Do I belong in tech anymore?

> The point of a code review is not simply for good code to make it into a codebase, but to build institutional knowledge as people debate and iterate and compromise, slow as it may be.

I feel like this is a very profound insight.

Of course processes like this can become about the immediate utility. Reviewing is then checking work so, it can be merged and used.

But the process is more about us than the code. And we lose the deeper part when we only care about the superficial one.

I work at MSFT and I feel burnt out too and am in a similar situation where I feel like resigning would be better for my mental health but AI isn’t a big contributing factor. I do have some arguments against speculative uses of AI though.

Experimenting with speculative uses is fine, technological breakthroughs require lot of iterations and some would naturally never make it but with the enormous amounts of capex that companies are investing, these have to impact the top line and eventually the bottom line as well. I just don’t see that happening now, I could be wrong.

1. To me speculative uses of AI like meeting notes summarisers seem to add little value if at all. First off, most meetings are performative work especially at big companies. Add to this, when someone just casually pastes the meeting notes from an AI summary and asks the meeting organiser to “pls check for correctness”, my blood just boils. Are we spending billions of dollars of capex for this ?

2. Every team builds their own “agent” for diagnosing incidents which is announced to huge fanfare but people rarely end up using it irl.

3. Devs and PMs chasing “volume” of work. You prompt GPT for an issue and it is bound to give you pages of text that you can use to show how much of output you can churn. I have seen excessively verbose design docs that only the writer (and prompter) could understand and all this was accepted because “Hey, I used AI for this and it must be good”.

There are legit uses of AI and I do have a 20$ Claude subscription which I like and use but at big companies they are shoving AI into every nook and cranny hoping it shows up in the top line and bottom line and so far it doesn’t add up.

Lot of these uses are driven by fear, by repeated exhortations from upper management about shoving AI into every nook and cranny when they are just as much clueless as us. People’s mortgages, their children’s education and their retirement, in short their whole livelihoods are at stake even more so when companies will happily lay off workers without a second thought. So people have to use AI even when it adds questionable value, if at all.

I am not resistant to change and am not an AI Luddite. I am happy to use AI to become a better developer but most current use cases seem to add questionable value.

You’ve got nine years of experience, so work your network and get referrals. It’s very hard to get mid-career jobs through the front door; most people want someone they trust to vouch for you.

Actually i think we will see a faker take over and then a doer conquest. All those going now take the recipe with them and are capable of cooking it elsewhere. Elsewhere being a place without ai management.

Another problem the author may be facing that if they decide to get back to the tech market and get a new job, it may be difficult with tech still going forward - not in a meaningful way, as computers still compute as before, but enough that lack of experience with a new tool or framework will make them unattractive compared to other candidates.

Otherwise, if they decide to go into another field that they will be starting from scratch in will pay only a small fraction and whatever lifestyle they were used to will have to change.