I think I’ve posted something similar to this before, so apologies if I’m repeating what I said previously. This is also probably a “first world problem”, I fully acknowledge that I’m in a privileged position.

I have been in the tech industry since the early 2010’s and I can definitely say that technology was always a passion of mine. I loved almost all aspects: hardware, architecture, programming, scripting, design, and even documentation. In some ways, that’s still true. My homelab is still one of my happy places. However, from a career standpoint, I’m pretty done.

At my previous company, I survived 4 layoffs, somehow. Every time layoff news leaked, I would end up staying up almost all night to find out if I still had a job to go to. I would check if my team members still had profiles in the company portal, so I’d know what mess I’d be coming into if I was retained and the rest of my team was not. Eventually, after the fourth layoff round, with another one planned in the coming months, I decided to apply for jobs elsewhere. It was mostly because of the mental issues the layoffs were giving me. I otherwise loved my coworkers; even my manager and skip-level. I even sort of liked what I did for my job at the time, even with all the layoff bullshit.

Anyway, by some stroke of luck, after nearly 6 months of applying, I finally landed an interview with a new company. I studied my ass off since I knew part of the interview process was a coding session, and somehow, I landed the job. It was the only response I got to over 300 applications, and it was a nice pay bump, too. I was very lucky, I was starting to get very demoralized and it even started to affect my job performance.

The team members I now have, manager included, are pretty good to work with. The rest of leadership, not so much, but that’s how it is these days. The soul crushing part of it for me is the drive for ultimate productivity at any cost. In the year or so I’ve been here, leadership has increased how much they’re micromanaging every aspect of our jobs. Constant escalations with little warning, watching our individual scrum point burndowns, and enforcing the use of LLMs for almost everything. I can’t even be myself at work, I have completely hidden that I’m trans from everyone due to the whole DEI crackdown bullshit. While my company still seems to have support networks for queer people, I just don’t feel comfortable revealing that to them while Trump is in office.

There was also a round of layoffs, so I’ve now survived a layoff at the new company, making it a grand total of 5 layoffs I’ve survived in the past 7 years.

Honestly, this round of layoffs didn’t make me all that anxious. It didn’t make me stay up all night in worry. I’ve gotten used to it, and in fact, the severance package, I’d later come to learn, was very good. Even though I had only been at the new company for about a year, I would have been able to get nearly 6 months off. In the back of my head, I was slightly hoping or wishing that it would be me, as bad and fucked up as that sounds.

I’m burned out. Since I had a very bad injury in 2022 (and had to take around two months off), I haven’t taken more than 5 consecutive days off. Before that, I barely took any time off. It feels like if I take time off, I’ll fall behind and end up on a PIP and then be let go without much severance, if any. I’m struggling to be motivated at work, and it feels like any minute now, I’m going to have some sort of breakdown.

I have no other marketable skills outside of tech. I like to do GIS work, but I have no real long-term professional experience in that regard. I’d love to do something for my local county, but I have no idea what that would be other than another tech job that I’ll get laid off or fired from eventually. I’d like to maybe do something outdoors, but those jobs are very difficult to get and I have a bit of a bad knee from the 2022 injury. I daydreamed about working at Costco (at the retail level), but I know it’s also a hard place to get a job at. The job market as a whole, is entirely fucked, as I’m sure everyone knows. It’s hard to see anything bright in the future. The only things that keep me going back to work are my family and pets. If I had no one to support, I probably would have moved to the middle of nowhere and turned my back to society by now.

I don’t really get much sleep these days, to say the least.

  • Malica@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    4 minutes ago

    Unethical life pro tips: hire a North Korean to do your job for you remote. In all seriousness, I wish I had better advice, but as a housewife, I’m not much help. I hope you get it figured out.

  • darthsundhaft@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    15 minutes ago

    I am somewhat privileged as well I would say although I haven’t been so lucky career-wise.

    longer message

    I am coming to the realization that I don’t think I ever really liked tech. I want money. I think for those of us in tech, this almost sounds cliche. I’ll be honest and say that I do at least like problem solving but I absolutely dread having to work with people for one, and second, I just do not at all enjoy the constant pressure of needing to be a SME in something I barely know because the industry keeps changing what matters every damn year now. Also, tech is just always constantly changing. Always.

