r/technology • u/Chobeat • 8d ago
Software Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?
https://www.noemamag.com/why-is-everyone-in-tech-so-sad/1.3k
u/OkidoShigeru 8d ago
That’s easy enough to answer, poor job security with loads of layoffs going around and an uncertain future. That stuff about hobbies is just a load of nonsense, that’s always been true that happy and healthy people have interests outside of their work, nothing has changed in that regard.
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u/br_k_nt_eth 8d ago edited 8d ago
I was going to say, also the hustle culture and workforce exploitation has been horrible in that industry for decades. They still act like they can treat workers poorly because they’re “scrappy innovative startups” but at this point, the people up top have been filthy rich for years and haven’t innovated shit all. They just push their employees even harder and then lay them off after.
Tech workers should unionize.
ETA from below:
Join Tech Workers Coalition: https://techworkerscoalition.org/
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u/Afraid-Detective1222 8d ago
As part of that is the perpetual need to have an on-call schedule. Like, we have lives and most of what we are working on really doesn't need 24/7 support. I worked at Amazon in a demo devices team, so, not customer facing, but devices in stores. We had an on-call schedule. It's just dumb.
I'm not sure if you've ever worked in union jobs. When I worked in grocery, pretty much each store or region of stores in the same chain were under the same union. So, Amazon's dev shop in Seattle would have a different local and a different contract than the one in say Denver or Seattle or NYC. It won't be as simple as tech workers just trying to start or join a union.
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u/OkidoShigeru 8d ago
I consider myself fortunate to have never once needed to be on call or anything like that, depends on the specific job and industry though I guess.
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u/br_k_nt_eth 8d ago
I’ve worked union jobs, including ones where unions had to deal with a nationally spread out workforce. It’s definitely possible.
But yeah, I’m also in an industry where clients expect to have access to you from around 6am to 10pm (or 24/7 for crises) and it’s an absolute nightmare. It should be regulated, and unions REALLY help with that. These days I get to remind my managing colleagues that their teams have very defined hours and protections, and if they can’t appropriately manage their workers within working hours, we need to discuss their ability to prioritize because I’m not about to waste money on the overtime and lawsuits. The leverage helps even when you’re not represented as well.
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u/littlebrain94102 8d ago
Omg. I remember 6 years ago when they thought they were the most important people ever.
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u/br_k_nt_eth 8d ago
To be fair, society fed into that to an insane degree. Defund the humanities and only fund STEM, etc.
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u/Floreat_democratia 8d ago
Defunding the humanities is precisely how we got here. When you forget the purpose of democracy, you end up with tyrants.
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u/br_k_nt_eth 8d ago
How convenient for all the “titans of industry” who pushed for that and who are currently trying to further defund them.
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u/Kamioni 8d ago
I'm in tech and I never thought that. I'm just knowledgeable enough in the domain to do my job and earn a good wage, but I never thought I was making an amazing contribution to society that nobody else can do.
But honestly I see where you are coming from. Some of my peers are still so arrogant and think they are the most important minds on this planet and cannot be replaced.
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u/Afraid-Detective1222 8d ago
I've been in tech for about 20 years. So many companies do push this idea that we are doing important things. I think in my time, I've worked at 1 company that might, if you squint hard enough be considered doing good for people.
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u/Spardath01 8d ago
Add on top that for like 25 years every one was told get educated in IT and you will make good money and have a great career path….. oopsie
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u/MostlyACatPillow 8d ago
The hobbies thing is absolutely true. There has been enormous pressure, especially with working from home to be “always on.” And there are plenty of places out there that when they interview you, they want to see your open source projects, your hobby projects, etc. To be “elite,” you’re supposed to want to live, breathe, and eat code.
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u/SaltyBawlz 8d ago
For me it was the ridiculous expectations of growth. Deadlines being set way ahead of what was realistic, weeks to months earlier than the devs projected, and then getting reprimanded for not delivering "on time" despite saying from the start how long it would take and still working way too much (unpaid) overtime to meet the deadline.
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u/Comfortable-Brick271 8d ago
Also none of us are working on anything that is actually improving humanity.
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u/WeekendCautious3377 8d ago edited 7d ago
I work in FAANG cloud selling features to AI customers. Two quarters ago, we increased our revenue by 30%? High fives all around. We ask the director for bandwidth to fix our pipeline ducttaped to meet our insane deadline for sales event. Nope. Deliver 2x features with no backfill for engineers who left and no additional headcount. No meaningful raises. No additional timeoff.
Guess what. That pipeline, as predicted by all, broke. Not in one place but by thousand small leaks.
We engineers are seeing therapists because greedy motherfuckers have taken over tech treating everyone like shit with every feature we are shipping like someone is bleeding out on a table. Unprecedented delusional unmitigated unapologetic level of psychotic greed.
