 70% as much in a different field, I would have switched by now.
I no longer enjoy my field as a profession. There is no “solving” anything anymore, it’s just prompting a bot and building tools that make it better and better at replacing me. But the reality is, without pursuing a masters in a different field, this is the most money I can make for the lowest amount of work. The field is dying and in the mean time we’re taking home standard salaries.
Personally I’m pursuing a fintech specialty since IMO specializing is our last hope to survive the AI destruction. But I don’t enjoy it.
tech is one of the stem/adjacent you can earn bank originally like in the last 10years, almost every other stem is very convoluted, need wet lab, research experience, and/or grad degree(if you want to progress in a career) and tons of experience before even getting the foot in the door. nursing is making bank though, despite how bad it is it. other health field needing degree, you have to be competitive academic wise.
Yes I agree. To reach my current comp in basically any field, it would be a 10 year grind.
I’m better off just sitting in tech and letting inflation eat away my TC over the next 20 years until it pays similar to other low-end eng work. But in the mean time I’ll make above-average while working 30 hours/week. Woe is me.
I was a developer and then manager for 16 years before I saw what the industry was becoming and left, almost a year ago now.
I used to be excited about the work I was doing, solving tough problems and working/managing great people.
Unfortunately, like every company, we had mass layoffs and AI tooling mandated.
My very last year there was me just depressed while trying to keep morale up for the team I was left with (which is almost impossible if you can’t support the company).
The good news is, after I left I’ve made a horizontal shift to starting my own Indie game company. Obviously that has tons of risks and it’s own problems, but it’s been a breath of fresh air to work how I want to work, with a hope I can build a company and run it how I want to (which is not forcing AI tooling down everyone’s throats).
I suspect I’m not the only engineer who’s left to set up their own business over the past year, on the premise they want to start something small, with a healthy culture that they can hire engineers into.
I appreciate it’s not much of a lifeline, but over time I reckon you’ll see a correction with smaller companies starting up, who do engineering right and can set disruptive cultures that draw all the exceptional and clever engineers to come work with them.
I really want to do the same after years of working in the field and watching it become more and more miserable, but financially I can’t really make the leap to starting my own business yet.
As the years go by I keep learning more and more from organizational practices:
- What raises morale and promotes healthy workflows
- What pisses people off and makes good people leave, and the circumstances that lead to the poor decisions made, since sometimes it’s a cascading effect that’s hard to trace back.
- What people who play games respond most positively to ( typically a mix of real authenticity in a core game design vision rather than pandering + good communication)
trying to keep track of the lessons learned, hoping one day I can make the jump, or at least jump on board with a like minded team
Really?
Because nearly each time I point out that software has been getting so bad that I legitimately can’t go more than 1 day without wild bugs in everyday software that was fine 6 years ago, I’m surrounded by 17 AI bros screeching about how “umm actually I’m way more productive and AI has found 6,500 issues in this code and that’s great!”
Yea what’s not great is when they use AI to “patch” the vulnerabilities.
You ever try to go back in basically any industry and figure out what the fuck the last person at a job site did?
Now imagine that, except instead of intuitively being able to figure some things out because human thought is at least a base to start from, you have no fucking clue what the AI was thinking.
AI is also a massive shortcut that tugs your dick anytime you use it.
Humans can’t be trusted to not optimize every little thing, and AI is taking advantage of that.
I genuinely pine for a time when it was hand coded and I’m tired of pretending this is better
I feel like this is the difference between the people who became developers for the craft and developers who became one just for the job
If you’re just doing it as a job, you tend to just want to get stuff done, as long as it works
If you became one for the art of the craft, you now feel the things described in the post. You don’t create anymore, you just delegate and code review. The LLM code might even be perfectly fine. But you don’t create, and it’s just tiring
Im a data janitor at my job. Theres no real love for stuff I make for the job. Sure I do a good job, but I dont pretend im making anything other than take data here -> clean it up -> put data new place half the time.
One thing LLMs have done is balloon the amount of projects that exist. Once a proof of concept is made, iterating on an AI project becomes a bit harder than normal, since your not the one who made the initial product. Also management often wants it out NOW rather than waiting on unsloppifying anything.