    I like learning and exploring but to be expected to know something authoritatively is very different. At that point, it takes the fun out of it and I’m not trying to enjoy it anymore. I’m just going through the motions and working to make sure my dragons make a dollar while I make a penny.

    I personally would also say I do not have skills that I could transfer over and that’s not me being wishy-washy or self-degrading. I don’t know which disorder I have that makes it extremely difficult for me to communicate with people effectively and fit in but it’s just never worked out for me. I’ve always been pitied and picked last for things and that’s just how it is. Thing is though, I don’t want to conform.

    I would never say tech is my passion but it was interesting for a time. I don’t see it going anywhere meaningful until closed-source software becomes illegal. Until then, corporate greed will continue rigging everything into planned obsolescence.

    My management has been micro-managing and also forcing us to use AI to “not lose the race”. We don’t even provide anything to our clients where AI would even make sense. What they really want is to do the work IT would normally being doing but without hiring an actual IT person. They want shadow IT because they don’t want to call out the elephant in the room due to BS office politics.

    The more I look at what capitalism has to offer, the less hope I have to moving to anything different. Anything in the service industry is against my sanity. I’m not young enough to be able to do manual labor. I’m broke and can’t mooch of parents let alone get some loan I know I’ll have trouble with later on. Every time I have to look inward and see myself doing anything else, I know that either I’ll get bored or I’ll get trapped in some bureaucracy that I will learn to hate just as much as I hate things now.

    The slimmest chance of hope that I have right now is the world going to shit and the population finally realizing that the only solution is to overthrow the government. It is the only way real change will happen.

  • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    I feel a bit like you except I have been it about a decade or so earlier and I was in science before that. My thing is im getting old and I have a wife with health issues and im kinda done completely. I have been looking for work for the last two years and I begrudge the time I look for work when I could be cleaning the house or such. Get things more organized or in better shape. I am just old enough that I saw when the idea of retiring at 55 was a thing and even as it went backwards I kinda thought by the time I got there the swings would ultimately bring it forward and like people would retire at 50. So even beyond wanting to just concentrate on my wifes and my own health and our everyday life, I thought I would at least be able to be deciding to do stuff because I wanted to rather than have to. Even before I started hourly type work at 14 I was baby sitting and mowing lawns. Once I started working it feels like I was doing school or work and once school finally ended it was just more work. So like this has been the case for well over 30 years of my life and honestly I am sick of it all.

  • discocactus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    12 hours ago

    I know people who have successfully transitioned to local government IT jobs. It’s low pay and slower pace, but stable.

    • Tess@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      2·
      10 hours ago

      Another alternative might be a semi-public organization. One that is independent but fully owned by a city or other government entity.

      It has worked out well for me, no cut-throat business practices but not a lot of bureaucracy either. Still super stable, a lot of people work here for over 15 years or longer.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    11 hours ago

    Lay-offs are stressful. I worked at SCO during IBM’s brutal propaganda campaign in response to our accusation of code rape, where real and imagined problems were amplified to vast overstatement. Monthly all-hands meetings were called Tribal Council because, like the Survivor TV show, new at the time, groups of people got abruptly voted off the proverbial island without preparation or warning. The numbering of lay-offs quit when it was even too much for dark humour. The undercurrent of stress and the awareness of code rot is a real thing.

    The lack of sleep seemed common for us too. It was so bad - and American mercenary healthcare was so cruel - that worrying about everything soon became its own issue. I abandoned my H1B and came home, having worked from home since 9/11 provoked a move that could just be extended farther. We were all burned-out, severely so, with the overwork to cover all the proverbial bases vying with survivor’s guilt in a contest to see which behaviour is more ruinous.

    I say all that to say that I lived through similarly crushing worry and stress and self-damage. Everything you’re feeling, lots of us felt similarly (while I’m a hetero white male non-trans and the privilege grass should be just so green on this side of the fence), and it’s absolutely a health risk that will compound your concern if you’re in America with that mercenary healthcare system.