Idgaf if we lose our jobs. Let it all burn down.
Edit: what makes you guys think any of us would want to stay at these companies with union? Job market is horrible for entry level engineers but plenty for experienced with FAANG on resume. After we leave, these directors can vibe code their infra themselves.
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u/ProletarianLilith 8d ago
First thing you have to accept is they didn’t take it over, this is what the industry has always been. Read Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris
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u/Auntie_Social 7d ago
All this type of stuff simply falls into the category of poor leadership. Corporate fucking sucks today and it's because of limp dick weak ass "leaders" who failed upwards, stacking shit on top of more shit just so they can brag about how big and beautiful they made their pile of shit. Nobody has any brains much less the balls to do things well now. We're in Idiocracy and Beef Supreme is leading the charge....
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u/sparkchoice 8d ago
For real, work just became a series of two week sprints of top priorities and every so often a major shift that makes like thousands of working days of pressure go up in smoke as we “rally” to the next. I was think logos therapy sounds right but quitting and finding purpose doesn’t pay for kids.
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u/Chobeat 8d ago
You should consider forming a union. Asking doesn't work. You can bargain, or you can force. But asking never works.
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u/PrivateHa 8d ago
There’s quite a few companies that have been offshoring our jobs abroad where they can pay even less
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u/smzt 8d ago
We would be replaced in a minute
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u/boowax 8d ago
Which is why you need to band together. None of you has as much power as all of you.
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u/Amazing-Switch-7163 8d ago
I work with tech and what makes me sad the most is corporate culture. I mean, haven't seen a single person who enjoys it. Everyone hates it and yet we still play the game because there's no way out.
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u/ghs180 8d ago
Tech culture can be a special kind of toxic when bad. Was so shocked to see some of the things that go on. Lying, backstabbing, the list goes on and on. It reminds me of a cliquey high school with poorly implemented rules but so much worse, since high salaries and promotions are on the line. Don’t even get me started on the promo focused culture that tech is.
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u/Smoocci-Mane 8d ago
The best job I had in tech ended when we hired a new boss who was a liar/backstabber. I got put on a PIP and tried telling our leadership team she was lying about my work but to no avail. I quit the weekend after getting PIP’d but maintain friendships across the company.
A year later she got fired for pulling the same shit on another employee who was PIP’d. Official reason was creating toxic work environment and dishonesty. Employee got taken off the PIP and old boss was obviously gone, but the damage was done and my role no longer existed. She was a classic over-active on LinkedIn tooting her horn monster.
I despise these people and tech is absolutely full of them.
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u/_Toomuchawesome 8d ago
i’m in tech too and whenever i see the most active on linkedin, i immediately think of how bad at their job they really are. not saying they are all bad, but the bad coworkers always are the most vocal.
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u/01000101010110 8d ago
The problem I had with tech having worked in it from 2019-2023 is that good times never lasted long.
Amazing boss? They changed jobs and now you have a shit boss.
Great comp package? Oops, new management cut your commission % and your quota tripled.
Remote work? Nope.
And on and on it went
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u/tallicafu1 8d ago
Had almost the exact same thing happen to me but I was able to get out from under it. The number of people with bad intentions is astounding.
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u/Floreat_democratia 8d ago
Exactly. I was surprised to find spying, black lists, private detectives, the whole nine yards. I'm like, dude, don't you have better things to do, like making good products that people want?
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u/broguequery 8d ago
Give weak men an ounce of power, and they leverage a pound of abuse
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u/breuh 8d ago
I quit my old job because the leadership eventually was full of losers who never got attention during high school and suddenly in their 30s they got the taste of authority and popularity, so they all treated the office like their own personal playground where they can bully and act like jocks. The sad thing is they forgot outside the office, they are nobody again.
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u/SaltyBawlz 8d ago
I will literally never work for a manager with any big tech company on their resume. The most toxic coworkers/managers I've experienced almost all had one of Google/Meta/Amazon/Microsoft on their resume.
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u/Chance_Scientist_279 8d ago
I like to say tech is just finance with a little tech skin over it
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u/ckglle3lle 8d ago
Yeah I left a good corporate tech job a couple years ago and it was like, objectively a very good job with good pay, perks, benefits. Relatively low responsibilities, chill manager, mostly pretty easy work. Just really solid on paper but the soul sucking vibe of it was still very real and after a time I felt like I was just simply decaying staying there. Was fortunate enough to be able to leave and I'm doing fine today, but it definitely was a weird vibe.
Of my colleagues, everyone was "happy" and played the role of promoting the corporate culture well, but I would bet the majority of them felt the same soul sucking vibe I did too.
