Title. It’s super frustrating - I have what most reasonable people would call a “good job”, including myself, and I do not care for it.
Context: I’m a programmer (“software engineer” i guess), work entirely remote from home, have decently flexible hours, paid well, and, most importantly, the company I work for doesn’t directly hurt anyone (we make software for sales teams). I was able to move shortly after joining the company and overall the gig has been fine. the co. treats itself as a startup and has the baggage to go along with it, but its not nearly as bad as a true startup imo, other than leadership saying a couple of times a year things will be further intensifying and people need to be on the bandwagon or should find other jobs.
The pace of work has always been somewhat stressful, but truthfully the stress is probably more self imposed than anything because i’m the primary income provider in my house. However, since the company went “all in” on AI development last year my ability to keep up and my output has continuously gotten worse imo (and based on some feedback I’ve received). i don’t think our AI development style suits my ADHD well - my tasks become wallpaper as the plans and files take “turns” of refinement, and by the time I hand it off the work is basically background noise to me. Between the actual mission of the company and our current dev style I’m just so alienated from the work it practically repels me from my desk. I’m constantly scrambling to try to catch up to deadlines (which I’m typically missing), but when I take a step back and think about my job through a liberal lens it’s like “wtf is even the problem.”
I know part of it is that the work just doesn’t matter. Other parts are because I have other things that are higher priorities in my mind (family stuff, organizing, etc), and would much rather spend time on those things. in lieu of finding more interesting work (I can’t seem to find any), I’m trying to encourage myself to almost consider work my part time gig compared to my higher priorities, but that is mostly only helpful for dealing with prioritization and not stress. Instead i’m taking my anti-anxiety meds and now frequently taking xanax too.
It’s just really frustrating because it’s not a “real” or “material” problem, its all in my head. I can do better work, i’m just struggling to engage. I don’t want to spend all my energy on my day job when other matters are just straight up more important.
idk just needed to vent. obviously this is some real first world problem bs but wasn’t sure where else to vent tbh.
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It seems like AI’s biggest change to work has been that now one person is doing the work of ten people, but only because 9 people using AI achieve almost nothing, and the tenth person is burning the candle at both ends to make sure their whole department actually gets anything done.
The only solution to this problem I can think of is to stop burning the candle at both ends and let the department fail. The c suites won’t notice a problem til everything goes catastrophic.
I’m a solo dev at my workplace that manages the whole management stack, tooling, project planning, QA workflow, and design template management.
Zero AI and it’s honestly not that bad. The whole codebase was written directly by me and I’m a lazy fuck so it’s meant to be as easy to read/write/modify as possible. Anything that adds too much complexity is immediately dropped in favor of spending a few days trying to find a better way (which ironically sometimes leads to me rewriting a whole library just so I can write the production code the way I want lol).
Our “parent” company (really just a client, but they’re our only client and the ownership of both is related) has ~4 devs all using AI and their shit stinks. It’s thousands of lines of slop that works only until you look at it the wrong way, and a small change in a seemingly unrelated place can cause untraceable cascading failures that halt production.
Their solutions always end up being just throwing more slop at it and accumulating tech debt at an exponential rate (they also didn’t start using git until I begged them for 3 years, and even then they don’t use it properly).
Just this week I wrote some tooling that end rounds their slop and we saw a 1600x speedup in something we have to do 4 times a day. I legitimately hate the current approach that so many people are taking, it’s so easy to just do things the correct way from the start and maintain/release features at a reasonable pace while keeping everything manageable.
Literally our entire company is run from a single repo with some plaintext configs. Anything can be pivoted in minutes.
1600x is crazy. If you replace a good CPU algorithm with a good GPU algorithm usually the best you can get is about 100x.
This is all single threaded. The 1600x increase is just because they have 1200 JavaScript scripts running on every single database transaction that do nothing.
All I had to do was defer those to run after the full transaction and we got a 1600x speedup.
