Many occupations have been made obsolete throughout history, and this article examines none of them. I'm not sympathetic to "this time it's different", I think people are just too lazy to try to find out what actually happened in the past.

I personally have been trying to get a financial security cushion for the last ten years or so (and failing) so I don't take my own feelings into account; AI hasn't made me more frustrated. On the contrary, it's a tool I now use in my escape-the-rat-wheel adventures, and there's nothing sweeter than seeing Opus dismantle in ten minutes a problem that would have consumed two full days of my time in this world. But when I speak with colleagues and friends, all of them, now and not before, in all age groups, and with only in common to be knowledge workers, are searching for a way out.

I think what happened is that a lot of the wrong personalities entered technology for all the wrong reasons.

Some of us started in the 80s or 90s and got into it with personal projects and treating the PC as a hobby. It is satisfying to be able to command a hunk of metal and get it to do things. And it can do boring stuff really fast and repeatedly. And that alone was exciting. The majority of us would stay up into the morning hours figuring out how to compile something. Or how to get that new driver work correctly in an unsupported OS or setup. It's a lust of computing. The gadgetry. The devices. The awestruck feeling when a new computing device or technology comes out.

I and many others like me still have that yearning and curiosity. I love strolling the aisles of the hardware store and computer stores for this very reason. The energy is electric. The immense amount of technology in every little thing is just mind blowing. THAT's why we do it. THAT's why we got into it. It wasn't the pay. It wasn't the glory. It was a group of us who wanted so desperately to have a computer club or an electronics lab for us to hangout and build stuff.

Unfortunately, as the industry grew, all the wrong personalities entered it. Project managers, product managers, scrum/agile masters, terrible mid level managers, talentless clowns, bozos, cheerleaders, jocks. The lot of them. The non-weird, non-geeky, non-obsessive, non-nerdy types. And then they co-opted the culture. They thought wearing glasses and wearing a backpack and carrying the latest tech devices made them "it".

The good thing is that the burnout hits fast for these folks. Just like the tons of medical school or law school students who are there for all the wrong reasons and realize sooner or later that this isn't at all what they wanted. Some members of this group actually become doctors and lawyers. THIS is the group that the article is talking about. They don't last, because their heart and soul are just not in it.

For the rest of us? AI, no AI, walled gardens, OSS or closed. It doesn't matter. All of this geeky stuff brings us joy. I don't want to "turn off and disconnect", I want to be connected because I love this stuff. I love the simple speaker and amp and the latest LLM. And I love the latest ADAS systems in cars. This work is meaningful to me because of both the end product and the work that it took to get there.

Unfortunately, the issue is that while we enjoy the geekery, the others ruin it for us because their lives suck.

Sorry to be harsh.

None of that is the reason I'm sad. I'm sad because I realized that this industry had grown from something that is a benefit to everyone to something that is the opposite of that.

On a personal level to remain as a SWE/Dev maintaining your sanity comes down to a few choices:

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'd like to congratulate Aaron Horwath on publishing this article. As a creative professional, he must feel pride in bringing his ideas to light.

Unfortunately, this isn't the movie industry. We don't see a list of credits at the end of his commentary recognizing the thousands of others involved in helping him publish his thoughts.

Perhaps we can all chip in and name some of the many people involved in building the tech stack he published with. I'm sure there are THOUSANDS without even looking at the previous technologies those things like blogging platforms, current browsers or current generation phones built from.

Is that fair enough?

I'm not sad. As I look out to the next few weeks and whatever, I'm not sad. Hopefully those credits will help others also not be sad.

Here's to WordPress and Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little.

Tech has always had an unhealthy streak; it was ok while workers were being compensated well and treated amazingly. The end of zirp has cut comp and benefits massively so there’s a lot less upside to this lifestyle.

For me it's not just AI. The industry just doesn't feel the same anymore. Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon - I've been in this industry since the 80s, but things really seemed to change, or I finally noticed it, around 2010 or so. It seemed like everything we were building wasn't to help people, it was to extract data from people and generally just harass people into buying shit.

We transformed society through email, the web, mobile, and so on. But now we're recording everything your car does and delivering ads on refrigerators. It just doesn't feel the same anymore.

Because most of us are middle aged with mortgages, kids etc. Not old enough to retire and live off of savings or 401ks, not young enough to start all over again.

I dont think it will happen