Warning, rant ahead. Not sure if it’s the wisdom of a few decades of experience or if I’m just jaded in the latter half of my career. It’s probably some of both.
My heart breaks for new grads. You’ve been dealt a raw deal by an industry that looked at you as an opportunity for financial and ideological exploitation and not a mind to guide and develop. They lowered expectations and made grander and grander promises. But the reality you face is an awful job market without the skills and maturity (which isn’t the same as knowledge) of previous generations.
Even still, that shouldn’t matter. With AI tools, new grads are better equipped to be productive and provide value early in their career ever before. LLMs have enabled productivity in areas where learning curves and complexity would have traditionally been insurmountable.
You should see companies putting the accelerator down on building and trying new things and entering new markets. But no, it’s layoffs and reductions and reorganizations. Everyone is reading from the same script.
Few in the C-suite wax philosophically anymore about how their people are the lifeblood of their companies. Instead, it’s en vogue to plot how to get rid of people. They think making aoftware is just an assembly line. They treat software professionals like bodies to throw at generic problems.
Every business plan is some sort of hand-waiving of “AI” or a strategy that treats customers like blood bags, harvesting value via dark patterns and addiction.
The result is that most software is anti-user garbage. Product teams emphasis strategies to ensure “lock-in”, not delivery of value. So many things feel broken and I struggle to make sense of how we got here.
I want to build software for people. I want to use software built for people. That used to be the recipe for success and employment opportunity. Now, employment as a software professional feels more like a game of musical chairs than an evaluation of one’s value and capability.
I think a lot of tech people feel this way. The feeling of mismatch between my values and the values of leadership is why I left the industry. I'm starting a Master's degree studying birds and it feels like such a weight off of my shoulders to not have to justify corporate decisions to myself.
Yeah, I'm employed as a research assistant as part of the Master's program currently. There are jobs in government, non-profits, and academia potentially after. I've never loved money (except for the flexibility having it gives me) so I have several hundred thousand saved up after a decade of engineering so while grad school is an 82% cut in pre-tax pay I can withdraw 1% a year from my investments and live fine. Even once I'm out of school my pay will never as good as it was in engineering but I'll be happier presumably.
I'm still figuring out exactly what the research will be but the plan is essentially data science applied to bird migration patterns (lots of statistics and modelling currently). Overall if you like birds and don't like money apparently a strong math/tech background is potentially useful for ecology research with the idea that's it's easier to teach me about birds than teach an animal science person data science and programming (though I did take an undergrad ecology class before applying to ecology programs).
People I know in academia are also having a terrible time. Grant funding is in the toilet. The focus is on providing for current staff not hiring. No one is leaving because no one has anywhere to go.
My guess is I'll end up in government or an NGO but I'm probably going to do a PhD before that so getting a real job is at least 5 years away. The previous grad students for my advisor are all employed with decent jobs so I'm not worried, especially since I have a pretty unique skill set for the field and strong stats fundamentals.
Edit: engineers are always skeptical of my career change but my friends actually in the life sciences are more confident I'll be able to figure it out.
The previous grad students came out in a different economic context. Things have changed remarkably for the sciences in just this year alone. Grad schools have actually rescinded offers because they no longer have funding for first years and faculty don’t have funding for taking on students. No one has seen anything like this before.
Seems to be kind of a running theme of the last few years, isn't it? I know some of these major upsets and changes to the way things are done have always been there in some ways, but it feels like there were never quite as many alarm bells ringing of unrelated existing systems catastrophically failing.
Everyone in my age group (early-mid 20s) is sure having a fun time right now.
I'm flexible and I'll have a wide variety of marketable skills so I'm sure I'll figure something out eventually.
I think I come across as a lot less anxious than people expect because I've just accepted these challenges as a cost I'm going to have to pay. Trying to change careers so far has already really sucked in many ways (though in more ways it's been a real joy) but I actually handle this sort of stress okay. Turns out what I handle much worse is not really believing in my job.
Moved from private to government and couldn't be happier. Look for a state position so that lunacy like the current admin can't touch you down the road.
C suites have social networks like everyone else, and their experience is tailored to engagement like everyone else’s.
They are constantly being fed FOMO and panic that due to AI the world will leave them behind.
So they desperately try to avoid that, pushing every lever they have to be part of the club without understanding what it even is. It used to be crypto, it will be something else next.
We'll keep heading towards societal collapse as long as we have all the population addicted to the feeds. If the adults are behaving this way I don’t want to think how those who were exposed from birth will turn out.
This rant is inspiring, it makes me want to find, or be, that company that is putting the accelerator down and building things instead of focusing on limiting costs and replacing people with AI.
My heart breaks for new grads. You’ve been dealt a raw deal by an industry that looked at you as an opportunity for financial and ideological exploitation and not a mind to guide and develop. They lowered expectations and made grander and grander promises. But the reality you face is an awful job market without the skills and maturity (which isn’t the same as knowledge) of previous generations.
Even still, that shouldn’t matter. With AI tools, new grads are better equipped to be productive and provide value early in their career ever before. LLMs have enabled productivity in areas where learning curves and complexity would have traditionally been insurmountable.
You should see companies putting the accelerator down on building and trying new things and entering new markets. But no, it’s layoffs and reductions and reorganizations. Everyone is reading from the same script.
Few in the C-suite wax philosophically anymore about how their people are the lifeblood of their companies. Instead, it’s en vogue to plot how to get rid of people. They think making aoftware is just an assembly line. They treat software professionals like bodies to throw at generic problems.
Every business plan is some sort of hand-waiving of “AI” or a strategy that treats customers like blood bags, harvesting value via dark patterns and addiction.
The result is that most software is anti-user garbage. Product teams emphasis strategies to ensure “lock-in”, not delivery of value. So many things feel broken and I struggle to make sense of how we got here.
I want to build software for people. I want to use software built for people. That used to be the recipe for success and employment opportunity. Now, employment as a software professional feels more like a game of musical chairs than an evaluation of one’s value and capability.