Title. It's super frustrating - I have what most reasonable people would call a "good job", including myself, and I do not care for it.
Context: I'm a programmer ("software engineer" i guess), work entirely remote from home, have decently flexible hours, paid well, and, most importantly, the company I work for doesn't directly hurt anyone (we make software for sales teams). I was able to move shortly after joining the company and overall the gig has been fine. the co. treats itself as a startup and has the baggage to go along with it, but its not nearly as bad as a true startup imo, other than leadership saying a couple of times a year things will be further intensifying and people need to be on the bandwagon or should find other jobs.
The pace of work has always been somewhat stressful, but truthfully the stress is probably more self imposed than anything because i'm the primary income provider in my house. However, since the company went "all in" on AI development last year my ability to keep up and my output has continuously gotten worse imo (and based on some feedback I've received). i don't think our AI development style suits my ADHD well - my tasks become wallpaper as the plans and files take "turns" of refinement, and by the time I hand it off the work is basically background noise to me. Between the actual mission of the company and our current dev style I'm just so alienated from the work it practically repels me from my desk. I'm constantly scrambling to try to catch up to deadlines (which I'm typically missing), but when I take a step back and think about my job through a liberal lens it's like "wtf is even the problem."
I know part of it is that the work just doesn't matter. Other parts are because I have other things that are higher priorities in my mind (family stuff, organizing, etc), and would much rather spend time on those things. in lieu of finding more interesting work (I can't seem to find any), I'm trying to encourage myself to almost consider work my part time gig compared to my higher priorities, but that is mostly only helpful for dealing with prioritization and not stress. Instead i'm taking my anti-anxiety meds and now frequently taking xanax too.
It's just really frustrating because it's not a "real" or "material" problem, its all in my head. I can do better work, i'm just struggling to engage. I don't want to spend all my energy on my day job when other matters are just straight up more important.
idk just needed to vent. obviously this is some real first world problem bs but wasn't sure where else to vent tbh.
It seems like AI's biggest change to work has been that now one person is doing the work of ten people, but only because 9 people using AI achieve almost nothing, and the tenth person is burning the candle at both ends to make sure their whole department actually gets anything done.
The only solution to this problem I can think of is to stop burning the candle at both ends and let the department fail. The c suites won't notice a problem til everything goes catastrophic.
I'm a solo dev at my workplace that manages the whole management stack, tooling, project planning, QA workflow, and design template management.
Zero AI and it's honestly not that bad. The whole codebase was written directly by me and I'm a lazy fuck so it's meant to be as easy to read/write/modify as possible. Anything that adds too much complexity is immediately dropped in favor of spending a few days trying to find a better way (which ironically sometimes leads to me rewriting a whole library just so I can write the production code the way I want lol).
Our "parent" company (really just a client, but they're our only client and the ownership of both is related) has ~4 devs all using AI and their shit stinks. It's thousands of lines of slop that works only until you look at it the wrong way, and a small change in a seemingly unrelated place can cause untraceable cascading failures that halt production.
Their solutions always end up being just throwing more slop at it and accumulating tech debt at an exponential rate (they also didn't start using git until I begged them for 3 years, and even then they don't use it properly).
Just this week I wrote some tooling that end rounds their slop and we saw a 1600x speedup in something we have to do 4 times a day. I legitimately hate the current approach that so many people are taking, it's so easy to just do things the correct way from the start and maintain/release features at a reasonable pace while keeping everything manageable.
Literally our entire company is run from a single repo with some plaintext configs. Anything can be pivoted in minutes.
1600x is crazy. If you replace a good CPU algorithm with a good GPU algorithm usually the best you can get is about 100x.
This is all single threaded. The 1600x increase is just because they have 1200 JavaScript scripts running on every single database transaction that do nothing.
All I had to do was defer those to run after the full transaction and we got a 1600x speedup.
Each of those scripts also queried the full database btw. The whole system they've created is functionally unusable.
For atomic, single row transactions it's okay. Like a 1s latency, but we have to do constant migration of tens of thousands of rows per table, so that cost stacks up and the micro second/millisecond latency of an unwrapped database transaction is your goal.
A merge of 20 project databases took 20+ hours with their setup and 1s with mine.