u/NurglesToes

First off I want to say I love my son, and I love my wife. But holy shit am I miserable.

We had an unplanned pregnancy, she was on birth control and we hit that 0.01%. We accepted it pretty early and eventually we were pretty excited by the idea, and the first few weeks were great. I used all my PTO to stay home and take care of the wife and baby while she recovered from the C-Section.

But now Im back at work, working 6 days a week. My life is wake up at 6:30 -> commute -> work from 8 to 4:30 -> commute -> return home to screaming baby because its the witching hours. I take him generally most of the night when I get home so the wife can have a break. I dont mind, its just exhausting.

But the part that sucks, is that everyone is so dismissive about the struggle of being the working parent, especially the dad, who misses every thing. I missed his first smile, ill miss his first laugh, ill miss the first time he crawls, walks, his first word, everything.

But when I bring my frustrations and exhaustion up with anyone, its "you need to do more, mom has it worse, at least you have the "privilege" to goto your soul crushing job every single day" like I acknowledge that being a stay at home mom is brutal and is insanely hard. but its not the pain Olympics, it can suck for everybody, but it feels like saying this to anyone immediately gets me labeled as a dead beat. Ive never felt so isolated and hopeless. People say it gets better for the dad at 1.5 years, but it hasnt even been 3 fucking months. i dont know if I can make it that long. And I cant even get a break from a day at work, because weekends are "take the baby so your wife can rest (my wife pushes back on this and we try to both decompress but its the expectation from our family) and I dont even have any PTO left to give myself a day. This sucks

Sorry for the rant, this was kinda cathartic.

My sleep apnea is "mild", and I've had it all my life. Ive read alot of forums and have seen alot of people with mixed results. Can anyone share their experiences?

I tried the Oral device and it just didnt work for me, and Im afraid the CPAP (Technically APAP i guess) wont work and im just gonna have to live like this forever

Got out in August of 2024, working a corporate job. Sent out a corporate email, the same one I send every month, prefaced with “ALCON”.

Sent it out, the boss swings by my desk and says

“hey man, drop the ALCON, no one knows what that means”

I guess it would BEHOOVE me to stop being an idiot, tracking?

gimme a water pls

To preface this, I know that the obvious answer to this question is to simply not use LLM's, but I'm asking anyway to see if anyone has some deeper advice than that.

I'll also say that I was a self taught developer, with very little formal education in CS.

I started learning to code very young, around 14, when I discovered Unity game engine. It became my passion and was basically the only thing I would do as a hobby that wasnt, well, playing video games. Eventually I grow up, join the Army, and while in I continue to write small games, never really finishing anything but still just having fun with the process.

Eventually decided that it was what I wanted to do as a career when I got out, with IT being a backup plan. So i continue to study, and eventually I get a job as the LEAD DEV at a tech startup. With 3 devs who were all college educated underneath me. I made it explicitly clear to the CEO that I was underqualified for the position, and he said thats fine, we can teach you. I said alright then.

Narrator: They did not teach me. In fact that company was absolutely OBSESSED with LLM's. To the point, they would review our ChatGPT histories at the end of the week, to ensure we were utilizing it for basically everything. Their reasoning was "we can ship the product faster if we use every tool at our disposal". I argued this point until I was blue in the face, that by using ChatGPT for literally every problem, we were creating massive amounts of technical debt that we were going to have to pay for later, and it would be better for us to just take our time and make a more stable product especially because the nature of the product was.. convoluted to say the least. And when I say the wanted us to use ChatGPT i dont mean "oh, run this by chatgpt for sanity checking and potential optimizations" it was "Hey Chat, how do I parse this JSON file, and then assign the structs to a 2d array" *COPY AND PASTE*. And then if ChatGPT did something stupid, it was our fault for not double checking it. But because we were supposed to use ChatGPT for literally everything, our timelines were ABSURD. As in, rewrite our entire website in 3 weeks, kind of absurd, while also working on the main product.

That job was actually so bad that it ruined writing code for me. I ended up leaving the software field, and just work IT now, but it still requires writing some Powershell, python, Ansible, etc. i have some sort of strange stockholm syndrome now. As in, I cannot write a piece of code without feeling like I absolutely have to run it through ChatGPT. And recently, Ive started to get interested in making some small unity games again, but same problem. Ill know how to do something conceptually, can write a function or whatever and get it in a MVP state, but theres this little voice in the back of my head that says "ah, I should run this through chatgpt, im sure ive done this wrong" and man it has ruined it for me. It sucks all the fun and enjoyment out of the process.

Bit of a rant I guess, but has anyone else experienced this? I feel like I have to have freaking Will Smith blast me with a neuralyzer to even enjoy writing code again.

sorry if this isn’t the place, just needed to rant honestly.

Our son is 7 weeks old, my wife is SAHM, i’m working full time. I’m just exhausted and burnt out.

I’m working from 8-5, with an hour commute each way. By the time i get home, the witching hours have started, and i take the baby from 6-8, i cook dinner and we eat, and then i take him from 9 - 11ish when i goto bed.

By the time i get home my brain is just mush. I work a pretty mentally taxing job as an infrastructure engineer at a large company, and if i make a single mistake im cooked. But I want my wife to have free time, and some time to relax and take a shower and just be something other than a mom for a few hours. But the last week i just can’t hang. by like 8 o clock im frustrated and cranky, and my wife ends up taking him again until i can cool off for a bit. I feel so bad because my wife is doing most of the work, and i feel like im just pawning him off when he gets to be too much work. I really don’t know what to do at this point. i’m fucking tired