Software engineer, here. Yep, the burnout is real. I consider myself fortunate, however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
I think that’s pretty much where the entire industry will go soon.
Huh. Maybe I will have a shot at getting a job… Oh, wait, I have 35 years experience, am over 50 and have been unemployed for 16 months. Never mind.
I gave up the humiliating shit show called a job search 3 months ago, and frankly my last job killed any interest in software development anyway.
It’s all idiots telling professionals they’re wrong and incompetent while blaming them for the ongoing production failures we solved and explained every month for a year but still can’t get the code past review because “it does too much”. 30 fucking lines of code “does too much”. Pompous morons.
We’re a threat of competence, and they’re excising us relentlessly. I will laugh bitterly as I watch the soon to be torrent of fiascos and lamentations these idiots spout while still finding a way to blame software engineers.
I’m sorry that happened to you. I’ve also seen it happen to a lot of very good engineers I’ve known over the years. It’s truly insane. I know some people who’ve had to dip into their 401k accounts early just to keep their heads above water, and it’s going to be an economy-wide disaster soon.
Yeah, I didn’t want to retire yet, but like my father before me, the choice was not mine. I saved enough that I should be able to actually retire and survive on part-time low income jobs. Unless the market crashes for a year straight cuz after that I got to start selling stocks.
I really hope you’re right. My company is still in the “use as much as possible” phase, and my manager is quoting Jensen about “you need to use half your salary on tokens!”. I’m looking for other work, but everyone is looking for vibe coders at the moment it seems…
I’ve gone from really loving my job, to hate my life.
Mo Bitar had a bit of advice that I think is applicable here: Lie. Claim to be an extreme 10x vibe whatever. Put “AI enablement” (whatever the fuck that means) in your LinkedIn profile. And wherever you get hired, commit to using enormous amounts of tokens as they require.
Then just… write code. Oh, definitely use the LLMs, too, but not for anything important. Set them to work writing BASH scripts or something. Get them burning through tokens to summarize all the corporate documentation you can find. Have agents creating agents to test the output of other agents and report to more agents on what the agents are doing. Meanwhile, do real work. Make sure that for every PR, you have the AI do one thing on it, to give it that code-slop shine.
Sucks that this is where we’re at, but it is what it is.
I’ve had LLM generate so many web sites about various random animals I’ve crammed into a prompt. No one wants web sites about those random animals, but my management is pleased at my token utilization.
Can do my real work and get praised for my actual productivity, and burn the tokens to get praised on AI adoption…
Clever! And when sanity starts reasserting itself at your company, you can claim you’re focusing on saving the company money by reducing your token usage and just… make fewer animal slop websites.
however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
and the Slop companies are still losing money… the end result still seems to be more expensive, crappier code, yet most companies seem to be so nearsighted they are not jumping into the spike pit face first
Software engineer, here. Yep, the burnout is real. I consider myself fortunate, however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
I think that’s pretty much where the entire industry will go soon.
Huh. Maybe I will have a shot at getting a job… Oh, wait, I have 35 years experience, am over 50 and have been unemployed for 16 months. Never mind.
I gave up the humiliating shit show called a job search 3 months ago, and frankly my last job killed any interest in software development anyway.
It’s all idiots telling professionals they’re wrong and incompetent while blaming them for the ongoing production failures we solved and explained every month for a year but still can’t get the code past review because “it does too much”. 30 fucking lines of code “does too much”. Pompous morons.
We’re a threat of competence, and they’re excising us relentlessly. I will laugh bitterly as I watch the soon to be torrent of fiascos and lamentations these idiots spout while still finding a way to blame software engineers.
I’m sorry that happened to you. I’ve also seen it happen to a lot of very good engineers I’ve known over the years. It’s truly insane. I know some people who’ve had to dip into their 401k accounts early just to keep their heads above water, and it’s going to be an economy-wide disaster soon.
Yeah, I didn’t want to retire yet, but like my father before me, the choice was not mine. I saved enough that I should be able to actually retire and survive on part-time low income jobs. Unless the market crashes for a year straight cuz after that I got to start selling stocks.
I really hope you’re right. My company is still in the “use as much as possible” phase, and my manager is quoting Jensen about “you need to use half your salary on tokens!”. I’m looking for other work, but everyone is looking for vibe coders at the moment it seems…
I’ve gone from really loving my job, to hate my life.
Mo Bitar had a bit of advice that I think is applicable here: Lie. Claim to be an extreme 10x vibe whatever. Put “AI enablement” (whatever the fuck that means) in your LinkedIn profile. And wherever you get hired, commit to using enormous amounts of tokens as they require.
Then just… write code. Oh, definitely use the LLMs, too, but not for anything important. Set them to work writing BASH scripts or something. Get them burning through tokens to summarize all the corporate documentation you can find. Have agents creating agents to test the output of other agents and report to more agents on what the agents are doing. Meanwhile, do real work. Make sure that for every PR, you have the AI do one thing on it, to give it that code-slop shine.
Sucks that this is where we’re at, but it is what it is.
I’ve had LLM generate so many web sites about various random animals I’ve crammed into a prompt. No one wants web sites about those random animals, but my management is pleased at my token utilization.
Can do my real work and get praised for my actual productivity, and burn the tokens to get praised on AI adoption…
Clever! And when sanity starts reasserting itself at your company, you can claim you’re focusing on saving the company money by reducing your token usage and just… make fewer animal slop websites.
and the Slop companies are still losing money… the end result still seems to be more expensive, crappier code, yet most companies seem to be so nearsighted they are not jumping into the spike pit face first
Ours is trying to cut everything to the bone to avoid admitting AI is not the future.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.