Sounds like a cushy job. Why would you want to leave?
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.
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.
?!!?
No way. Are you sure? What kind of work? Here there’s still a lot of care needed to navigate the LLM work, like knowing when to make it quit, rewrite, refactor, follow your outline.
It feels magic but when I watch people who don’t know what they are doing trying to make something new (not almost a clone of an existing product), they get pretty frustrated.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Be_Lazy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Idleness_and_Othe...
I can't believe how much mental justification needs to be made by otherwise highly intelligent people (Bertrand Russel wrote In Praise of Idleness) to defend the right to not work.
No, I fully reject any notion of life value coming from work, and those who hold your view are basically jailors to those who don't want our identity defined by work.
I would gladly not work and learn cello and physics independently if that were a real possibility, but it's not, and it won't be within my lifetime.
I had a job in a system that required jobs to survive that genuinely didn't bother me. I actually quite enjoyed it most of the time. Now it's permanently dead and I need something else, or I am homeless and starve to death.
> No, I fully reject any notion of life value coming from work, and those who hold your view are basically jailors to those who don't want our identity defined by work.
Fuck off.