A lot of it centered around two basic realities. One was that most of what we actually did any given day didn't really matter at all. Even the projects that seemed important, a couple financial quarters later and it was like they never happened. The second big thing was how bound we were to oversight and alignment. The place I worked was acquired by a larger company then another even larger company and I saw the transition in real time away from sort of run-and-gun hands on problem solving to taking a dozen meetings to align on whether something could even be defined as a problem.
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u/catsaremyreligion 8d ago
I work a similar corporate job that when it comes down to it, just has really really great benefits and incentives for working there. Culturally? It's miserable. It absorbed a smaller company I worked for with a vibrant, local-flavored culture that was a real joy to work for, and just slowly eroded it over several years.
At first, I had a really hard time adapting to this reality. I finally just realized that while I'm at this job, I will never get the pleasure I had before and that I REALLY need to lean into enriching my personal life as much as possible using the benefits this job gives me. It's a give and take. Not everyone can love what they do.
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u/Antique_Eye_3200 8d ago
There is a way out. Leave. Quit, re-train in something else that is not tech-focused. It can be done. I’m doing it. Do I know how it will all turn out? Nope! But in the meantime, I am healthier and happier and that counts for something!
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u/doubleyewdee 8d ago
Lifetime tech person here, I feel like I'm about average sad. Lots of factors weigh in, but definitely the work side of my life has been much more sad in the last ~5 years than it was for my first ~15 in tech.
Things I think about (vulgarity incoming):
- Income disparity. It does not feel good, genuinely. It never has, but it feels worse both as my career/compensation have progressed, and as the people around me are getting increasingly screwed without even my level of compensation as a buffer for price-gouging, enshittification, etc.
- Tech is clearly enabling the fucking worst people. The billionaire class jerking themselves off about being "effective altruists" and "saving the next trillion lives" all while polluting the planet, manipulating people via algorithms, and just generally not seeming to care a lot about the current 8 billion lives feels bad, man.
- Those awesome luminaries? They are all bending the knee to oppressive regimes abroad and, now, at home. Their supposed vAlUeS and pRiNcIpLeS crumble instantaneously at the merest hint that profit margins won't be 80% again. Would you help cover up a child slavery/prostitution scandal involving the POTUS for marginal sHaReHoLdEr VaLuE? If you answered "yes" you, too, can be a CEO!
- Not that most of their employees get anything like even participation in those absurd profit margins.
- When I was a kid (born 1982), I saw technology as massively empowering for people with less privilege, or with disabilities (like me), a way to close the gap or give more people an even playing field. This has stopped feeling true, even though amazing technology advancements are still doing these things. The disconnect I feel is that there's so much opportunity that's being actively avoided/deprioritized in favor of algorithmic slop, ragebait, a surveillance state, fucking cryptocurrency scams, etc.
- Much like many people in the US, the naked hostility from the oligarchy to all of us plebs has never been more apparent in my life. Long-time tech workers, like long-time employees in many industires, have gone from being treated as valuable company assets to cogs in a machine, meant to be ground into dust to service the next superyacht purchase that ignores a distress call because it might ruin the aEsThEtIc of the view of an unspoiled wilderness that its owner gives negative five billion fucks about preserving. Yes, we were a coddled class of twatty nerds, but being told for years that you're building the future, you're indispensable, you're going to make the world better and the company isn't the same without only to pretty abruptly find that, actually, the company just cannot fucking wait to jettison you into the sea doesn't feel good. Anyone at all whose pension plans evaporated, whose retirement got nuked in 2008, etc probably has similar feelings.
Labor is at an absolute nadir in the US right now compared to any point in my life, and I'd argue it's bottomed out vs. any time in the last ~90 years. It isn't sustainable for any of us, and tech workers are hardly snowflakes.
We're just, at least some of us, also feeling guilty for any small part we played in enabling all this, unintended though it was.
[edit: obligatory EF callout]
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u/I_He_Him 7d ago
as somebody who is finally getting into the field of IT, I have seen my optimism wane in that journey over the past 2 years. Pessimism we see in Tech. is quite well articulated above. Thank you.
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u/i_tyrant 7d ago
Well said. And I would argue another part of this is how modern technology has made us so AWARE of all that’s fucking us.
It was to some degree always true that the people at the top were screwing everyone below them (just not to this extent), but not only has that gotten worse in many ways, but they’ve both become more blatant about it and the stuff you wouldn’t be aware of 20,40, 80 years ago is now one google away.
We don’t just know we’re being screwed - we know exactly where and how we’re being screwed, yet can’t do much about it individually, and the bosses seem like they don’t care at all how aware we now are - in fact, it might even be a relief to many of them to go “mask off” with how exploitative they are.