Each of those scripts also queried the full database btw. The whole system they’ve created is functionally unusable.
For atomic, single row transactions it’s okay. Like a 1s latency, but we have to do constant migration of tens of thousands of rows per table, so that cost stacks up and the micro second/millisecond latency of an unwrapped database transaction is your goal.
A merge of 20 project databases took 20+ hours with their setup and 1s with mine.
The part that brought my efficiency increase down to 1600 from something closer to a million was just the time it takes to signal that we don’t want the scripts to run.
Yeah largely the same problem I’ve had for the last 3 years. The expectation now is we deliver every quarter without fail or we get interrogated and whatever answer is given the response is “but AI makes you go faster”
We’re currently sitting on years of the most egregious tech debt that nobody wants to acknowledge exists while we have offshore staff manually tweaking production infrastructure with admin perms to keep the lights on with no oversight.
The only thing thats happened is we’re going slower as 9/10 colleagues appear to have lost all cognitive faculties to copilot down to them talking to me or asking questions written by copilot which is sending me into the silly dimension. All work is now making sprawling design docs down to the granular atomic implementation detail and when something happens that means such a design doesnt work which is all the time because you cant fucking spend months designing a system without testing ONE SINGLE ASPECT OF IT and somehow expect it all to line up with your copiloted hallucinations, then everyone just stares blankly into space.
I shouldnt complain its an easy job and all i have to do is pretend to be stoic, tell everyone i use ai when i dont and use GitHub copilot to keep the teams spyware from saying im away from my computer so i can play MMOs all day. But it does actually hurt that the career i really enjoyed for over a decade is basically ruined.
Programming or bug fixing used to be the reward at the end of the long boring requirements discussions and endless planning talks. Now all my life is meetings and im literally not allowed to code anymore
Yes, exactly! i’ve been in this career path for just over 10 years and now and the current state is just dreadful.
for a few (2 or 3?) months I was able to use claude & cursor to do just enough of my work that I could focus more of my energy on local organizing tasks, which I actually really appreciated. With the intensification of labor though now we (mostly me tbh, i think most of my colleagues are fairing better at least outwardly) are constantly scrambling, nothing is ever fully aligned with expectations or requirements, and the “flywheel” has to keep turning. the design doc thing is especially egregious - converting requirements to instructions the llm can understand is one step, then lots of refinement (at this point in the process I really wished I just sat down and wrote the sprawling thing myself, but my typing speed is a limiting factor on this part of the work (which shouldnt matter, but here we are)), then converting it to a format that is github friendly, then updating that so its human friendly (which, apparently, I’m not spending enough time on. which, admittedly, is probably true at this point), then wading through design comments while also expecting our tools to implement the un-approved plan, so inevitably the implementation does have to change at least a bit.
The whole thing is just silly because the bottleneck has always been code reviews, manual testing, then CI. We didn’t change any of that, there’s just a whole lot more of it! we did add llms to automatically review code, but literally the whole thing now is the “implementer” is supposed to spot check the llm output and say it def matches the plan and is quality code, and the rest of the team just signs off on the plan and does some basic testing.
And that’s just for a single ticket, so there’s like 3-6 of these per person per day + meetings. It’s just asinine.
All work is now making sprawling design docs down to the granular atomic implementation detail and when something happens that means such a design doesnt work which is all the time because you cant fucking spend months designing a system without testing ONE SINGLE ASPECT OF IT and somehow expect it all to line up with your copiloted hallucinations, then everyone just stares blankly into space.
lol.
I can picture the blank stares so vividly.
I’m an SE, have the issue where I complain to friends making more than half what I make and they just scoff at me because I should be happy that I make money/have a job/etc. Complained to a therapist that I need to quit because this job will kill me, told don’t do that the market is bad and you make a lot of money.
All the bottling up left me even more burned out because there’s truly no end in sight and no one to listen to my woes about this “amazing job” that’s absolutely killing me.