And management has now had a couple of years moving peoples jobs to an AI project. Which means ironically im doing MORE work since there is just more code all over the place. And AI is starting to get expensive per token… So they are hiring again haha.
Meanwhile at my house, ive been playing around with my open source ebook reader without any AI involvement. Its fun to make a small change and look at it from all angles. Small changes to make something for me.
Exactly.
And it’s not just programming, it’s in every career, artistry, journalism, etc.
When barriers are extremely low, one side effect is you no longer have the passionate people as easily rise to the top.
You have a shit load of people with surface level or worse understandings of things in charge.
See the following:
Parts of Hollywood from studios to directors, nepotism and mbas nearly ruined cinema.
Gaming companies often sell out to go public or allow themselves to be bought by soulless corps, this often but not always goes very very wrong.
The music industry is RIFE with plants, nepotism, and absolute garbage music.
Now programming is opened to the masses.
And you even have people like Linus Torvalds taking what I think is a stance that likely makes sense for him, but is such a damning thing to openly say because people take Torvalds use of AI as a blanket “look he uses it so it must be ok” where there is SO much nuance.
I miss times before AI lol
"journalism, has been doomed for like 2 decades, articles are just rehashs of other online articles prior to AI, and is clickbaity. AI just does it faster, not to mention the censorship from right wing groups screeching. i assume you meant AI affect all these jobs you mentioned?
bio/biotech remains high barrier of entry, due to have physical labs, and research, but bio has its own problems for a while already.
hollywood was always nepotism, dare i say it cronyism, unless one was wealthy or have significant connections you arnt becoming an actor, or at least one that wont get you roles, aside from your acting ability. olivia wilde, pratt, is 2 known nepo people. the current trend with movies and shows, seems to insert “these people” in the show/movie where its not source material, or distracts from the poor writing. hollywoods rife with Sexual predators that hold actors livelyhoods in thier hands. AMazon DINT green lit the new SG series because the exects want the same thing as what “nutrek” was pushing out, a large audience.
swift and shareen are prime examples of nepotisms to get into the industry.
Thing is, the ones who use ai to code large segments of code, don’t usually know how it works in sufficient detail. Even the block diagram is done by ai with little oversight. The fix is simply to ask the ai to do over.
I ask the bizfolks: would YOU allow a guy in a suit with no prior engineering knowledge, but with an ai design the structural elements for a bridge for thousands of vehicles a day? What about one you use daily? So why would you allow that when developing software that is critical for handling your enterprise data and finances?
I ask the bizfolks: would YOU allow a guy in a suit with no prior engineering knowledge, but with an ai design the structural elements for a bridge for thousands of vehicles a day?
They would allow it. The difference is that our societies decided that liability for builders of bridges is a sensible thing and nonnegotiable, but for reasons unknown to me you can release any piece of crappy software to the public without any liability whatsoever as long as you tack on it some terms and conditions that absolve you of warranty and liability. This is unthinkable with all other commodities. When it comes to software, the people in charge turn off their brains.
Until they lose an astronaut or submariner who is related to a senator. Then they try to overregulate, like they did with software patents.
would YOU allow a guy in a suit with no prior engineering knowledge, but with an ai design the structural elements for a bridge for thousands of vehicles a day?
I know people who would get an instant boner from that idea and be the first in line to drive over it
I ask the bizfolks: would YOU allow a guy in a suit with no prior engineering knowledge, but with an ai design the structural elements for a bridge for thousands of vehicles a day?
For less money in less time with no liability? Yes, without hesitation.
Even in this day and age, when furniture is being mass-produced, there is still a niche for those who create furniture by hand, without the use of assembly lines and CNC.
The same goes for software development.
The downside is that you need to become the creative, the “ideas man” that can come up with that bespoke solution that AI can never truly provide. And you likely have to do it on your own, or if you are lucky, in a small company whose entire identity relies on bespoke solutions and high-quality, high-cost work.
The vast majority of software developers will never be able to make that jump, just like how hundreds of thousands of furniture-makers in the early 20th century, across North America, were also unable to make that jump. Those turning out bespoke furniture today represent an almost-unmeasurable rounding error compared to the same numbers of craftsman a century ago.
But they still exist. They can still make a living. And so can software developers with the right skills and attitudes.
Is there really a market for mass production of low quality software?
