u/Busy-Recipe9840

This is more-so a reaction to observing trends I am noticing as our field assimilates to the unrealistic expectations and AI. I am currently working as a weird love child of a Data Engineer and DevSecOps role. I honestly don’t even know what I do anymore nor do I care. I am 26 and have been in this field since I was 18. Started as service desk support then moved across the Networking pipeline until I and upper-management realized that I had a gift for automation. That’s the thing though. I don’t feel like I actually have a gift. I just spot trends in technology then implement them before other teams do which makes me stick out.

I essentially notice things a team is not doing that management wants them to do as a shiny bargaining point for a contract’s proposal (to make the company more competitive) then I do it. Most people in IT perform Click-Ops type of work and despise scripting, automation, AI, etc. so it is very easy to stick out if you are at the right place. You basically learn to climb the ladder by profiting off your teammate’s and leadership’s lack of vision or laziness. Maybe I am underestimating my value, but this is what I noticed and it has created a sense of disdain for the people I have to work with and the “big picture” mentality I am supposed to have.

I am grateful for my salary and I realize how lucky I am to be able to do this in a LCOL (I live in one of the lowest ranking states in America). I honestly think I could dedicate what piece of my passion for this career is left and try to get into management or job hop for another $50-100k but what is the point? I genuinely just don’t care about the work anymore. I don’t want to work with a glorified autocompleter or a glorified autocompleter that also has API read-only access to external facing business applications that we are only using to build reports. I don’t want to containerize a small Drupal site with an overly engineered, massively expensive K8s solution that has no real value based on what the customers actually want.

My “leads” are bots. Everything I do “leads” to them just regurgitating exactly what I told them. There is no mentor. There is no senior level guidance resisting me. Whatever I say goes. As well as not drowning, I am also just jealous of the fact that the higher title you earn the less work you genuinely do. Yes, I have worked at 4 different companies and this hierarchy of labor distribution is always the same. The last thing I want to mention is the shear volume of quiet desperation you notice in the workplace. The herd mentality. The need to do what sounds good theoretically without considering the actual value or how it will be integrated into production environments. Many of you will say I am burnt out, but that is the external symptom of a larger issue I have with modern work in general.

The realization I have come to is that most jobs that extort the human condition will give you that superficial level of satisfaction you are looking for. Want the Big Tech job? Go into defense contracting with a higher level clearance or be an extremely valuable SME in a sector (like database/backend, cloud migrations, Intune, etc.) of IT nobody else wants to do (since those sectors require higher/obscure levels of patience/training most people don’t have). I don’t have to explain the moral justification behind the government contracting idea, but you can sociotechnically see why this pays off. There will always be a country to blow up. There will always be sociopolitical policies that our useless technology upholds through our rigidly controlled change boards. If I was to quit, I would go into healthcare. People die everyday and if I walk-out of my job, people will still be dying at the next hospital.

I just read this piece in his essay and am interested by his conclusion almost 200 years ago:

“The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower is it in reaching maturity. Man
reaches the maturity of his reasoning and mental faculties scarcely before he is eight-and-
twenty; woman when she is eighteen; but hers is reason of very narrow limitations. This is
why women remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand,
cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to
the most important. It is by virtue of man’s reasoning powers that he does not live in the
present only, like the brute, but observes and ponders over the past and future; and from
this spring discretion, care, and that anxiety which we so frequently notice in people. The
advantages, as well as the disadvantages, that this entails, make woman, in consequence of
her weaker reasoning powers, less of a partaker in them. Moreover, she is intellectually
short-sighted, for although her intuitive understanding quickly perceives what is near to
her, on the other hand her circle of vision is limited and does not embrace anything that is
remote; hence everything that is absent or past, or in the future, affects women in a less
degree than men. This is why they have greater inclination for extravagance, which
sometimes borders on madness.”

I wonder what he would think today with social media and other forms of social technology available.

Me and her have been separated for 6 months. She is literally existing like she didn’t beg me to explain how much I love her every single day. I wake up in an empty apartment. I don’t have an appetite, so I force myself to eat. I think about her every 5 minutes without much control while she is probably moving on without much concern while attending Nursing school.

Her most recent post on Facebook (she post once a year) says “I’m back!” and it’s just pictures of her in the club with drinks, rocking a short revealing dress and all of her comments admiring the “glow up.” I know it sounds like I am being a hater. Well, I am. You can’t possibly be “happy” for a person who used you to launch their next career chapter without any display of appreciation throughout the relationship. Also, what’s up with them deciding to “reinvent themselves” AFTER the relationship? Did I not deserve that?

4 years spent together and she basically just pretends I don’t exist. I have come to the conclusion that love is a means to an end for most. There a preconditions (masks to wear, money to make, self-depreciating compromises, and status to gain) that determine the accessibility to that love. Even if you have every precondition met, it will still not be enough for 50% of men today. I am 26 years old, make high six figures, tall, and I actually have hobbies (music and reading). I feel deeply, treat people with the respect I get, and try to REALLY pair bond to the person I am with.

None of it is enough. The saddest thing I ever heard came from her Uncle who still calls me:

“Think about it nephew. Even if y’all had 25 good years of marriage, at least you could say that the experience is what counted.”

Yeah, F all that. I don’t even want to experience this anymore. I rather die alone with a carrot in my ass than go through the excruciating pain of this process AGAIN, but with children, alimony and assets in the picture. The worst thing I have to live with is the fact that she knows my darkest secrets and insecurities. I regret letting her in on that stuff as you know she was most likely blabbering about them with her “girlfriends” after the breakup to speed up her grieving process (assuming she had one).