I ended on, nobody at the company cares about quality so why am I? They want us to use AI on everything, it’s absolutely stupid and expensive with no ROI but you want it? You get it. I’m throwing AI bullshit everywhere and people clap like seals. No idea what it’s doing or how it’s messing up my code and I hope to not be around when the time comes.
It hasn’t given me enough energy to do the things I care about but it’s less cumbersome to login to work knowing they don’t give a damn and I don’t give a damn.
I’m an SE, have the issue where I complain to friends making more than half what I make and they just scoff at me because I should be happy that I make money/have a job/etc. Complained to a therapist that I need to quit because this job will kill me, told don’t do that the market is bad and you make a lot of money.
All the bottling up left me even more burned out because there’s truly no end in sight and no one to listen to my woes about this “amazing job” that’s absolutely killing me.
I feel this so hard, no one really sympathizes when you have a “good job” that’s making you miserable, and it feels foolish to just walk away, so you end up feeling stuck. I’ve been at my current job for over 14 years now and even though it keeps getting steadily worse*, and I keep getting lonelier (and older), I can’t think of a better alternative, so I just stay put.
*Nowhere near as bad as OP has it, though; I recently let my GitHub copilot license lapse because I never use it, and no one has criticized me for doing so. But that, too, only contributes to the too-good-to-leave issue.
Hey it’s me. I too have a cushy work-from-home job and continuing to do it is (somehow) killing my soul and my mental health. I just need the money.
Getting stressed about work is an absolutely real and material problem. Don’t minimise it. I have no great advice to improve the situation - Because I need the same advice.
All I can say (hypocritically so) is please don’t underestimate the importance of your health. “what I’m doing is not helpful for stress” and “I am taking multiple anxiety drugs” combined with “I can work harder” does not scream healthy simultaneous thoughts to me.
I’m eyes out for anyone else’s helpful input here. Here’s to more sustainably pleasant arrangements for all in the near future
I’m a software dev and my workplace only recently started to allow use of AI. Suddenly I’m getting so many questions which start from faulty premises (people come to me for questions and code review). And worse, I’m also getting a lot of “this is what copilot suggested” and their question shows 0 understanding of the problem domain. Aside from the problem of using AI generally, I think they were wrong to try to use it to assist in something which the AI is not even trained on.
The worst part is that after a dev uses AI to avoid learning something, they have learned nothing to help them with the next task. Each task is starting from 0, and the effect is that the old guard are dumped with basic questions since we’re the only ones who still know how stuff is supposed to work.
I feel for you on the alienation, I worked in the sales side of things with AI being shoved down our throat.
I quit and did a month of working for my step-dad who is a native tree specialist who takes a lot of highly hazardous and surgical emergency jobs which was great but I just don’t think my old ass is fit enough to keep that up. I’d how this dude still climbs 200 foot redwoods at 75 years old.
Now I work for a rural animal hospital 30 hours a week and it’s enough to get by on and the most fulfilling work I have ever done.
I wish you the best comrade. Shits bleak out there job hunting right now.
Idk how this dude still climbs 200 foot redwoods at 75 years old.
He most likely has really low inflammation. Some people just have extremely low mast cell activation and low CRP levels, even if their diet and lifestyle don’t seem to correlate with it. They’re typically very outdoorsy or work outsid like your stepdad but it’s not super clear if it’s correlation, causation, or just that these jobs end up selecting for these traits because others find other work.
I feel your frustration. Not sure about you, but some days are OK and others I feel like all I do is get upset at a GPU cluster. Last week, my team lead announced “We need to stop thinking of ourselves as a team that writes code, and become a team that reviews LLM code”. Goddamn, reviewing LLM code is miserable.
I’d quit to focus on hobbies, but short/mid-term life plans require a strong financial footing. I left a previous job after the 2024 election hoping to take 6 months off, but day 1 of MAGA fascism’s return had me so scared that I got right back into looking for jobs.
