So it’s mid-afternoon on a annoyingly warm November day and here I am sitting here in my home office staring at a nice glass of Irish Whiskey. I didn’t take today off. I’ve just decided that I’ve had enough of the bullshit for one day. That’s where the whiskey comes in.
Of course this week had to be the week that I committed to taking a THC tolerance break. That’s a shame. But honestly, the whole point is to [a] make sure I’m not over-indulging, [b] to reset my accumulated tolerance and [c] make sure there isn’t anything pertinent being left on table by numbing myself to all kinds of external shit I’d rather not deal with. Well it’s been three days and I’m already regretting this move. With any luck my therapist will see this and we’ll have a nice long chat about it later this week (coin flip chance on that - she sometimes reads this blog - sometimes doesn’t). In any event, I haven’t actually taken a T-Break since before the election of our esteemed piece of shit and chief, Donald J. Trump. It’s been a minute.
That being what it is, fuck this industry. The AI bubble is clearly on the verge of popping. Big money which happens to be in the know is starting to make big moves out of the market. Other big money (aka Warren Buffet) are moving funds into more established companies (aka Google) that will take a hit but undoubtedly survive. This bubble is so big everything is going to take a dive right along with these worthless husks of wannabe companies that are pushing AI. A lot of the non-AI companies will survive. All of the AI companies will go tits up and their “assets” will be bought for pennies on the dollar by the survivors. The reality is that this is meaningless. That’s because you and me, the “retail” stock holders are going to end up holding the bag.
Of course by “you and me” I really mean you. I’m mostly out of the stock market now. While I did get some RSUs and some ESPP recently, I sold that shit the second it showed up in my account. I don’t have faith in the idiots running the company I work for. I have even less faith in the rest of this industry. As for my retirement (such a delicious lie that the billionaires have sold us on, amirite) most of my long term investment money is stashed in other vehicles and has been for almost an entire year because I’ve been anticipating a market crash since the day Trump took office. He’s a fucking moron of the highest order and can’t be trusted to mind a bodega in NYC (a duty that cats are entrusted with) much less the world’s biggest economy.
But the joke is on me. Trump’s idiocy will just be the multiplier effect for what the Tin Gods of Tech have been cooking up. And boy have they been cooking up something special for all of us. I feel like I’ve been watching that final scene from “Scarface” for the last year where Tony Montana is liberally taking snorts from a huge pile of cocaine on his desk. That’s basically what the Tech Industry is doing with AI. If you’ve seen the film (and if you haven’t stop reading this dribble and go watch it) you know how it ends. There wasn’t enough cocaine in the world that could stop Tony from receiving what fate had in store for him.
Progress Update: I have finished drinking the second glass of Irish Whiskey. About to pour a third. Thankfully I’ve already decided to be done with being productive at work today so it doesn’t matter. I can’t win no matter how hard or long I work, so why bother? The only way to win is not to play. That is pretty sad too. Most of my problem isn’t the fact that we can’t do what we are being asked, but rather its because we are being tasked with meeting a six month “planned schedule” (real Agile, right) that we “agreed” to months ago. The only problem is that we are forced to agree to things that we literally have no idea what any of the actual details are. Then when they do give us details, you can’t really rely on them because they are constantly changing those details.
“But but ITF… that’s how agile works!” No it isn’t. Agile is about releasing software early and often to clients and focusing on results rather than all the other bullshit. Then its about getting their feedback and incorporating it. We haven’t released a single goddamn thing to actual paying clients around this initiative. The people at the top of course keep changing their minds and the timelines keep getting lengthened while the scope keeps right on growing. The entire thing is a fucking mess. As soon as we feel like we are starting to make actual progress, some asshat with a title that makes his dick bigger than mine shows up and destroys that feeling by delivering confirmation of our inadequacy while simultaneously making us wonder whether or not this is actually ever going to end.
But hey it’s not all bad right? Actually yes it is. Sometime last week we were given the news that we would soon be receiving even more chaos in the form of “AI” as our CEO has now decided that AI must absolutely be integrated into every single product we offer which apparently includes the one I’m working on. We have no idea what AI related nonsense we’ll be adding, but we’ve been told that we’ll find out by early December.
Sometime after mid-December I’ll be taking off for the rest of the year, as I tend to do. That ensures that I’ll have just enough time to absorb the horror of whatever this “Confederacy of Dunces” manages to brainstorm and draw the appropriate motivation I require to spend the last few weeks of this year immersed in the biggest bender the world has ever seen. Okay, maybe not the biggest. Certainly not Scarface big. But something notable. That much is for sure.
TLDR: If you are investing in this dumpster fire of an industry, get your money out now. You’ll thank me relatively soon. This industry is more fucked than Turkish in “Snatch” after he bets the gypsies that the dog will get proper fucked and ends up on the losing end of the wager.
If you work in this industry, then you have my sympathy. We are the damned.