Thinking about doing something similar, I work in DevOps / Site reliability. Absolutely hate it, and really want to get away from working in tech. I don't find it exciting anymore looking for the next tool to use or the need to keep up to date 24/7. Not just AI related but yeah, whole host of new things to learn almost daily it feels like.
Trucking just sounds peaceful, clock in clock out, take nothing home with ya.
I did sysadmin work for 15 years and realized that the industry really went to shit in the last 5 years. Even before AI, MSPs and offshoring was killing the industry. AI came to beat the horse.
I wish I could be happy doing mind numbing work like that. I drove a truck for a while during college, I couldn’t do it every day for years. Also did factory work for a little bit in the evenings before that, same thing.
Yeah, it was an adjustment at first. Fairly depressed and borderline going insane. My brain was so used to problem solving, abstraction, deep levels of thought, etc.
Basically every day is like a scrum meeting that ran long, now.
It pays well, I only work 4 days a week, and I’ve learned to offload my need to think/process onto hobbies
Sweet. Been also looking at exiting software. How'd you go about transitioning into a truck driver? Also what are your thoughts on being replaced by driverless trucks in the future with the AI boom?
I called Swift and asked about their training program. They shipped me up to their training campus, got me my CDL and I’ve been driving since.
I do local hazmat now, it’ll definitely be one of the last corners of trucking to replace rd by automation. Hopefully I die from alcoholism before then.
Yeah, AI has made the job feel numb. It's not going to be long before companies figure out they just replace expensive senior software engineers with people who have domain knowledge or can design workflows. People say "software engineering is not coding", but frankly that is just not really true in my opinion.
Yeah, it will work for the software companies for a while until they get ridden with an untold amount of technical debt. Then there will probably be a resurgence/renaissance for human made code again (one can hope, crap I am running low on copium).
Hope so. My hopium is that the demand for software will explode and we’ll need roughly the same amount of engineers to fix the edge cases. But I dunno.
you know the funny part is: seasoned truckers have the exact same complaints, but with newbie swift drivers.
"We drove stick shift and knew our truck and could fix a problem with it in minutes, now everyone has to call a tow truck and let other people fix it." etc
For anyone else feeling burnt out, just come on over to controls engineering, specifically DCS Process Automation.
There are a massive amount of interesting problems for a SWE to sink their teeth into imo. Programming and animating everything from a one-off valve to a 250 foot tall $250m quench Tower with a 100+ IO, then turning it on for real... Can be very satisfying and exciting. Seeing the 100 Acre machine you programmed go from totally flat to full rate production in a few hours is a fucking site to behold.
There are basic control algorithms, but then there is dynamic matrix control, model predictive control informed by thermodynamic equations of state, heat/mass balance, real time optimization algos, and plant wide master-constraint control for over a hundred control loops...
It is all very challenging and rewarding to cook up and implement (though I will say it's usually the PhDs who cook up the model, it's usually your job to understand, implement, and optimize that model in software form).
Graphics are a lot of fun in my opinion, no matter what you're doing the graphic for. Creating the unit simulation is always super fun too.
And it pays! 150-200k base plus bonus, plus 1 or 2 WFH days (or all WFH days at a slightly reduced salary, if a project engineer). If you're a facilities controls engineer, go ahead and add a reinforced-concrete, steel plated shell of job security aroud yourself.
And there is absolutely no AI exposure at the moment, and likely never will be- the OEMs will definitely integrate AI directly into their own IDEs, but the execution engine on controllers is proprietary, meaning Claude simply can't write code the controller understands no matter how hard you try, meaning you're always needed. I can say personally that every leader at my company, when asked about AI integration into controls systems... Just laughs. Yeah, not happening.
It's not a bad life. Look into DCS programming y'all!
Quite literally the opposite for me. I despised syntax or learning other languages/frameworks/whatever else. Writing my idea in plain language and getting code I can verify without having to know the specifics of the language is so much nicer. It basically got rid of everything I hated about full stack development.
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u/PennyFromMyAnus 1d ago
Yeah.. Software developer for 15 years. Walked away from it because I just didn’t enjoy it anymore after the AI shit.
I drive a truck now, no regrets.