Posting this here as I feel like similar things are happening in open source projects we like to host.
Thanks for sharing this. I’m also quitting. I’m exhausted. My great pride has been rubbed from me. The morale code of this society has been turned upside down, and I do not wish to keep contributing.
I went to free gardening classes at the local library. I spent more time with friends. I am grateful that I have some savings to recover.
AI is rapidly eroding any joy or satisfaction I once derived from my development job. It’s being pushed hard despite its many problems and limitations, and I’m pretty sure they’ll eventually be considering your AI leverage when determining raises, layoffs, etc. I know better than to voice my concerns about it, I’ve been around long enough to know when the company has its mind made up about something and expects everyone to get on board or get out of the way.
I don’t know where to go to escape it, though. Every company seems to be going all-in on AI and I’m not sure what else I could do with my education and skill set. And it’s not like my family can afford for me to take a pay cut in the current economy.
Things will get more expensive as the consequences of US foreign and domestic policy pile up. If your family can’t afford you to take a pay cut, understand that your family will be under water within the next few years regardless of what you do, and prepare accordingly. Given you will not be able to get what you need with money, how can you increase your chances of getting it through other means?
For me, at least, the easiest option is to join solidarity networks. Unionizing, sharing appliances, dumpster diving, learning trades and skills from each other, cooking communally to reduce waste and save time, squatting, etc.
And if you can’t afford to live given that, you’ll be far from the only one. So maybe join the others that are trying to change the system.
I’m pretty sure they’ll eventually be considering your AI leverage when determining raises, layoffs, etc.
It’s already started. Where I work, LLM usage has become the one single metric to judge who’s a good and who’s a bad software engineer. It’s depressing and infuriating. I have very talented people on my team, but their low LLM usage makes them “worthless”. Meanwhile some morons who have always been shit engineers are called “champions” because they burn 2000 Claude credits a month.
I’m also quitting or rather retiring this year. a couple years ago I pivoted from being a contract/consultant dev to doing consultation work to clean up AI slop that various companies produced.
I had hoped that eventually my clients would get it, would realize that utilizing LLMs for end to end builds and vibe coding your way to a final product didn’t work but…no…they aren’t getting it. They refuse to acknowledge it.
I’m tired. I’m tired of the same song and dance with every client “hey this app we made isn’t scaling and there’s a lot of issues with it, can you run a code review and tell is where we went wrong?” “sure you used AI to build this from end to end via a vibe coder who doesn’t know any of the languages the AI used. you need to start over with actual real devs” and nope. they just find another vibe coder that they feel can write better prompts.
So I’m quitting. I can’t do it anymore. I was hoping this bubble would have burst by now but the way, especially recently, companies are fighting tooth and nail to keep these shit producing agents going because they’re way too invested now is worrying. IF this bubble bursts it’s going to take EVERYONE with it. Everyone. so I’m getting out now and hope my money is still worth something when it does burst.
Oh I’ve been on a similar journey, after a year long break I’m back in the education space and things have only gotten worse.
I voiced concern about professors using LLMs to create presentations. The sloppy images with nonsense text are one thing, but it’s hallucinating on actual content. Since I’m learning, I can’t be certain if something on this topic is true or an hallucination. My criticism was understood as me just not being tech savvy enough for AI.
I’ll probably drop the course and get my money back, I could get a chatgpt subscription for a lot less…
I’ve beefed up my legal insurance because I believe the only way to hammer some sense into people and businesses is to sue when their agentic ai makes mistakes. Currently nobody seems accountable for the output and that has to change.
This excerpt from a 47 year old IBM manual just keeps being increasingly relevant.
Are there a lot of managers who can be held accountable?
That’s a good article, thanks. The core beliefs they articulate at the end really resonate for me, but it was getting hard to convince people they were worthwhile even ten years ago, long before LLMs were infecting people’s minds.
- Things that are worth doing are worth doing well.
- Things that are done well require time and effort.
- You make meaning through the doing.
- Ideas are common; effort is not.
- There are no shortcuts.
You join a meeting with a coworker. Your coworker has enabled an AI tool to automatically take notes and summarize the meeting. They do not ask for consent to turn it on. The tool mischaracterizes what you discuss.
I just had a Teams meeting where a business partner added their AI assistant to the call and said that it would record audio/video for training purposes.
They didn’t ask for permission or anything, just joined and turned it on. Like wtf? Where does it store the data? What is it used for?
If I wasn’t forced to attend I would have left then and there.
You say, “what’s the privacy policy for your AI assistant?” and then keep asking questions like that until the person running the call gets annoyed that this has taken over their agenda and they’ll ban people from using unapproved AI agents on calls.
“Where is the data stored?” “Has this tool been approved by IT?” “Did you get consent from everyone to be recorded?” “Does the employee handbook say you can record other employees?” “Is my voice going to be used by an AI company to train a model?” etc.
I love asking the “how do you know” all day, but our official IT people have been bitten by outlook and cloud and LLMs so badly that they completely overlook the CLOUD ACT risks and general sovereignty issues inherent with using those from outside America.
So the “has this been approved” part is not gonna go like I’d like.
