I started my IT career in 2011, I have enjoyed it, I have got to do a lot of interesting stuff and meet interesting people, I will treasure those memories forever.
But, starting with crypto turing general computing from being:
“Wow, this machine can run so many apps at the same time!” or “Holy shit, those graphics look epic!” or “Amazing, this computer has really sped up that annoying task!”
To being:
Yo! Look at how many numbers I can generate!
That brought down my enthusiasm severely, but hey, figuring out solutions to problems was still fun.
Then came AI/LLMs.
And with it, a mountain of slop.
Finding help about an issue has gone from googling and reading help articles written by something with an actual brain to mostly being rephrased manuals that only provide working answers to semi standard answers.
Add to that a general push to us AI in anything and everything, no matter how little relevance it holds for the task at hand.
I also remember how AI was sold to the us at first, we were promised to do away with boring paperwork, so we could get on with our actual job.
What did we get? An AI that takes the fun and creative parts, leaving the paperwork for the workers.
We got an AI that we need to expect to be stealing our work and data at every point, giving us shit work back, while being told that we should applaude it and be grateful for it.
And the worst thing, the worst thing is that people seem happy with it. I keep getting requests to buy another Copilot license or asking for another AI service to be added to our tenant, I am sick of it!
We got an AI that somehow has slithered onto the golden throne and can’t be questioned.
I am not able to leave the tech market at this time, but I will focus on more tangible hobbies going forward.
This year, I have given myself a project, I will try to build a model railway in a suitcase. That will be a Z-scale tiny world in a suitcase.
I have never done anything remotely like it, but I feel like I need something physical to take my mind off tech.
Sorry for the rant, but I just came off of a high from realizing and putting words to my feelings.
Oh do I feel you. I’ve been into IT most of my life and using Linux for about 15 years now. Professional Sysadmin for ~10 years.
I loathed crypto but AI is really the Band oft my existance. While everyone around me (not in technical fields) has been toying/working with ChatGPT and the like I’ve never actually touched an LLM (except for automatically through Gemini and the like) but it’s getting impossible to ignore.
My hope is that the AI bubble will eventually burst and while LLMs as tools (like assistant for writing documents/mails etc.) will probably be here to stay the “Now with AI” buzzword bingo will hopefully end?
As for keeping the Joy I am so lucky as to work in a Field where we still do most things manually and Provisioning Laptops or the Occasional server still is done free from any AI. For my own projects I also focus on what I need and can provide on my on infrastructure. I self host a Nextcloud and have a little Jellyfin Server which always are an opportunity for some improvements/maintenance which is after still a hobby of mine. But in the end they simply fulfill a function.