Well as it so happens this week I was alerted to a semi-terrifying development at work. It seems the moronic executives have been pushing very hard for upper and mid management to furnish them with a complete list of employees who are “under-utilizing” AI related tools. Now of course given that they are mostly snake like demons who deal in the vaguest terms possible, I don’t have any way of knowing what constitutes “under-utilizing” but given the fact that I generally don’t use these tools at all, I’m guessing I’m going to be on the list.
Of course Upper Management is playing hard to get here… they are acting like they don’t want to give up that list. But given their baseline level of spinelessness in all other things, I figure its only a matter of time before they give it up much like Trump gave it up to Iran. So what does this mean for me?
Well at the very least I figure I’m going to be pulled into a meeting with all of the other AI luddites (there are dozens of us, I tell you!) and they will probably attempt to “scare us straight”. That might work for some of us, but it won’t work for me because well my ethical objections aren’t going to suddenly evaporate when some mongoloid incompetently wielding an MBA and ginned up on Claude’s latest batch of self-actualizing bullshit decides to issue a petty threat against a job that I’m not remotely interested in fighting to keep.
This will likely lead us to the next step: Putting me on a plan to improve my performance. That of course is the kiss of death. It is well known that throughout the annals of company history these mechanisms aren’t actually meant to get employees back on track but rather to give the company enough time to build a legal argument against allowing you to file for unemployment after they fire you. Rumor has it that this process generally lasts about 90 days and offers no real path to improvement. It’s more like a patch to getting fired.
I thought coming back here would give me about five years of breathing room before I had to seriously move on from this career and it turns out, I’m probably only going to get half of that. Which means of course that I’m not really prepared, at least not as well as I like. However as I loathe going into work each day, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about what I would do in the event that I happened to rage quit or be unexpectedly let go one day for telling the wrong person how much of an idiot they actually are.
So what am I going to do?
Well I suppose given that I have a wife and I very much want to stay married, I’ll probably try to find yet another engineering / IT job to tide me over. Whatever I find won’t pay what I’m getting paid now of course, but if I pick a place far enough off the beaten path, I might be able to avoid the AI shit show. On the flip side given that the AI bubble isn’t that far from popping now that Space-X has IPOed and OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t far behind them, there is a chance that this entire thing blows up by the time I get fired.
That would be chaotic but within the corners of chaos lies opportunity. Decent engineers who haven’t had their brains melted by their prolonged exposure to LLMs will be in demand because companies will need help to clean up the mess once the dust begins to settle. These brain dead LLMs are going to leave behind a lot of broken and half-baked software that the vibe coders will no longer be capable of maintaining or extending.
What about local AI?
I’m not worried about local AI. The reason being is that buying the hardware required to run local AI isn’t a cheap proposition. The frenzied and irrational gold rush around data center hosted AIs is largely to blame for that and frankly that’s a good thing. This trend needs to die. People need to realize that trying to outsource thinking to any non-human entity, regardless of where its hosted or how it was trained is a path that can only end in a caustic mix of slop and failure.
Of course I’m working on other options. In truth, I’m tired of IT and Software Engineering. I have mostly stopped doing IT outside of my own home and outside of work I’m generally not writing any code anymore. So my primary long term goal is to simply not do this anymore. Even on the good days at work, I lament how ridiculously overcomplicated software has become. I lament how pointless many of the features I’m coding actually seem to be. I lament how we don’t seem to really care all that much about the details and only seem interested in closing JIRA Epics so that we can start working on new ones.
As it stands for the moment, I’m going to remain steady in my approach and continue to do the best work I can, in the most reasonable amount of time I can without incurring more stress than is absolutely necessary. Some days will prove more successful than others, but in time my time in this career will come to an end.
More than ever, it really is just a matter of time now.