u/Over_Commission9891

Just wondering if anyone else here is having a bit of a crisis over where all of this AI stuff is all headed...

I work in software development for Belfast based company and the change I've seen even in the last 12–24 months is absolutely mental and I'd say the vast majority of PRs I’m looking at now contain code that's nearly entirely AI generated or at least heavily influenced by AI in a way you just wouldn't have seen a couple of years ago. I suppose initially I wasn't bothered by it because I’m no coding purist and happy days, whatever gets the job done quicker and easier, but it's the speed of the change that's starting to properly scare me, especially when you look at it alongside everything else that's already happening in the tech industry and how many people I know who are struggling to find work in tech.

Morale at my company is at rock bottom, there's zero atmosphere left in the office anymore and just constant corporate BS from C suite types who can't act like normal humans and instead talk in meaningless buzzwords. At the same time there's a massive drive to offshore work to cheaper labour overseas and that has gutted the moral to the point where most local people just don't give a single fuck anymore and everyone I work with is just waiting for that email from HR telling us we're being made redundant.

I'd probably be able to convince myself this was just another cycle in the tech industry if it was only happening to me, but my partner works in the creative industry and watching what's happening to her is scary aswell. Look everyone knows creative industry was already a race to the bottom before AI came along, but ChatGPT (and other tools) have given clients and businesses the excuse to grind people down even further, and to be honest it's getting to the point where she'd be financially better off working in Lidl or Tesco than doing the thing she spent years studying and building a career in.

We keep joking that if we could go back and talk to our teenage selves then we'd tell ourselves to become nurses, doctors, plumbers, undertakers or sparkies or just anything where a machine, or cheap offshore labour can't fuck up your entire career overnight while some suit profits from it.

We both studied hard, we worked hard to build up experience and we did everything you're meant to do, so if we both end up getting made redundant down the line then what? Who pays the mortgage? How exactly are we supposed to retrain when the same thing is happening to more and more people? Everyone can't just retrain to become a plumber, electrician or tree surgeon and at some point you have to ask what happens when entire industries are being hollowed out faster than people can move into something else.

The weird thing is that you look around Belfast and somehow everyone seems to be loaded. We ourselves don't drive fancy cars, we don't blow money on stupid shite and we're not living some mad lifestyle. Yet you walk through town and the coffee shops are rammed, the pubs are rammed, there are brand new cars everywhere, massive extensions going up, and people seem to be spending money like there's no tomorrow. Meanwhilse we're sitting here worrying about whether our jobs will even exist in 1 years, and we can't help but wonder what the fuck we've supposed to have done differently.

Maybe that's the part we're struggling with most because we were all basically told that if you studied hard, built a decent career and didn't completely take the piss then you'd have some level of security for the rest of your life, but it feels like that whole thing has just disappeared now.

Is anyone else feeling this same dread at the moment?

Seeing alot of the political parties pushing for Belfast to host Fleadh 2028 again, as if 2 years in a row wasn't enough, they want a 3rd year and probably with good reason considering 2028 marks 30 years of the Good Friday Agreement.

However is it really fair for Belfast to keep it for 3 years straight when it could potentially go somewhere else in the North, like Derry or another place like Armagh or Omagh or somewhere else? I’m just wondering what people from outside Belfast, think about a 3 year run here. I don't have massive opinions on it myself other than thinking maybe 2027 should be the last year in Belfast for now, and then could then come back in 10 years so people can actually see what difference it made long term. Sometimes I worry we have a bad habit of overdoing a good thing, which kind of dilutes its impact. What are your thoughts?

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I actually agree with every word of Lavery's post and the Electric Light Station was class and the Fleadh showed what Belfast could be like if we demand change, but what I can’t stomach is the sheer cheek of who posted it.

Lavery's are one of the biggest pub businesses in the city and going on about "empty spaces brought back to life" and asking us to "think differently about how our city is used."

Are you taking the absolute piss?

Lavery's are full on influential members of Hospitality Ulster and that for decades has aggressively lobbied to protect the "surrender principle" and have spent years using this exact system to object to and block virtually every new pub trying to open anywhere near them. Remember when Wetherspoons tried to redevelop the former Methodist church on University Road? They were right at the front of the queue using licensing objections to kill competition in their own backyard. And when independent policy reviews called for reform and proposed a dedicated "Cultural Venue Licence" to let independent spaces survive year round, who lobbied to kill it?

So please spare us the marketing shite about "making space for music, culture, and people." You don't get to object to competition, fund the lobby group that keeps Belfast's nightlife in a chokehold, cash in on a temporary festival popup and then pretend to be starry eyed champions of independent culture.

