Hello out there to my fellow fossils! Yes it has been awhile since I’ve posted anything to this anonymous blog of mine and given that I felt that you all deserved an update. Obviously this blog still exists. Obviously it hasn’t been merged with its less anonymous version, at least not yet anyway. That is my ultimate goal at this point, but I say that knowing full well that once the opinions I’ve posted here become associated with my public persona, that will be the equivalent of me pounding one of the final nails into the proverbial coffin of my career in tech.
But at this point, I’m okay with that in principle, just trying to get a handle on the reality of it. This career is effectively over for me. Over the last six months, my zeal for it has diminished in ways that I didn’t realize were possible. Most of my output now is merely the result of me instinctively going through the motions by mimicking learned patterns of behavior which have served me quite well for decades. It seems that for a time, this fallback has been enough to keep others from discovering that when it comes to working in tech and producing software, I really have no fucks left to give.
My employer is getting more and more heavy into all of the AI nonsense of course. They are currently working on radically reshaping how our software is built by rolling out what they are generically referring to as a “Software Assembly Line”. Which is a nice way of saying that software engineers who write code by hand are now considered to be obsolete. In this brave new world instead of delicately and lovingly building useful and resilient mechanisms, we now instead get to sit back and bark orders at armies of AI agents who in theory will do all of this for us. All we really have to do is prompt via building detailed JIRA tickets filled with the precise requirements and “validate” its output (which incidentally seems to be increasingly handled by another set of AI agents instead of the engineer). It’s gone so far off the rails, I’ve even seen examples where the agents are now demoing the resulting software and recording videos of those demos, so the supervising engineers in theory don’t even have to actually use the software anymore.
Somehow despite my refusal to work this way, I’m still getting positive feedback. This feels very out of sync to me. I got the top performance rating a couple of months ago in my review and a healthy raise and a nice batch of RSUs to go along with it. I got the top performance rating the year before this one too. Earlier this week I was recognized for cross team collaboration on another initiative I worked on despite the fact that I didn’t suffer in the way that so many of the other hard workers on the actual team had to work to get this particular feature out of the door. At least one of you will likely read this, so believe me when I tell you: I appreciate your work and your sacrifice. The recognition and the pittance of a reward they handed out in response pales in comparison to what you all gave up in exchange for it.
I have a good friend who is supervising his own “Software Assembly Line”. Day in and day out he manages his team of agents. He and his “teams” are producing quite a bit of output. Despite that, he’s working more than ever. There are no breaks to be had during the day. No downtime between tasks. The assembly line stops for nobody and it surely waits for no mere meat bag. In any event, he’s miserable. He’s strongly considering walking away from the career entirely at this point. I would say that misery loves company but the reality is that I hate seeing him miserable, just as much as I hate feeling miserable. He deserves better than this. So does everybody else. You included dear reader.
But he knows the same thing I do: Once we walk or are tossed out, life is going to change in some really radical ways. This mostly revolves around finances and benefits like health insurance. Sure I want to write, but yeah I’m just not there yet. I would need something to tide me over in the meantime. I have no idea what that thing would be. I’ve seen a few job ads for low level tech jobs with local government that don’t pay well but probably have a decent benefits package. That could be an option for me. But of course it’s not an option I can take right now. Because those jobs pay a half or even a third of what I make today. I’m obligated to my family to try and draw this good income stream of mine out for as long as possible, because after I walk away - thing are going to change.
My ethics around AI usage are where I’m drawing the line here of course. For some brief period of time, the token leaderboard our company has was made available to all of the engineers. This only lasted a few days before the executives locked it down. The disparity in token usage across the whole of the organization was striking. I of course was nowhere near the top. I employ the services of Claude for local code reviews once every week or two in an effort to stay off the very bottom of the list and thus far those efforts have worked to achieve that. I may be in the bottom 100 of token users but I’m not in the bottom 10 or 25. Those are the people that the executive Eye of Sauron tends to focus on. Eventually my strategy will yield a diminishing return as those at the bottom are either canned or shamed into using more tokens and thus in time I will still find myself facing this horror.
When my time comes, it comes. I will only go so far as to play the system to avoid the inevitable end that comes with the Sword of Damocles now hanging over my head.
At this point on this blog, I have no idea if anybody will ever actually read this post. This could very well be the last post I make to this blog. The future of this blog is probably similar to my future in tech: Dismal and non-existent. The primary difference being that my career in tech is in it’s final days but the content and the spirit of this blog will absolutely live on, just in a different place. When I make that transition, the content here will be preserved and redirects will be setup. In spite of all of the other things happening and all I stand to lose, the one thing I will not give up is my voice.
Go in peace my friends and best of luck to my fellow fossils.