[atlgator]

I think what people are actually tired of isn't "tech" — it's the gap between what they thought the job would be and what it's become.

When most of us got into this field, the implicit promise was: learn hard things, solve interesting problems, build stuff that works. And for a while, that's what it was. The disillusionment isn't really about AI or crypto or whatever the current hype cycle is. It's that the job has slowly drifted from "engineer solving problems" to "employee managing process." You spend your morning in standups, your afternoon fighting with CI pipelines someone else configured, and your evening wondering what you actually built.

The people in this thread who say "just get perspective, you could be loading trucks" aren't wrong exactly, but they're answering a different question. Nobody here is saying the pay is bad or the chairs are uncomfortable. They're saying the work feels hollow. Those are different problems, and "be grateful" has never been a lasting fix for the second one.

What I've noticed — both in myself and in people around me — is that the ones who stay engaged tend to have found a way to shrink their world back down. Fewer layers between them and the user. Fewer abstractions between them and the machine. Whether that means a tiny company, freelancing, or just a side project you actually care about, the pattern is the same: make the feedback loop short and real again.

[tacostakohashi]

The problem you are getting at is alienation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

Over time, tech work has become totally disconnected from real world users and customers, and everything has become intermediated by JIRAs and tickets, sprints, product managers, and process, so that the developers are interchangeable cogs, with no real domain knowledge or user relationships.

As much as people say AI is killing jobs, even before that, interesting jobs were mostly being killed anyway by agile, sprints, and product managers anyway, to the extent that replacing those kind of jobs with AI is no great loss.

Loading trucks, and manual labor, can potentially be quite satisfying, especially if it's your truck, or your business, or your product being loaded.

[haute_cuisine]

I think the main problem is tech workers finally became a commodity. It was a brief time when hiring was hard and it was possible to get some sense of power because you could freely walk away or because you were a craftsmen.

Over the years, power slowly returned back to management and the industry figured out how to slice the creative role into small cogs: QAs, FEs, BEs, SREß, OPSs, POs, PMs. It's ten people now instead of three crafsmen. They can now follow a very strict process to produce average software with a lot of overhead. Customers don't care because one half is forced to use it and the other don't have a taste of what good software is. Partially, because they use abysmal MS products. Apple briefly showed to an average Joe what is possible when people care, but they're slowly losing it.

Now it's node/js everywhere and fierce competition being a ticket taker. People with no passion who are here just for the money and who don't care about the code. People who are here to play promotion politic games. Coding is a regular job now which pays decent and has low barrier to entry. You can fake it very far now with AI assistance.

[tokenless]

> Over time, tech work has become totally disconnected from real world users

While we used to use Excel and now use Jira, in my experience even 25 years ago never spoke to users. Spoke to their proxies in house. If lucky those proxies are from the industry and were end users once.