Greener Pastures
Almost six years ago to the day, I began learning to code while holed up in my Chicago apartment. I had just been laid off from a dream bar management job, and my mind was restless to do something. The general pandemic malaise settled in and became endemic long before the novel coronavirus did, and it was increasingly clear to me that bar tending, was not going to return to any kind of pre-March-2020 normalcy any time soon, probably not ever.
It seemed as though my high-flying life working in fancy restaurants had come to an abrupt and unceremonious end, and I now had no other choice but to give up on hospitality and get a Real Job™. I tested into one of those web development bootcamps which were all the rage at the time, and I crammed my brain full of esoteric computer bullshit, all the while convincing myself that this just had to be the way to the stable middle class existence which eluded me every other way I tried to find it.
Miraculously, I was able to find a job with the help of a friend from college who generously offered to help my résumé find its way through the bureaucracy of a multi-national consulting firm. In March 2020, much of the world shut down and I lost my job. By July 2021, I was starting my new big boy engineering job thinking I had finally latched onto a rung of the ladder from which I would rise inexorably to a life of stability and comfort I had never known working in restaurants for the previous seven years.
Alas, scarcely a year into the job, the one-two punches of Elon Musk's buffoonish and cruel takeover of Twitter and ChatGPT's public debut set the tone for the rest of my regrettable time in tech. Between 2022 and 2026, I survived at least four rounds of layoffs at my company and countless other layoffs at the multi-national client companies for whom I worked as a poorly compensated contractor. Executives were in unanimous agreement that the beatings would continue until morale improved or until AI agents could replace human engineers entirely, whichever came first.
I finally reached my breaking point when the bombs started falling in Iran. I suspected that AI was partially to blame for the massacre of children in the city Minab, because the United States and Israel had already used the same untested, unreliable AI tools to extinguish tens of thousands of innocent lives in Gaza and Lebanon under the watch of Democratic and Republican administrations. It finally became impossible to be involved in tech in any way without constant reminders of the stubborn limitations of generative AI and Large Language Models and the equally stubborn insistence from the least trustworthy people on earth that this was all just about to pay off, any day now.
In March, I resigned from my position as a senior engineer without a flicker of regret. I now have several part-time jobs that don't pay well, but ultimately allow me to sleep much more soundly at night. Along with some partners, I am working on businesses of my own that have nothing to do with tech.
This can't go on forever, but as long as it does, I don't want any part of it.