Maybe it’s just never been needed in any of the market segments I work, but it always seems like it’s better to spend 40 hours today to refactor or clean up code then to spend 10000 hours bug hunting spaghetti code. Like sure your perl script worked but for the love of all let’s actually make a project with a maintainer and a code base you can reasonably attach an SLA to plz
I’d say tech workers in general are not doing okay. I quit my sysadmin job 3 years ago and have been desperately trying to switch careers.
I moved from sysadmin to technical pre-sales a few years ago and I’m happy with the move. Though honestly I enjoyed being a sysadmin as well - from my experiences it’s more the work environment and the collegues than the actual work you do that makes or breaks a job.
I considered killing myself last night. I self-harmed for the first time in many years. My company advertised remote work. I asked if I could move far away from Tokyo and sure, no problem. I got told if RTO, then it would be close and new people only. I got permission to run a side job doing a small farm. Sure no problem.
I’ve been in this industry for 20+ years now.
Mandatory return to office (I live 4 hours each way). They pay transportation expenses per month at a level that wouldn’t cover one day. If you’re nice and apply, we MAY approve (for three months only) 2 days a week required in the office. No guarantee it will be approved. I joined a union to fight this but it’s slow. They will likely still try to fire me.
I have a mortgage. I got a subsidy to move to this small town, that many in Japan provide, but it must be paid back if leaving within 5 years. I also am a registered farmer with farm land which means I legally have to maintain it properly.
Yesterday, they said no more side job is allowed. So I’m not allowed to sell anything I grow anymore, have to close my self-proprietorship, and have to close my company (which has tax impacts on me because now nothing counts as expenses and I lose my ability to do special tax forms). They apparently want food to rot. They want me to rot. The farm was not even yet at a point to make me money. They falsely claimed I got subsidies for farming (I did not and do not) and that it’s no longer just selling extra produce (it still is) and is a full-scale farming operation (it is not). My sales were like 10k yen last year and maybe will get to that this year.
My wife does not work. There are few jobs out here. No remote jobs in the US or Canada are responding and few would even allow Japan time zone even with overlap. Remote jobs for a backend engineer (primarily golang lately with very rusty Java somewhere in my brain unused for many years) are basically non-existent. I’ve applied for jobs in the EEA but, as a non-EEA-citizen, I can basically go fuck myself. My body is way too messed up (multiple broken bones, back issues, etc.) for any really hard manual labor.
So I lose my job, I lose my income, I lose the house, I will never get another mortgage in Japan again, there’s no point to being alive. My wife’s birthday is coming up, which is basically what stopped me. She’ll have a better life without me and at least the house will get paid off so she can do whatever with it.
Living in an apartment in Tokyo would also violate the terms of my mortgage making me lose it (on top of losing a huge chunk of my paycheck) and would also make it impossible to keep up with farm maintenance, let alone the rest of the house and property.
I am fine for now. Just not sure I’ll survive any future attacks from my company. Thanks for the kind words.
Sorry to hear, thanks for sharing. We are with you.
Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum
I’m very sorry for your situation. Please do not let these fuckers decide what you are worth, and leash you.
Your wife loves you, and you are more important to everyone around you than to your company. Live for your love, and your friends. Even if your life has to change a little, that’s not the end.
make your way out of that company painful. Point fingers, humiliate them, politely. Call the media, do the drama, make them feel ashamed.
Best of luck, do not quit life, you are bigger than them.
Call the media, do the drama
Even saying 100% true things, this gets you sued in Japan. This is specifically why I don’t name the company.
If you will be fucked either way… Create a trail, try the good path first. Humanize, try sympathy.
If they don’t care, threat media exposure, Japanese are really prideful and that hurts them the most
And I assume that you (and many others) were being lied to about this RTO policy, so you’ll most likely have public sympathy on your side. Also, you can start a GoFundMe (or similar) to support you in your Situation. Be vulnerable, let the communuty pick you up. And when you’re up again, pay the compassion forward.
I wish I could help more, but the old “side jobs are forbidden” being in the company handbook is legally flimsy, if not completely unenforceable. Just because your company says so, or it’s in your contact doesn’t actually make it legal.
