Sounds like a cushy job. Why would you want to leave?

swatcoder 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Some people just can't turn off their brains and play drone for dozens of hours a week for decades. It feels existentially, aesthetically, and sometimes ethically crushing to spend a whole life doing work you can't expect yourself to respect or value, no matter how much you get paid or how little the work overtly demands of you.

Often, the lack of meaningfully challenging demands being put on you is punishing on its own. It can feel like a relief for a week or month or year, but if you catch a glimpse of that being your whole future, you can come to recognize yourself as being in a mind-eroding secular purgatory.

This anguish is especially common among on highly capable people, high achievers, and those used to some kind of ambition. And by accident of its history, there's a lot of those people in this industry and some of them are going nuts now.

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Nevermark an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> This anguish is especially common among on highly capable people, high achievers, and those used to some kind of ambition. And by accident of its history, there's a lot of those people in this industry and some of them are going nuts now.

I went nuts for years, until I sold off my interest in my dream partnership.

10 years of heaven. All the benefits and none of the downsides of my internal colleagues. Then 14 years of bureaucracy aimed at predictability over progress, which was infinitely more difficult for me to dodge as an external player.

Compensation for my interest was very objectively valued, with the rate of stalled progress priced in. Which made complete sense, while also being its own madness.

I walked away from so much value, but I don't regret it for a minute.

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birdsongs an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> and some of them are going nuts now.

Pretty much this. I know it sounds melodramatic but it literally feels like rotting.

I don't solve anything anymore. I don't get any spark of fixing bugs. I don't DO ANYTHING, and it's fucking chipping away at me.

Also I'm fairly sure people are going to realise soon that if they're happy with slop, they don't actually need highly trained engineers anymore.

This whole thread actually prompted me to look into electrician work, especially in renewables that we have here in Norway.

I might fix my burnout and go to school to get my 2 year qualification. AI can't rewire a hydro dam.

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	▲	tomat_1000 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Man, I have the same feeling. A long time in your life you build the career and now it’s just feeling so empty, like you are not a engineer anymore, now everyone can use AI and without checking code they would have good results.

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an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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	▲	lirolero an hour ago \| parent [-]
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footy 2 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

it sounds soul-destroying