They make you attend the meeting, but if you’re like me you’ll be messaging your boss and saying "I’m not okay with being recorded, so I’ll just mute and shutter for the duration, thanks. I think that’s the best we can do.
I’m lucky that
- we’re union
- we have really strong provisions around recording
- my boss is awesome
…so we can refuse to interact while being recorded, without fear of reprisal.
Call me a coward but I can’t blame someone for not having the strength to keep that up. Especially if it causes friction with your coworkers who you have to interact with every day.
You’re not a coward, that comment is horrible advice.
It’s good for “oh I oughtta…!” online, but in real life there are significantly more professional/adult ways of solving the problem than asking semi-rhetorical questions that barely make sense in the hopes of guiding someone toward the desired outcome. Please don’t actually do that.
Asking “what does the employee handbook say about X??” isn’t a “gotcha.” You can literally go look, then tell us.
It’s ok to ask not to be recorded in a small meeting. You don’t need to bring up your unfamiliarity with the employee handbook.
I was in a physical meeting where the other part cracked open their Windows laptop so we could go over documents together. Halfway in I noticed the microphone icon was on in the system bar.
Considering Microsoft and the state of Windows, I’m guessing the entire conversation is liable to be used as training data, and I would really have liked the option to nope the hell out in advance.
I’m convinced that the way we use AI and the way it is marketed by corporations will force us to recognize the fundamental divide between people who genuinely care for human progress and building a better tomorrow and those who either don’t care at all or have a very warped and egocentric view of progress. I’m glad that what is described in this blog post hasn’t reached my day job yet, but I’d be lying if I said I’m not worried that it’s only a matter of time. It’s difficult to not feel extremely disillusioned by the current state of the world.
just watching humanity burn hard-earned resources on something arguably worse than arms race and dotcom/blockchain craze combined. Got to outlast it, in spite.
Got to outlast it, in spite.
Problem is not wanting your creations scraped.
Even worse when you want to contribute to some key project that likely won’t leave Github (issue being Copilot training). In my case it’s Godot bindings in my preferred (somewhat niche) language. I already contributed an example and have another better example I haven’t uploaded because of this (other issues though too, so I haven’t even been able to share an export).
Well at least with opensource, we can keep forking. Like Audacity project showed is possible, for example, through chaos to better product. I’m more concerned with physical resources though, those do not fork.
Github is not git, after all, and self-hosting some git server is kind of simple. Not doing it myself though, too many friends who do it already lol.
This one hit me hard. It described a lot of what I’ve been feeling myself lately.
I feil this one. I had co-workers that used the office picture of another one to give it to chatgpt to change it to a specific style. I was feeling so weird about this… it’s hard to explain, like I was revulsed by this
Ouff, this article hits hard… and makes me rather glad I’m trying to do my own thing.
I know I’m in the minority here, but I don’t blame AI for the conditions he’s describing at all. I’m a little jealous that as an older millennial, he got to experience the golden years of tech work where everyone was getting rich off work marketed as meaningful and socially progressive. Us younger folks that got into tech because of that era are kicking ourselves for not being born a decade or two earlier.
As a gen z-er, I’ve only experienced exploitation. Skeleton crews where you are saddled with way too much work at all times, and your seniors have no time to train you to do it properly, so you bury yourself in a cycle of burn out and tech debt. Oh, and our starting wages have likely not increased since OP graduated college. So my perspective is that work for large corporations is a joke, and no one actually cares about the output beyond how much money they can extract out of shittier (i.e., cheaper) work. This enshittification of the workplace is why people are using AI first and asking questions never. I don’t blame them. I’m using copilot for side projects and it’s 10x faster at coding than I am, although I agree with OP, the code can be sloppy and should absolutely require human supervision.
I think what he hasn’t quite arrived at as the logical conclusion of his laments is that tech workers need to unionize. It sucks because I do think people of his generation who benefited most from the tech boom would never consider that they would benefit from class consciousness (a lot of them aren’t just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, they are actually ashamed millionaires). But yeah, if he wants privacy protections in the workplace to be taken seriously, if he wants assurance that AI will not literally take his job because it was trained to do just that by his company, if he wants to find meaning in human connection, he’s looking for a union.
AI is the symptom. Unrestrained capitalism is the disease.
Ky (the author) is using they/them pronouns btw.
There’s differences in workplaces of course, but many people, while working for money primarily, also draw some satisfaction from their job and want to do fine. This is often abused by the bosses by not paying them properly but trying to convince the workers that they are one big family etc.
Absolutely with you in terms of unionizing tho. The lack of care is a symptom.
I think you have a highly idealized idea of the past. Most jobs are, and have always been, a way to make money to fund your life. Any “meaningfulness” is a rare beneficial side-effect for most.
And as far as understaffing and overworked? Every company will attempt to extract the most they can from you for the least amount of money. Pretty much always has been. Sometimes you can find some management that realizes you can get more out by showing some amount of care to their underlings as people, but again that is also rare.
Also, outside of the tech hubs like the SF bay area, or FAANG employment (or the equivalent for the time), you aren’t going to be finding “the grunts” are millionaires still working.
I hope unions take off again. People forgot how much of workers rights were fought for, with literal blood shed in support of them.