The MHLW states that it actually has to provably interfere with your job in some way. The hours outside your day job are your own, not your companies. Don’t close your kojinjigyo and just submit your own tax adjustment every year. Unless you’re making lots of money your HR won’t even know.
I’m sorry for your situation. Other comments have pointed out that legally you don’t have to comply with the “no side job” bs, so i agree to keep proceeding with it, and if they try to fire you, bring in the lawyers.
On another note, stories like yours are why I want to watch the entire system burn, using executives as fuel for the fire.
Better to resist and flip the bird to these asshats rather than comply in advance.
Good luck to you, keep fighting, and never give up, if only to spite the bastards
Wow, I’m so angry for you. But your wife would not be happy to lose you, so don’t tell yourself you’d be doing her a favor by dying.
It sounds like you’re in an impossible situation, and it truly is a bind, but have you explored whether you have any legal recourse? Your company set you up to fail by making promises they didn’t keep. Do you have those promises in writing? Emails, texts, contract terms, anything?
Is your wife Japanese? If so, she can help you communicate with a lawyer. I know Japanese law is very neoliberal and pro-corporation, but this seems like exceptional circumstances so it would be worth at least looking into.
In any case, breathe. Whatever comes, you still need oxygen.
I’m nobody in your story, but you’re now somebody in mine, because this is so relatable. I can only commiserate with you, but I can’t fully understand the stress you must be under. My employer is doing much the same, and it breaks my heart how many people around the world are or are about to be in similar situations.
The crushing weight of executives not giving a fuck about the harm they are causing is both enraging and deeply saddening.
But what makes life worth living is a moving target. I have, a few times, seen no light in the dark. But then, somehow I crawl back out and see all the reasons I still want to be here. I hope you find a way to okay. If nothing else, “I want to watch it all go down. I want to see the world give way.”
Lawyer up. Meanwhile, just keep doing what you’re doing. I refuse to believe living on a farm counts as a side job, especially since it’s not for meaningful profit, especially since it’s not the same line of work.
People have already given you good advice, so I’ll give you a less than stellar advice: don’t become statistics, every year lots of people kill themselves due to their work or die of overworking in Japan and nobody gives a fuck. You’re not the wrong person here, so why would you suffer by yourself? If you’re fucked either way and has nothing else to lose, do something real about it. I saw your comments about getting sued, does it matter? Bro, you were considering taking your own life, justice matters more. If you think you still have shit to lose, then don’t even entertain taking your own life.
With your backend skills in golang, is there any business you can start on your own? Do you guys have savings that would allow you to live for a while without your main work? Don’t give up, bro. As long as there’s still some alternatives, keep going. And, please, if you and your wife truly do love each other, go talk to her about this.
Contact some social media ppl (like https://m.youtube.com/@AbroadinJapan) and publicly shame your company, they broke their agreements. They lied. It’s not you that is at fault, so it’s not you that should suffer.
My family gets sued. AboardInJapan would also get sued which is why no news orgs ever pick this stuff up.
that channel seems just like an influencer? thinking how great things are. never use an influencer as a source for help.
Why do you get sued when they are breaching contract? What can their allegations against you possibly be?
Japanese reputational damage laws. You can get sued even when what you are saying is 100% true
some similar happens with companies on glassdoor, thier “Reputation” got damaged because they were posting thier unethical behaviour, and they sued the reviewers and glassdoor.
Well that is 100 % fucked, wtaf
Can lawyer do nothing for you? Or some sort of NGO?
Can you do hidden audio recordings in Japan? Record them admitting that they promised one thing and are doing another. Take the recordings to a lawyer.
I’m sorry, I wish I had some smarter ideas.
My union says we will go to the legal system if no agreement is reached. It’s just been very slow going and, at first, felt like nothing was happening.
People do hidden recordings. I’ve heard a mix of things about them actually being admissible if it goes to court (mostly that they are not).
deleted by creator
I am sorry for your situation. Since you entertained the idea of killing yourself, I strongly believe you should consult an expert or a doctor. As others mentioned: The people around love you and do care about you.
you fell for the “move to the countryside” incentive. they give you money to move in the middle of nowhere, then you pay for that circumstance for the rest of your life with poor transportation, no jobs, expensive maintenance etc.
also you went into farming while also having severe physical health issues?? really?
you are probably thinking of corporate farms, where you grow crops, abuse migrant labor, laws,etc,etc.