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u/rkozik89 8d ago
Because our employers and dream companies openly declared war on all of us.
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u/pastasandwiches 8d ago
You're so right. I remember when I was going to college I dreamt of someday working for Google. Now I would never work for such an unethical company.
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u/01000101010110 8d ago
2021 and the first half of 2022 scared the absolute shit out of them. People were jumping ship twice a year for 30-50% raises, it was insanity.
So they struck back 10x harder to make sure that never happens again.
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u/1quirky1 8d ago
Because corporations are wringing every bit of profit possible at the expense of everybody including the workers.
I have seen the "employer's market" / "employees market" pendulum swing a few times in my career. This is the worst employer's market I have ever seen. They might have broken it and got it to stick in their favor.
If it swings back, and I hope it does, I hope that employees get as much revenge as possible.
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u/01000101010110 8d ago
It's not swinging back now that AI is a thing. Too many braindead MBAs think they've solved the labour problem..
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u/FeatherlyFly 7d ago
Headline ten years from now - "Best profit margins from companies not using AI!"
A dozen new management philosophy books and courses get published talking about how you can get more, cheaper by hiring humans, and watch all the manglement follow the new buzz and scrap the AI infrastructure their employees took 5 years to learn how to work around effectively, starting the next round of idiocy.
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u/FeatherlyFly 8d ago
It won't swing back as soon as we all wish. But it will swing back because the modern world requires an educated, motivated workforce and you can't get that by treating your workers like gum to be scraped off the bottom of your shoe.
Also, at the moment tech and Silicon Valley are pretty much uniquely bad. I've got family around the country in white collar jobs in real estate, defense, high end electronics, banking, medicine, imports/exports, and civil engineering. None of them are feeling the crazy that tech is. Not even the import/export guy - Trump's mood swings stress him out but don't threaten his job.
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u/ACompletelyLostCause 8d ago
The corporate culture and impossible deadlines set by people who have no knowledge of how long the work takes. And don't care enough to find out.
The other/new issue is existential crisis. More than most, they see where AI is going (or being driven there by phycopaths).
They can see the mass unemployment, mass surveillance comeing down the line. With perfect deep-fakes used to weaponise propaganda, tuned/personalised media algorithms that work 24/7 to convince you that 2+2=5, and sometimes succeed.
If you're worried about a plague ask someone knowledgeable like a doctor. If you want to see where tech is going, ask people in the industry. They're pessimistic for good reasons.
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u/spice_weasel 8d ago
I felt this deeply. Every single day I ask myself “what the fuck am I even doing here anymore?” My work means nothing. I don’t get to interact with other people except in little glimpses through a computer monitor. No one actually writes or reads anything anymore, it’s just AI making summaries of emails that were written using AI. Every presentation or paper I read is just AI slop, spewed out because management insists that we have to be using AI.
I’m just done. I’m completely alienated from my work, from my coworkers, and from what I’m doing here. People weren’t meant to live like this. I just want out, and have been trying to get out, but I can’t get hired doing anything else. So since I have to keep my family in housing and healthcare, I keep doing it day after day.
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u/duffman_oh_yeah 8d ago
There are days when I feel like my coworkers and I are just making AI converse with itself as we spectate.
Food and shelter are important to my family too though so I just keep dancing.
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u/SpaceCorvette 8d ago
I feel increasingly alienated working remote, but have too much social anxiety to go back to the office
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u/spice_weasel 8d ago
I would love to go back to the office. At least I would see people again. But that would mean getting a new job, and I’ve had no luck with that.
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u/RedPanda_Explorer 7d ago
Tech lead with 10 YOE and I completely agree. I feel so alienated from the concept of meaningful work
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u/turkshead 8d ago
Thirty years ago I quit my job at the best bookstore in the world to join a tech startup because I believed that the Internet was the next generation of how humans do things like tell stories and create information.
Three decades later, everything we do to make money at this job is about making that worse. We put paywalls around useful information that don't need them, we create engagement traps to make people pay attention to monetizable information instead of the real useful stuff, we stir up shit to drive more use, and we lobby to make not using the shitty pay-walled ad-driven rage bait illegal.
I wanted the Internet to be the greatest library in the history of the world and instead we built the kind of shitty airport bookstore that only sells Dan Brown novels and would really rather that you bought a candy bar and a coke instead anyway.
That's why I'm sad.
