Long long time ago people in tech were in tech because of the tech.

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 have been in tech for the tech for over 20 years now, heck over 30 years as a hobbyist. I have lost almost all interest in it these days. It feels increasingly meaningless, and actively harmful.

I know it is my own fault for neglecting my health and relationships, but I can't help but feel this career makes the most important things more difficult.

Tech means a lot of things there.

I got into computer science because the problems in physics were either already solved or couldn't be solved without trillions of dollars invested in new accelerators.

From my point of view the tech side of things is a gig I did on the side to pay the bills. LLMs are amazing and useful. Even Knuth thinks so: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf

Now instead of spending weeks on side quests I can just burn some money and get either a counter example or proof without sinking hours/days/weeks into it.

>For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed.

Yeah it did. The environments became a lot more toxic and the decisions became a lot more stupid.

I also miss working with people who actually cared about the craft. They exist on the IC level but they're burned out and on the executive level it's mostly just insecure morons these days.

Quite a lot of folks who got into tech for the tech are also miserable, because, as the byline rather aptly puts it, a lot of it is pointless. It does not serve a public good, or even a public desire, and 'work for its own sake' is only engaging up to a point.

100%.

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".

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This is such a neat comment! If you concentrate, it's very near the metre and prose of a Dr Seuss story, like the Lorax or the Sneetches.