Farming is a hobby. A lot of it is done on tractor or seated in the dirt.
I was also tired of the constant noise and business of Tokyo. Don’t really have expensive maintenance.
If you get the opportunity, join a union.
Capitalism. The people calling the shots and keeping the profits are not the people doing the work.
It’s bad and will continue to be bad for everyone except the top layer of rich people.
I would argue it’s normalizing.
For fucks sake, the last 30 years have been insane, especially with the dotcom boom and bust.
Suddenly every dipshit adult was telling their kids, “computers are the future, the internet is the future, and you can’t survive with just a highschool degree. You better go to college and learn programming!!”
Those parents are a bit to blame with how things got. And it seemed like they were pretty accurate too as high speed internet became huge, and lithium batteries thus mobile phones…
I always was interested in programming, since before my mom pushed me into it, because she was one of those types too. Then I went to college, and I met a bunch of teenagers who said, “uhhh I don’t know what I want to do but I want it make money so I’m doing computer science”.
The first year of college usually filtered those people out. Usually.
And i’ve always said, don’t join this career for the money. It’s not worth it, if you don’t love engineering. This is the most stressful fucking job I’ve ever had, and there are tons of meetings and social activity to go with it. You can’t just solve puzzles in a vacuum, even if you like programming, and that’s EVEN if you enjoy it. You have to start leading others at some point, act like a mentor.
You take on a fucking lot of responsibility, start giving demos, working with product managers, marketers, help teach people what is possible in the product and what isn’t. This isn’t a chill gig. It rarely is. It usually involves a fuck ton of effort and planning.
You get paid a lot… But honestly, if you’re actually doing the job well, you’re underpaid even then. Often you will be underpaid compared to the effort you put in. Especially now.
Not as many people should be in software engineering as there are. I talk to people sometimes and you can tell they hate this job. It’s okay, and I don’t blame them, but way too many people got sucked into this career for the wrong reasons, then kinda now have to keep doing it to survive.
I’m glad I still enjoy it but I see a lot of fucking burnout right now. But I have to say, the people leaving the job now, some of them, not all but some, might be some of the types that shouldn’t have jumped into it in the first place. Lots of people were told they’re smart and good with computers so should make money doing it.
Some of those smart people should’ve done other smart jobs. Biotech is huge too, but I don’t see the drive to it like there was for making fucking websites.
You take on a fucking lot of responsibility, start giving demos, working with product managers, marketers, help teach people what is possible in the product and what isn’t. This isn’t a chill gig. It rarely is. It usually involves a fuck ton of effort and planning.
This is just part of jobs in general and if you had any indication it wouldn’t be you were lied to. One of the early things I remember being told in engineering school is that you will have to be social and work on a team. As soon as a project requires more than a few people then you will be working on cross-functional teams and need to work together with a variety of people.
Often you will be underpaid compared to the effort you put in
You might be shocked to learn that employers do not pay for “effort”, they pay for the (perceived) value you bring to the business. People that get paid well are value multipliers (or they play the game well enough to appear that they do). The people that work with them do more because they are there guiding things. If you don’t bring that value, you tend to top out at “Senior” engineer titles and the pay that brings with it. I’ve had to have somewhat blunt conversations with people to explain that I’ve given them a poor performance review not because they haven’t put in the hours, but because they aren’t using their effort efficiently. Working overtime consistently is an indication of poor prioritization and delegation more than having too much work.
At this point even the Futurama randomised job assigner machine seems better than our current system
its essentially like the voyager/sg1 version, where the person(of course kidnapped memory suppresed) and given a job in a sector which is assigned.
i think futurama one reads the person/mind and determines the job ahead of time.
At this point, those booths from Futurama seem better than our current system
4D Bullet Hell Game (With Tactile Feedback)!
The first year of college usually filtered those people out. Usually.
Unfortunately in my country this doesn’t happen. There’s a bell curve and as long as you submit your homework and do the bare minimum for the exams, you get your degree. You’re gonna have a pretty mid GPA, but you’ll have a degree which effectively makes the degree useless as an indicator of competency. The amount of people I’ve interviewed who couldn’t answer a simple programming question is astounding.