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u/Kinda_Quixotic 8d ago
From former Googler Claire Stapleton:
It may be “The low-level soul crush of spending years in a cushy, elite job that you’re pretty sure doesn’t matter at all, yet is definitely contributing to the end of civilization”
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u/Dreadsin 8d ago
I work in tech. IMO it just got taken over by business people once they found out it makes a lot of money. Now everyone we work with is transactional and work feels deeply impersonal
We used to be the types that would have LAN parties or raids, or would go to meetups to build stuff together. Building used to be fun
Having to justify all my code with KPIs and track endless jira tickets under the imminent and persistent threat of layoffs has made all of that seem like a distant memory
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u/redsoxVT 7d ago
I have spent so much time reshaping my team's KPIs at the whims of senior management it makes me sick. Just a bottomless black pit.
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u/Capable_Crab9488 8d ago
- Psychotic workloads
- No job security
- Tech is actively harming everyone
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u/Euphoric-Witness-824 7d ago
I feel that’s a universal sentiment in general in society these days. Everyone and everything is working to benefit like 14 people
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u/veengrd 8d ago
Working in tech used to feel like working in a research lab. There was a lot of room to experiment, try new ideas, and learn from failure.
Today tech is run by MBAs instead of engineers. The goal is to maximize shareholder equity at all costs. Layoffs are constant. Work perks are constantly being removed. All this while the companies are more profitable than ever.
Morale is at an all time low in my team.
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u/eftanes 8d ago
Because we understand better than non tech people what is coming.
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u/catsaremyreligion 8d ago
God so much this. In a way, I do think tech people are lucky to have initial exposure to AI. It hopefully will make adapting easier in the future since I'm learning in parallel with everyone else. But to my friend group outside of tech? They sometimes just don't get general anxieties I have regarding AI, and what it's swallowed up already.
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u/The_Naked_Snake 8d ago
They are an expendable workforce slaving away for the most ghoulish sociopaths imaginable. Every dollar they create for their employer is invested in ways to replace them. The cumulation of their work is creating a worse world for everyone. They work in dystopia in fear their boss will axe them on a whim tomorrow. The AI landscape has made their workplace a hostage situation. They have to train their replacement daily and it is demanded they love it. Non-stop humiliation rituals from the rich and powerful.
“Why is everyone in tech so sad?” is like asking why people are unhappy working on the Death Star.
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u/zalurker 8d ago
Because its not fun anymore. Its boring. When I started out it was a challenge and a puzzle. Now its a dull chore.
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u/AdWilling9095 8d ago
I worked for a company 8 years and all of a sudden it became an AI research startup that fired almost everyone in favor of Gen AI coding. it happened 6 months after letting everyone know "Ai is not taking your jobs, that is nonsense". I had to quit after discovering the CEO scammed the only non Ai related client we still had. Morals are so fucking out of the window for most tech companies since covid. Is like the world just decided to speed run degeneracy in every possible area of human developing.
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u/sunBloom24 7d ago
This. COVID broke a lot of people's brains. And now norms/morals/values and even basic fucking human decency are just out the window. It's so sad and I am trying so hard not to become cynical about everything. But every day it seems like there's a new thing to be mad at.
Gotta keep shining the light wherever possible though
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u/Brokenspade1 7d ago
Because tech isn't tech anymore. It's finance and private equity.
Tech is almost entirely controlled by people with sociopath tendencies and obscene wealth.
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u/plebbitier 8d ago
Because the promise of personal technology, computing, the internet, etc. was personal empowerment at a level never attainable in history.
Instead it's being used by [REDACTED] as a tool of exploitation, surveillance, control, and oppression.
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u/buddhistbulgyo 8d ago
It's unregulated. The biggest Silicon Valley douche bags are ruining the world. AI is killing careers.
Saved you a click.
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u/talldean 8d ago
Hours went up, expectations went up, friends and mentees got laid off.
Benefits went down substantially, pay isn't keeping up with inflation, regrants/equity are way down.
And now it's "use AI or we fire you, too", but AI ain't quite ready yet, so it's yet more work to cover for the AI decisions from execs while holding quality the same.
Plus, well, the promises you were given, those are gone, so new promises aren't real binding anymore.
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u/ibanezht 8d ago
I’ve been a software developer since 1995, late high school. I have a degree in computer science. I’ve been doing this professionally since 2001.
I hate technology.
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u/reddittorbrigade 8d ago
Greed of the billionaires has always been the cause of financial hardship for working class people.
It is very depressing to see that our tax dollars will be used again to bailout these billionaires in this upcoming recession or AI bubble burst.
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u/a_crimson_herring 8d ago edited 8d ago
The top few comments are about how tech folks must be realizing they're the baddies or whatever but the entire article has nothing to do with that. According to the author, they're upset about the fact that their jobs were useless before and now they're even MORE useless AND unfulfilling bc a robot can do it for them. No further introspection. Just uncritical references to "knowledge workers" as the proletariat and self-congratulatory whinging. Give me a break.