    The question is, as I’ve asked friends with 20 years in a specialized field also going on 2 years without a job, what’s the plan-B if you leave the tech world? What can you do that is good for both the spirit and the rent?

    • ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      7 hours ago

      I’m so glad I’m not the only one. Job insecurity has just really took a toll. I’m so burned out and life is so hard at home that I’m just worthless at this point.

  • graycube@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    15 hours ago

    Not every company goes through that many layoffs, but many of them do. I lost count after surviving 25 layoffs. I have been caught in a few over my career. What gets scarier is as you get older you run into ageism too, but there is absolutely nothing you can do to effectively hide your age.

    Anyway, the employment insecurity is part of the point of the layoffs. They keep you on edge. You push yourself harder and are afraid to take vacations. Nothing makes those elitist investors happier (except for the promise of AI).

    But you are human. You have to take breaks. You can burn out. You need time and space to be yourself. It has been proven over and over again that productivity goes up when you do. The investor class may be our superiors, but they aren’t always the smartest. Instead they just use people up and replace them.

    If you get the axe, move on and try for something better next time. Half the time you can team up with your fellow layoffees to end up working somewhere else together. Maintain those connections - that is the important part of surviving this world.

    The uncertainty and stress is why they pay you the big bucks. You have to take care of yourself though.

    Fintech is the worst industry to be in. Avoid that. It is a culture of numbers, not people.

  • Mikina@programming.devEnglish
    12·
    17 hours ago

    I feel you, I’m working in gamedev, and the worst thing is that it’s for a small indie studio that does have cashflow issues right now, while also being a co-development studio that sells me to a large corporate.

    So I work fully integrated into a corporate I’m not a fan of (it is a pretty good game, though), doing 1:1 the job others are doing there, for 1/3rd of the pay while also getting late paychecks.

    But the indie studio is cool and I like the people there, it still has a startup vibe and they do work on cool stuff. And I mostly just don’t want to deal with the bother of getting a new job and a project. Plus I have a side job for ocassional cybersecurity tests, thst pays like 4x as much so if I do it here and there I’m fine.

    I am looking around into other fields, and don’t k now what to pick. Currently signed up for a sound engineer courses/classes, because I do volunteer for a promoter doing local subculture events and shows, including DJing for them, and having an in-house sound engineer sounds cool. But that also doesn’t pay, they are a no-profit and have it as a hobby (I am sure, they are my friends for years, we are mostly in the red or barely even after shows/festivals).

    • CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      2·
      17 hours ago

      A pivot to sound engineering sounds like it would be good for you. Even if it doesn’t pay the bills, it probably will help to just do something different on the side.

  • UltraBlack@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    11 hours ago

    I’m about to join the job market in IT.

    I hear about this a lot. I really hope that this is just a US thing and less problematic in the EU.

    I don’t want to work my ass off just to be another number that nobody cares about and everybody expects to drive itself into burnout for the “company”

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      11 hours ago

      I don’t want to work my ass off just to be another number

      What my friend who was 2.5 years without an I.T job despite 3 degrees and a FAANG-laden resume decided, was that being another number was okay as long as he was eating and paying rent. It’s terrible to realize you’re a cog in a big machine, but when it comes to the basic needs

      1. food
      2. clothing
      3. shelter
      4. knowing our position in our societal group

      … the cog thing is ultimately #4. Having a ridiculous mortgage and a wife with visa issues and two kids to keep safe and healthy, the cog thing took a back seat.

      I hope you can find a job that fulfills all 4, but keep the prioritization in mind, okay?

  • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    17 hours ago

    I’m kinda burned out too. Left a big customer to rekindle my love for the field. Finally started getting bored, now putting together some upgraded tech as the basis to approach the market with a new outlook.

    Hope everything works out for you.

  • kettuli@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    5·
    18 hours ago

    The easiest (probably hardest) way is to study something entirely different and try to land a job for half the money you make at the moment. That’s my plan, or more like a plan im waiting because I don’t have any way to finance any studies apart from working a job and I don’t have the required stamina to study anything on top of doing the IT job.