Most of these people end up picking up jobs as project managers because that’s all they can do. And the country’s leaders wonder why we don’t have much software R&D here.
same here in some universities in the states, the harder stem classes ten dot lower thier avg grades like D,C,B,(not As though) so people can get a better grade. that tells you theses classes are quite difficult to pass.
India?
Singapore
For me it’s starting to feel very draining. I’ve worked on small teams the past several years but now my current internal-only project is picking up steam and we’ve got a product owner and manager on board.
The amount of planning, discussing, iterating, changing requirements, etc. is absolutely demanding. I’m starting to miss just programming. The overhead is what starts to make all this feel soul-sucking after a while.
I’m a computer scientist and got into it before it became popular.
I suck at programming and have never labeled myself as a programmer. I write software to solve problems and know my way around the SDLC, but there’s a LOT of CS work out there that isn’t being a code monkey.
The shame was the number of people who went to college specifically to learn how to write software that can now be generated by AI, at the quality level generated by AI. Those jobs are now gone. Being a software analyst, integrator, architect, security engineer, information systems analyst, data scientist, etc? Thise are still in high demand, as are programmers who are subject matter experts or can lead a team.
I really enjoy programming, and i don’t mind all of the planning, mentorship, and working with stakeholders to formulate solutions. But for the past few weeks 90% of the work I’ve been doing had been around deployment, migrating services to new servers, and fucking with azure resources. I haven’t written a line of code for 3+ weeks. That has been draining.
Couple that with picking up work items that are poorly written with way to little information on what needs doing and it’s also frustrating as hell.
At my company, we have dozens, probably over one hundred different repos that we maintain, and no less than 30 actively worked on projects. It’s bitter sweet in that I get a good mix of work to break up the monotony of working on the same project, but at the cost of not being able to master any of them. I’ve only been in my role for 6-8 months coming from a non programming background, and it’s been tough to learn and keep up with the pace required. Being full stack is nice but shitty at the same time.
Does your current stretch have a foreseeable end? Or do you think the very little programming will continue?
It’s just the way work has played out for us right now. A couple servers are being decommed at the end of the month, so it’s priority. I work on team of about 14 people and we use Azure dev ops for work items and sprint planning. The way we do it is once you finish a task, you grab the next available item in sprint rather than cherry picking. I’ve just been a bit unlucky in my timing. We do have some projects in the works that will be hitting us soon, and some new implementations, so I yea, it’s likely I’ll be writing actual code again in the near future.
Hilarious to throw biotech out there at the end as its a similar case with a lot of smart people doing not what they want and hard to pivot out of. The filter also works similarly.
Could be STEM as a whole. Everyone glamorizes it, but it’s definitely not for everyone. Shit, my family literally got upset when I suggested I might want to be a writer.
its glamorized because some of the more popular jobs, like engineering , scientists for stem is in the media/cinema alot, and they assume its easy for people find a job in it, when a fresh graduate doesnt find one thier whole family/friends gang up on them and rag on them about it. they dont see the the actual ugliness behind it, need a competitive gpa for grad school(depends which grad school and which program), and then research/lab experience,etc and its also not easy getting these. alot of phds/MS trying to get academic jobs in our area are like in thier 30- 40s already. plus there is a demographic preference at the lower levels.
I was close to finishing my molecular biology degree. I always had a nice quaint job in some lab doing basic stuff in mind - an ok paycheck, no big ambitions.
In the last 2 years i realized how big the “socializing” part of this whole gig is. The first years i was getting by learning on my own (i’ve always been good at that). The amount of seminars and group work where working alone was not an option anymore was suffocating for me (i was able to deal with presenting stuff as long as i could work on it on my own, but cooperation over a longer timeframe with random people was insane stress for me), and in combination with my mental issues made me drop out in the phase of choosing a project (I even already had decided on a bioinformatics project) and seeking a mentor for finishing my degree.