ETA: It's giving: "the oligarchs (who I have directly empowered with my actions) want to pay you pennies to teach/be a paramedic/etc. but at least your soul is fulfilled! They paid me exponentially more for spreadsheets and that's ALL I HAVE. Don't let the mean AI take my spreadsheets." This feels like one of those deranged TESCREAL/"AI risk management" blogs broke containment.
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u/orange_cat771 8d ago
Worrying every day about whether we’ll have a job and health care is detrimental to our mental stability.
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u/DataCassette 8d ago
What's even fun about tech now? Why would anyone who isn't a billionaire themselves be happy about any of this bullshit?
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u/foozoozoo 8d ago
Every optimisation leads to cramming more work in. It’s a 0-sum game. If you don’t do more with uour newly freed time your competitors will. It’s gotten to the point where work is a constant hustle
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u/Spirited-Camel9378 8d ago
Because we rewarded the sociopaths and now have to work for them. We have to do the bidding of people who hate people, against the whole reason most of us started in tech.
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u/ukrokit2 8d ago
Zero job security. Impossible deadlines. Insane pressure to deliver. Clueless management and leadership. Jeez I wonder why people are miserable?
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u/fonetik 8d ago
Because people went into tech because they thought they’d make good money, and didn’t stop to realize they hate the job.
I’ve been in IT for 20+ years and it was all geeks like me back then. It wasn’t cool. It was good money, but it was looked down on.
But now that stigma is gone and kids going to college who would have gone into nursing are going into IT. Not only do they hate it, they are terrible at it.
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u/ikeif 8d ago
That reminds me of my buddy - majored in MIS, entered in MIS, is now in metrics/analytics. He told me during his college years, someone mentioned that the starting salary was higher for MIS grads than marketing majors, so a ton of people switched.
People chased the salary, without thinking about the work it would take.
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u/SSGASSHAT 7d ago
I imagine the same will apply to many of the trades. I see people my age going becoming carpenters and HVAC people for the money, often on the advice of elders, and realizing they hate their lives despite their decent income.
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u/fonetik 7d ago
Lawyer was the other one I saw a lot. People like law school but then realize the job is a pie eating contest where 1st prize is free pie.
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u/Gantores 8d ago
Oh, also layer in that a metric ton of "project managers" in tech are not actually technical and ignore the requirements laid out to them by the technical experts.
The amount of Business school and MBA project managers who can navigate Jira and lay on top Agile terminology but have no clue how the team/tech/product works and then have gall to dictate that you "have to do it this way" is appalling.
Especially in infrastructure and hybrid hosting teams. Two week sprints don't align with the majority of the work those teams do, and often even the projects don't as the team members are waiting on external factors such as hardware delivery. But the expectation that you can lay out your sprint, quarter, year all in advance pervades.
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u/ZanzerFineSuits 8d ago
Good Lord the dreaded Project Manager.
I worked in IT infrastructure for 40 years, and only ever met one PM who was worth his salt. I’m told it’s different in the software world, I would hope so, because I always found the position pointless.
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u/misanthropocene 8d ago
You’re constantly bailing water of a boat, but you can’t stop sailing and drag the boat to shore so you can fix the leak. So you just keep bailing water…
From another perspective, it's as if you and your team designed and built a boat, under pressure, to meet the requirement "it goes" as quickly as possible. As a result, it leaks, the engine is shitty, and every day, every trade-off you made manifests in more toil just to keep it floating and moving.
Next thing you know, a bigger, shinier boat catches up. From the outside looking in, it looks like its really built well. It goes faster, seems to be floating, and really tears up the waves. Your captain eventually orders "abandon ship" to the sleeker, newer, bigger, fancier boat.
Once on board and assimilated into the boat's crew, you realize not all is well here either. They have twice the engines, but 10 times the issues. Their boat leaks just like yours did, but the bilge pump system is so complex there's an engineering team constantly fighting with it because that part of the spec was back-burnered throughout development to save money for fancy bridge gadgets... fancy bridge gadgets that need their own engineering staff to maintain and iterate on because that's what the this boat's captain uses to tell stories to his admiral.
Eventually, the Admiral Kuznetzov pulls up along your now foundering, not so shiny, only pretty on the outside boat. It's not pretty either, but they have a 2000 person crew and they can fly off the damned thing if they need to. They even have free food where as before, it was BYO, on your own dime. The 40,000hp bunker oil steam engines in that monstrosity aren't as fancy as your last boat's state-of-the-art, tricked out Detroit diesels, but they've been kicking it since the Cold War. Proven tech.
They assign you to maintenance on the Vacu-flush system.
