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this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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I feel this. 5 years ago I was a radar engineer making ~200k/yr. Today I'm unemployed and just submitted an application to a law school. I love technology and I'd love nothing more than to continue working in STEM fields, but I just cant justify it when the torment nexus is the only project those in charge are willing to fund. I cant bring myself to continue letting the rich harm people with technology I make, hopefully I can at least get involved with the law and try to create conditions where people in the future can work on tech without building the torment nexus
I am also an engineer (data platforms). I similarly thought the only other field I might enjoy is law. I like complicated, technically-you’re-wrong kind of shit. I also don’t want to work for these giants anymore. Fuck them.
I once had an alternative dream, where I believed I would start my own business one day. I really wanted to live off my own contributions to the economy, with (eventually) enough spare time to actually be with my kids more often.
Now it feels like everything is a fucking scam. I need to go to paper-mill college just to impress the dumbass class of billionaires, so that I can make them more money via their capital machines. This would be my path to building enough wealth such that I can take on the risk of starting a new business. A risk that is all too risky, right now. I have kids to feed. Costs of everything going up, and who knows what’s to happen after the AI bubble pops.
I feel kind of trapped.
I feel you. I'm so fucking sick of the scam based economy we (I'm assuming you're also in the US based on the vibe of your comment; apologies if I'm wrong) live in. I don't have a family, I can only imagine how much more difficult things are right now for people who do.
It makes me feel like the only path forward in terms of improving any facet of human life is to push the kleptocrats and oligarchs currently running things out of power. That's honestly one of my goals going to law school; I want to work in politics in some fashion and try to change that. I see some of the anti-oligarchy politicians that have had success or at least a lot of news coverage lately and that gives me some hope for the future. I absolutely hate the idea of being a politician, but I hate the idea of allowing the people currently in charge to remain in charge even more.
I feel extremely lucky to have been able to retire when I was laid off after 30 years at the telecom company I used to work for.
The guys who are still there have been on a roller coaster of crazy in the last couple of years.
It's hard having two decades of experiences in a domain I suddenly find myself at odds with. Reading about others having the same qualm reassures me that I'm not going crazy. On the other I feel drawn further into an untenable contradictory position.
Once in a while I give in. It's typically when I'm faced with a non trivial problem I realize will take me days of learning before I have any chance of tackling it. My colleagues start suggesting it or share some slop to "help out". So I think fuck it I'll study later for now AI will solve it I need this ticket closed asap. I fire up a "decent" paid model and I start feeding it context. Every time it's a nightmare. Hours of trying stuff that doesn't stick, of questioning, of arguing with a chat bot, of wading through "here are the facts" and "good catch" and "I owe you an apology". It's not a shortcut it's a fucking dead end. Then the bitter aftertaste can only be cleansed with cold hard time consuming actual learning.
I am so glad to hear that I am not the only one who finds AI coding to be an almost futile exercise. I spend more time talking to the damn robot trying to get it to fix problems than I would if I had just done it more slowly and deliberately in the programming language I am familiar with, or just circumvented the automation effort and done the task manually. All three seem to take about the same amount of time.
At least after hours of arguing with a bot and burning tons of money and energy you have a pile of code you can’t understand without paying a chatbot.
But will the chat bot understand itself? It's fun when you start questioning the LLM line by line about its own slop in the same session and it starts flagging all sorts of things it did wrong. Why didn't it write it correctly in the first place? Or is the fix wrong? Who knows? People I guess. The model is fed on knowledge but whether it will activate in response to your prompt and be restored unadulterated is a coin toss.
No, but it will gladly pretend to understand it. For a price.
That's a problem, but the bigger issue is how the commercial models are tuned to tell you that you are never wrong.
Or, more to the point, telling people who don't know what they're talking about that they're never wrong.
We see the appeal to middle and upper management.
I think we might need a support group for disillusioned tech workers.
There’s a tales from tech support on lemmy. Would that suffice?
7 months ago I quit my job for this reason. I thought long and hard about it even bought a ranch. I have joined another team, but one that is pretty critical of ai. They aren't anti ai, but using it needs to have good reason. I figure this is my last bastion and I'll ride this.
Got room for one more at the ranch?
Absolutely, but you'll have to help me tend to the yaks, and hike through the mountains every so often to forage for food and set up new sensors. :)
I saw the yakherds riding Honda motorcycles all over Gansu. Seems like a blast.
I started my job just a few years prior to this AI boom. With a shitty company and now AI on top, I'm really trying to think of other jobs I would be okay at/with doing.
If my current employer goes bust and I lose my job (which doesn't seem unlikely right now), I think I'm out. I'll have about 1.5 years to reinvent myself somehow. But at this point I can't really see myself working in tech for the rest of my life.
Same. If I lose my job I think I'm going to become an electrician instead. That or work on a farm or garden center.
You’re going to be competing with everyone else that’s deciding to suddenly become an electrician plus all the existing master electricians. Good luck.
Electrician sounds kind of cool, but the union route (in the US) seems like a pretty serious commitment.
This is the sign I needed to call in sick for the next few days. This shit is so tiring.
Real
Sounds like an opportunity for malicious compliance.
Auth is down? AI did it.
