So for those of you following along you probably noticed that I didn’t post anything here last month. There are a lot of reasons for this, but ultimately the biggest one is that I wanted to take a break from writing ITF content. Why? Well as it turns out I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last month and I’ve started to make just a little progress towards figuring out what my next step past IT / Tech is. Spoiler alert: As of right now that step doesn’t involve writing about these topics, at least not in anyway that would be expected to keep the lights on and put food on my table.
This period of reflection also happens to coincide with an actual break from work. Unlike in prior years when I took “breaks” from work in which I still attempted to at least keep an eye on things by reviewing Teams / Slack / Email every few days, I didn’t do that this year. I needed to straight up detox when it came to what is clearly devolving into a toxic corporate culture at my current employer. On top of that on my way out the door for the year, they basically made it clear that once things got kicked off in 2026, we were going to be spending a great deal of our time on AI related idiocy.
Now you all know how I feel about this AI bubble, so I’m not going to belabor that point. Needless to say its yet another bad decision pushed by a leadership team that is far more concerned with chasing trends, clout and share valuations than it is with developing tools and solutions targeted at actual problems that customers have. Yes that’s a hard path. But ultimately providing real value to customers is the only way to build a long term business with a strong foundation. Every other path is basically a lie that the greed mongers tell us and themselves so that they can avoid taking responsibility for dismantling what used to be a solid business.
Maybe it’s the fact that my employer is publicly traded. After all its no coincidence that they are chasing the very trends that the analysts keep asking them about on the earnings calls. Personally I just read the transcripts of them after the fact as I can’t stand to hear our CEO speak. He’s an idiot and a charlatan of the highest order and I’m far from the only one who thinks so. Since he’s following the lead of the so-called analysts, one can only conclude that they are also idiots. But then again, it isn’t their job to run the company.
However bad mouthing one shitty corporate executive who slithers around within in an endless sea of them isn’t the point of this post. No the point of this post is to share that because I’ve finally started to take the first baby steps towards actually trying to craft the next phase of my existence, that my relationship with work and my relationship with the ITF website will begin to change. They can’t change independently of one another because they are co-dependent.
What do I mean by that? This website is an outlet for me. Maybe the term “pressure release valve” might be more accurate. My therapist has pointed this out to me many many times and she is one hundred percent right. In order to continue to stay in tech I basically depend on this website as it allows me to vent and express my true feelings without worrying about possible retaliation. Also to be clear, this is not a theoretical concern: my employer has absolutely chased down employees who violate their RSU agreements by saying “too much”. The reality is that once I make the decision to start downshifting my relationship with my current career and tech at large, my relationship with this website will change. If I start caring less about the former, I will start caring less about later. The two go together like peas and carrots.
So with that prelude out of the way: I have finally made the decision to begin pulling back from my current job and my tech career as a whole. You can call it quiet quitting or whatever you’d like, but the reality is that I’m done going out of my way to fix things and save the day when the opportunity arises. It’s not worth it. Plus I need what remains of my brain power after work to chase my other project, which involves writing, but absolutely does not involve writing about tech. I want to write. I want to create. These urges are core to every fiber of my being. But I’m done taking the process of creating software seriously. In a company with hundreds of software engineers, I’m going to start depending more on the collective to resolve more of the issues that come up and begin acting “as if”.
What does that mean? I’m done pouring my soul into this tech shit. It’s a job and frankly its a job I don’t like in an industry I despise. But I’m really tired of being angry about it. It takes a lot of effort and energy to remain angry. It’s an emotion that feeds on one’s very soul. That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to post anything here, because I’m sure that until I finally put something successful together and get something serious published in a big boy sort of way, I’m going to need to use this release valve especially in the face of ever increasing AI enshittification at work. But it does mean I’m really done working more than 40 hours a week. I’m done implicitly volunteering to fix things because every time I become aware of a problem, up until now I couldn’t help but to dig deeper.
That’s because when it comes to problem solving, I’m a bit of a junkie. I have a problem. My wife has told me about this for years. Sometimes she just won’t tell me about problems because she knows there is a solid chance that I’ll drop everything and attack it immediately and she hates seeing me do that to myself. It’s a shame that I make her feel like that she can’t share things with me. I’m really going to try and be better at that this year because goodness knows, this mentality has been wearing me down for years. When I curtail that and focus on just doing my actual job instead of trying to be everything to everybody, that is going to free up my attention and brain power for other pursuits. Pursuits which I have started to pursue over the last few weeks while being truly off of work for the first time in quite awhile. My new writing project is where I want to shift my creative energy and effort. It’s a fictional project and thus requires me to flex muscles that I haven’t really flexed while writing, at least not since I was a teenager and writing sci-fi short stories type of things.
Of course the people who employ me probably won’t like this. That’s okay. I don’t like them. At some point if I’m truly going to leave tech and do it without some sudden “out of the blue” type of finale involving me either rage quitting or being laid off and effectively aged out of the career altogether (which as of right now, I’m dangerously close to that point), then I have to start pulling back so that I can start apportioning my brain power into things that matter to me rather than the things that matter to my employer.
Because lets face it, that’s what I’ve done for over two decades now: Rent my brain power out to companies and use it to help them solve their problems. Only somewhere along the way, their problems turned into bullshit and the ability to work with them has been steadily eroded by the endless stream of propaganda and bullshit being pushed by Big Tech in nearly every facet of existence now. This arrangement no longer suits me, so it’s time to free up some resources and spin up some new threads so to speak.
In any event, that’s the update and the explanation for why I didn’t post anything here last month. I appreciate everybody sticking around and make no mistake: There is more to come here, if only because there is more to come from the dwindling remnants of my tech career. I’m not out of the game quite yet. Once that changes, I’ll be sure to let you all know.