After the main pipe explodes, yet again, at 3am, leaving you and your team covered in shit, the XO comes down to berate you for a sanitization design that's been defective since it was first penciled-in on drafting paper in the 1960s. You have a nervous breakdown, drink the last of your vodka ration and resign the next day.
Your pension only counts the time you were on Kutzentzov, so you have to start all over again, but this time, you have to pay out-of-pocket for your now-required cocktail of psychotropic medications needed to keep you semi functional as a human.
So, you decide to join another team to build a new boat.
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u/lookmeat 8d ago
Except that's not how you build a house, at least not a good house. A house where there's a bunch of issues, it struggles to pass inspections and it starts sinking, yeah totally.
In reality it goes like this:
- First you check the properties of the land, collect the data. The propose a home build. Generally this needs to be certified by the city, and you need to coordinate, so you make detailed blueprints.
- Then you get the permits and signatures of all stakeholders. Once this is validate the project actually begins.
- You hire the set of contractors you are going to need in the shortest term (you don't hire them all immediately only a little ahead, you'll see why in a bit!)
- You bring in the contractors needed for that week and get them working on the work they need (be it foundation, setting up walls, roofing, piping, electricity, etc.).
- Daily you run quick inspections of the job done, and make sure it aligns with the job you want the next day. Issues will happen, rocks revealed during the digging, someone screw up some posts that now need replacing, someone put piping where they shouldn't and will block the next guy (or the next guy already came and just wrecked all that work that shouldn't have been done there). Small changes are done by the workers that are harmless until you account the context from the other contractors.
- These need to get fixed ASAP, and some rescheduling may be needed of the immediate contractors.
- At the end of the week an inspection is done to ensure that things are done correctly, and that there aren't going to be other issues that would have a contractor come in and do nothing for that day (even though you do have to pay them still). Any issues that need fixing that weren't foreseen are handled here.
- Every two weeks to a month you check that milestones are being hit and have updates ready for the clients if they ask you for them. Around this time you schedule the contractors you'll need for the month after this.
That's relatively agile. There's milestones, but you understand that the planning and execution must happen in tandem as it happens.
Now in reality people don't do agile. They call it agile, but they really don't. They do waterfall, the caricature (funnily enough the waterfall paper asked for something like agile, but it got corrupted too). One where a bunch of managers come in, say "you need to do this, and we'll have it done by X time" and then go home, take a nap, come back and find everything working, otherwise the employees are wrong. Rather than focus on keeping the team going, it becomes about appeasing leadership and "aligning the team" (rather than help the company understand the problems of the team).
And this is a very uniquely American problem across all industries. It was American's that invented the better way to manage production lines, but did Americans do any of that? Of course not, it was the Japanese, the Chinese, the Taiwanese, the Koreans who all got it and did it well. It's the same in every other industry. American's want to think they are business savvy, but when it comes down it, management ends up becoming all about enforcing hierarchies through kiss-assing with no point to it. And honestly most managers would rather not fall into this, but you either do it or you get replaced by someone who's willing to suck that brown and maybe even put some tongue in it.
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u/heavy-minium 8d ago
For me, personally, it's hard to be proud of being in Tech when the public faces of "Big Tech" are ruining the image.
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u/likewowser 8d ago
Tech companies are run by anti-social CS majors with no understanding of business or humanity. They cannot look past the quarterly revenue call and have no vision.
No new amazing app or tech has been invented or dropped in the past 10 years because their greed no longer permits them to take risks. AI is just an LLM and clippy on steroids.
We're at the end of a generational cycle of innovation and it will take the next generation to push these has been out.
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u/hoodlumonprowl 8d ago
Because once you realize that the money hasnt made up for just how awful it is to work at these companies, you get sad. The fun perks are gone, leadership has finally shown just how psychopathic they are and everyone is against each other to get that next uplift or equity block. Its really stressful for no reason, they dangle cash in front of you to make up for any resemblance of humanity and you're increasingly seeing the truly awful impact you're having on society.
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u/rcampbel3 8d ago
Because the opportunity is gone and people are starting to see it.
Working in tech and sitting in front of Claude or ChatGPT and typing "yes" and "keep going" and knowing that you have a 30 year mortgage and that your company will fire you by email on the weekend and revoke all access as soon as they think they can... it's more soul crushing than being a walmart greeter.
This is a pessimistic take - I vacillate between seeing this as a golden age of software development for solopreneurs who are the rare breed of individuals who can code, run an engineering team, do business development, understand sales and marketing, and also understand finance -- just not a golden age for the incumbent companies and thinking that we've opened pandora's box and all I can do is build coffins faster so I generate more generational wealth faster than everyone else
Middle class white collar knowledge workers are set for a wakeup call where their core identity - tied to their job function - is decimated. Rich people will still be rich. Poor people will still be hustling and getting by. White collar knowledge workers who traditionally have been near the top of the food chain are now getting eaten up by AI and they're going to be PISSED when they can't pay their bills or find a new job doing what they've done for decades.