I’m emailing Lavery's directly today to ask them one you genuinely care about Belfast’s cultural future then are you going to withdraw your membership and funding from Hospitality Ulster?

I suggest everyone who actually cares about the city’s nightlife does the exact same. Flood their inbox. Force them to answer whether they stand with independent culture or the monopoly line.

Maybe it’s just my algorithm but my Instagram feed is flooded with reels and stories from Belfast house flippers lately and it's driving me fucking mad.

There’s one absolute melt in particular who has seemingly made a whole career out of it and I see now charging people for advice on how to do the same. Before anyone starts I am not jealous of them and I couldn't give a fuck how you make your money as long as it's legal, but the issue is the insufferable bragging and boasting about it on Instagram.

They love to sit there smugly explaining how you can just work your mortgages so you're constantly moving money about, using the banks to leverage everything and treat private residential houses like a game of Monopoly.

The old school property developers back in the day did all this stuff quietly. They bought a house in cash, did it up, made their money and just got on with it without needing attention and validation on Instagram. This new generation are totally insufferable about it.

Cue the mention of the housing crisis because that's the most annoying thing about all of this. We are in the middle of a crisis where ordinary hard working people can't even get a basic mortgage and these parasites are flaunting their profit margins on cheap gray laminate house flips like they've done a public service.

Is anyone else seeing this shite or am I just getting bitter?

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I see the BBC are running pieces today showing the new indicative designs for the North Street/Donegall Street project ahead of the public consultation today and tomorrow.

The new plan is to ditch the all office blocks and strip back the retail for 1,000 homes, including social and affordable housing. They also plan on retaining the two entrance points of the historic North Street Arcade and turning the rest into an open-air thoroughfare.

It's hard to make a full assessment without seeing the full consultation docs, but I have to say the idea to only retain the arcade facades is an absolute fucking disgrace and I see the consultants behind the project are already making excuses, claiming that the arcade is "impossible to refurbish completely" and declaring that the widespread disrepair is "not the responsibility of Castlebrooke."

What an absolute joke. Castlebrooke bought an historic chunk of our city centre, sat on it for decades doing next to nothing while they actively watched it crumble into dereliction and are now playing the victim. The least you could do is try and protect and restore the buildings that continue to rot under your ownership.

The public consultation is on at the Masonic Hall on Rosemary Street today and tomorrow.

I've been working in IT/software development for years now and after the post I wrote on here last week, it feels like morale is at rock bottom across the industry here and I'm sure there are exceptions if you're lucky enough to work for a good company, but from reading the replies the issues are pretty widespread.

So for the past year or so I've been on and off thinking about leaving the industry altogether and I know lot of people have told me not to and to just move companies. And maybe that would be good if I was lucky enough to land somewhere decent, but it feels like a lot of the same problems exist in almost every single IT company.

The thing is I still really enjoy coding and my biggest issues is everything that comes with the job now eg metrics, sprints, stand ups, tickets, business analysis, timesheets, refinements, stakeholders, KPIs, story points, delivery managers, middle management and endless meetings. It all feels like a load of shite now.

On top of that, the job just feels unhealthy and sitting in front of a screen all day, working from home most of the time, spending half your day typing/talking to faceless avatars on instead of actual people and it doesn't exactly feel like a great way to spend the next 25 years.

It's got me wondering what I'd actually like to do instead and I've thought about something more practical, or something where I'm out and about, working with real people and building proper friendships etc.

The hard part is knowing where to go from here. All the people I went to school with who started trades at 16 are now driving big cars and have 15-20 years of experience as plumbers, electricians, joiners and mechanics and if I decided tomorrow that I wanted to do something like that then I'd be starting from scratch again.

The other option would be to use my IT experience in a far less corporate environment, whether that's working for a charity, a school, a local business or going self employed. The problem is I don't know if those jobs are actually any different, or if they just come with a different issues, for example working for a small business where the owner rings you at 2am on a Saturday because the webshop has gone down. At least in larger companies you're generally not dealing with that unless you're on an agreed to it.

So has anyone here successfully transitioned away from IT into something completely different? What did you move into and how did you make it work financially?

I live in the area near the London Road bonfire site in East Belfast and while my own house isn't directly impacted by the heat of the bonfire, a lot of other properties in the area are and so lots of people living in the area are really concerned about this year's bonfire.