The amount of social competency STEM needs is very underemphasized - i am pretty sure this extends into all of STEM.
we had to collaborate alot in one of my bio classes, 1 where i had a lab partner that did all the work without consulting me, so i dint know what was going on, she dint let me do any of the measurements,or whatever. then she disappeared midway into the semester(she dint even register for the class properly and only found out halfway) so i was left alone.
then comes the 2nd partner, who was absent most of the semester herself for health reasons. she touted as being in labs for 4 years(which she used in a rant against me), she was one of the most unhelpful people out there, she did not like the slides i was doing , and i should be doing it a certain way to make “digestible” to audience, but she would not offer any help, other than saying this or that is wrong. she was saying how she went to “talks” and conferences, she knows what she is doing, but she wouldn’t offer how she was doing her part of the slide projects. as soon as she found out grades were separate for each person. she largely stopped helping(which was just criticizing) and only would get together to combine said slides.
later down teh line, i was thinking this btch was cutthroat asf, is biotech industry have people like this worried about thier perceived reputation so much, they would sabotage the group for thier own ends, also the PI/instructor was no help, but he has own problems, having an attitude. all the other groups in class dint have this much abrasiveness, and dint have interruptions like i did. losing 1 partner due to her being absentminded, and then gaining a btchy one.
I had mostly luck in my labs, outside 2 occasions: a lab partner (an exchange student - luckily his english was passable, because he had no local language skills) who was utterly unable to work under sterile conditions and KEEPING them sterile, scratching his head while holding the tools in in that hand at the same time. it was infuriating to watch, and gently telling him did not result in behavioral change.
The other one was a professor for an organic chemistry lab course that had obvious problems with me being overweight, including fucked up comments in front of the class. I was already over 30 and had my share of rude costumers beforehand when i started, so outside of being pissed at him i ignored him as far as possible. Imagine being 19, still not really an adult and getting disrespected like that in front of the class by the person who should be the last to be guilty of such an behavior.
The seminars which required long term close cooperation, especially outside the lab or class itself, were where things truly fell apart for me. I wasn’t able with the constant, long term social noise in my life at all - the separation between private and work practically vanished with those.
i think because biotech is has a small gatekeeped job market, its hard to get into, its essentially a catch-22, its also complicated by other things, , and requires upfront experience years before graduation.
they already have the situation where they dont train people for biotech out of graduation already, you are expected to have it already.
Yep, getting actual experience in the summer months was practically a requirement, even if noone told you that outright. I was lucky enough for my ex knowing someone in a neighboring town working in an university research group on heliobacter pylori where i was able to gain some experience in a friendly environment, which would have sufficed if i had been actually able to finish my degree.
internships are quite uncommon around here, its mostly extra-curricular lab work(not from yuor courses), or getting published from said lab work. extremely rare, i knew someone who worked as a lab tech and was published by said PI(separate from school work). plus universities do not inform students about labs in the same universities they go to, and the PI themselves do not like mentioning it at all.
I don’t think I’ll ever stop working on my own projects. Even if I leave the software industry otherwise.
Sadly, I’m way more burned out than Pre-AI and I was a bit before then. (So I guess it just sped up the pace).
I have no desire to come home and work on personal software or devops projects. My Homelab sits in the same state it was since the last real vacation I had. Corporate/industry work has removed all desire for personal development work.
Yeah one of my hobbies used to be computational math, I used it to learn about complex analysis, shaders, group theory…
Now I’m like “fuck all of that”, I do tai chi, I cook carnitas, I read manga.
I’m spoiled on the whole thing, I take no pride that I used to be someone who knew a lot about computers and having worked at Google/MSFT is now a source of shame.
I guess I’m really lucky that I never had to use AI, and when I tried it on my own, I quickly realized how awful it is.
This is the way to keep being attached to what you create. Noone can force you to use AI for your own stuff. And if corporate life does get unbearable, there’s still the path of trying to sell your own software. Not using LLMs for that is a big plus nowadays in the eyes of costumers too.
I think this is part of the reason for the massive explosion - close to cambrian proportions - in the indie games market in the last years. It gives people a creative outlet and if it goes well (sadly that is not often the case - yet. Steam has been experimenting heavily on matching the right player with the right game which has already made some impact in actual sale numbers from what i read, and the fruits of this experimentation are bound to come into play next year), it might pay the bills.
Edit: Here’s Steams announcement where the are replacing curated slots with ones personalized to the account: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/676258795703240952
I’ve started my own project a few months ago (fully free mobile game on Android and iOS), it can be a fun hobby, but when it’s not so fun you burn out even quicker. So I guess it depends on if it’s just a small project for yourself or if you make it public…