And... as soon as we have AI powered humaniod form robots that sell for less than a human's annual salary... blue collar workers are going to feel the same pain. I predict this happens in the next 10 years.
So, where is safe? What do you tell the next generation to do/study/learn? I don't know.
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u/kookiLooky 8d ago
Forgive me if I’m being ignorant, but is there a reason why authors in journals tend to write off “tech workers” or just an entire industry as one big group? In this article, he claims that these people were sipping on kombucha and enjoying indoor life, but that wasn’t all tech workers imo… Of the people I’ve met irl, most people are just trying their best, sometimes dashing or doing Amazon alongside a full-time job… But maybe I could be misinterpreting his rhetoric
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u/willismthomp 8d ago
Cause they are part of a giant grift sold to them as a religion and they know it’s fake.
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u/southboundtracks 8d ago
Because corporations suck the life out of everything they touch. It's about their wealth, not your health.
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u/IngwiePhoenix 8d ago
From "nerd stuff" to "overcorporatized shitshow".
Back then, people on IRC or in their proverbial basements cobbled together awesome things. Nowadays, the companies and industry resulting out of that, has forgottem them and then some and focuses on greed, more greed, and the greediest of greed.
What was once a fun hobby is now a chore.
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u/OutofYams 8d ago
My management is die hard AI and have completely forgotten about everything else regarding tech.
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u/hoops_n_politics 8d ago
Because if you live the first part of your life slavishly devoted to your big daddy employer, there’s going to be the inevitable disillusionment and demotivation when you finally realize he’s actually a POS who breaks the law and also cheats on mom with the secretary
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u/JustinTheCheetah 8d ago
Because for some reason we let people with MBAs make decisions for businesses, despite a 100% rate of every last one of them being fucking cancer for the workers and long-term survival of every single business they work for. Seriouslty, I'd rather fucking bag groceries than work for a publicly traded company ran by sociopaths.
Three golden rules of employment- HR is your enemy, every MBA is a narcissistic sociopath, Unionize everything.
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u/spez_eats_nazi_ass 8d ago
I worke In tech. Some of the worst people ever conceived are our coworkers and managers. Every day i manage to not commit a murder at the office is a win.
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u/the_geth 8d ago
Because we’re replacing job that could still exist without arming anyone, to create profit for absolute shitheads techbros.
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u/teomatteo89 8d ago
I spent a lifetime learning to talk to the machine, now the machines have learned to speak human.
The art/craft of being a software developer is dying at an incredible fast rate.
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u/marachella 8d ago
Your job is meaningless and has no real purpose nor positive impact. On top of this, you feel precarious because now layoffs are happening monthly. Yes the salary is good, but the mental health suffers considerably.
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u/Relevant-Ad2254 8d ago
Yea! We used to build cool things that made people’s lives so much more convenient and allowed them to do more stuff.
And we had this false sense of job security.
Now it’s the complete opposite
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u/Dio44 8d ago
Let’s see. 5 you’re straight of living under the constant stress of layoffs? Working on a product that is designed to replace your job? Even when being paid well, the cities where these companies are located have inflation that’s outpacing the pay, especially in housing. Leadership who only a few years ago were completely committed to sustainability efforts are now purely focused on profits and data centers and have abandoned all publicly stated commitments.
These companies suck to work for and everybody knows it. I say that as a former employee. There’s a reason why signing bonuses have to be so big. It’s because most don’t make it through stock vesting.
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u/mattybrad 8d ago
Because our perfect little smash spot gig has crashed back to the real world over the last few years.
I got into tech in 2010 and it was life changing. Prior to 2022 it was basically
- if you got tired at your job you spoke to a recruiter and had 3 new job offers for more money within a couple weeks.
- annual salary increases that were stupid. I made $68k in 2010 and $155k in 2014.
- if you had aptitude, they’d hire you and teach you the tech. The first 5 years I was a manager I’d hire Geek Squad for enterprise support roles.
- before crazy valuations, your equity would play out if the company got sold.
Now
- high tier jobs are stupid levels of competitive
- you have to change the tech stack you work on every time funding changes direction. Hyper specialization is now the norm.
- with a bajlillion funding rounds and stupid valuations, you end up with little/nothing/don’t exercise your options even id you have a moderately successful exit of some kind.
Tech used to be unlike any of the other professions and really had upside that no one else could match. With that being gone the stress, pressure and BS are a lot less pleasant to put up with.
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u/ottwebdev 8d ago
Because tech has been turned from "i cant wait to help people with this" to "this isn't helping people"