Last year was an absolute shit show and the Fire Brigade spent the night hosing down houses and roofs on Florida Drive and London Road because the heat was absolutely mental. You could feel it even 2/3 streets away. Looking at the size of the bonfire being built this year, it's potentially going to be even bigger.

Surely there's a line where culture stops and the potential burning down a residential street begins. Why are the locals expected to just sit there, board up windows, or hose down their own houses on the 11th because some fucking spides want a bonfire meters away from peoples homes?

So I'm wondering if anyone living nearby actually had any luck getting Belfast City Council, local MLAs, or our MP to pull their finger out regarding getting this bonfire removed, or is the Council just going to do their usual thing of voting to act and then letting the PSNI refuse to back them up?

Or would going down a legal route as part of a group of residents be a worthwhile cause? I honestly feel as a person from a Protestant background that this stuff has to stop (and I know I'll get the usual you're not a proper Prod shite for saying it), but it's not culture and most of all it is not safe. The Council, the PSNI, and Stormont need to step up and set a precedent for removing these dangerous bonfires before someone's house is burnt down or someone is killed.

I work in IT in NI and honestly morale here feels like it's at an all time low. These last few years have just been one kick in the balls after another with constant offshoring, cost cutting, tiny pay rises and more and more dispersed remote teams scattered across the globe with management constantly chasing the latest AI buzzwords.

Loyalty and experience count for absolutely fuck all and if they can replace 10 local workers in Belfast with 10 workers in India and save a fortune on salaries, most of them will do it without a second thought. That's not a criticism of the people in India, because they're just trying to earn a living like the rest of us, but what really gets me though is when companies win local public sector contracts funded by taxpayers in the UK and Ireland, but then quietly move the actual skilled work overseas once the contract is signed just so they can squeeze a bit more profit out of it for their shareholders.

But the thing that's really getting to me though is how utterly meaningless a lot of the work is now.

Endless tickets. Endless Teams messages. Endless standups. Endless meetings about meetings. Endless calls where nobody turns their camera on and half the people never say a word. Endless discussions about absolute shite that nobody actually cares about, and I genuinely feel like if I picked my laptop up and bucked it out the window nobody would care. The tickets would still be there. The meetings would still happen. Some middle manager would still be updating a spreadsheet. In fact I'd probably still get a message asking me to update my fucking timesheets before I left!!!

Most days it feels like you're not building anything. You're not creating anything you'll ever look back on with pride. You're just moving tickets from one column to another so somebody can generate a report showing how productive or unproductive everyone was at the end of the sprint. It's bullshit.

Maybe I'm just burned out but the whole thing increasingly feels like bullshit layered on top of more bullshit.

Which got me thinking that if I got sacked or made redundant tomorrow, would I even stay in the industry? A few years ago I'd have said yes, but now I genuinely don't think so.

I'd rather do something practical and something where at the end of the day I can actually point at what I've done. Something I could look back on when I'm 70 and be proud of instead of trying to explain to my grandkids that I spent 40 years attending Teams calls and updating tickets.

The problem is I've been in this game too long and starting again would mean taking a massive financial hit and going back to the bottom of the ladder.

So instead you keep going. Another sprint. Another announcement about how exciting the future is.

Anyone else in IT feeling like this or am I just turning into a miserable old bastard?

On The Nolan Show yesterday, Green Party councillor Brian Smyth suggested redirecting funding away from the A5 dual carriageway project and instead spending £300 million on safety upgrades to the existing road, beginning a Portadown to Derry rail corridor and using the remaining money to plug Translink’s operational deficit.

On the surface, that may sound reasonable, but in reality it completely misunderstands the problem.

Firstly the A5 is not dangerous because it lacks cat’s eyes or slightly wider verges. It is dangerous because it is a single carriageway strategic route carrying heavy freight, agricultural traffic, and huge volumes of regional transport through dangerous junctions and countless crossing points. You cannot safety upgrade a road that is fundamentally unsafe by design and minor safety upgrades will not solve the problem, and the only credible long term solution is full dual carriageway segregation.

Brian Smyth also pointed to Europe to support his argument while ignoring the fact that most European countries invest heavily in both public transport and strategic road networks, while also treating modern road safety standards and grade separated dual carriageways as basic infrastructure requirements rather than optional extras.

Having travelled through parts of Eastern Europe with significantly better strategic road infrastructure than large parts of the West, it is hard to ignore just how neglected our roads have become. Anyone who regularly travels west of the Bann can see that large parts of the region remain connected by roads that are decades behind modern European standards and upgrading key strategic routes to dual carriageway standard should be viewed as the bare minimum, not some extravagant “vanity project”.