Is anyone else just done with the industry?

Hi! I've been doing this since 1994 (I started in the industry instead of going to college). I feel this way approximately once every 7-8 years. What I think I've learned is that I make stupid decisions reacting to those feelings.

I assume by industry you mean software development. And I’m not tired of that. Where else can you be integrally involved in different businesses? Communications, medical, education, e-commerce for anything/everything. We get to play in a lot of different playgrounds and potentially have a huge impact. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.

I am tired of the interview process. Here’s a take home assignment that you’ll code in isolation without feedback or interaction from us. Completely opposite of how you’d do the job. You’ll have to justify any assumptions you make. And if we don’t like your justification, pass.

Took 2 days on the assignment - this is kind of simplistic, not what we’d expect from a senior dev. Pass.

Take 4 days on the assignment - what took so long? We’d expect a senior dev to knock this out in 2 or 3 days. Pass.

Maybe we’ll tell you’re out. Or we’ll just ghost you. Depends on how our recruiting team is feeling that day.

Behavioral is generally where I “blow” it. I won’t lie and answer the “so tell me a time about xyz”. Sometimes xyz was terrible, and I didn’t handle it well. I know how I’d handle it now and can articulate that. Sorry. We’re looking for someone that handled this exactly right already.

Personally I screwed myself over the years by not chasing titles. I’ve done Staff and Principal level stuff. For years. But I didn’t fight for the title. So I generally get screened out of those pretty quickly because past titles don’t match what recruiting team has been told to look for.

But this is the price that must be paid. So I can work/play in a lot of different playgrounds. Keep applying. Keep trying. Eventually I’ll find something.

Oh yes. It's dog eat dog but among very lazy privileged dogs.

Don't confuse business with a humane enterprise. It operates according to a vague informal internal calculus, has little loyalty to staff or communities and will happily eat skilled, conscientious contributors. The utopian stuff about being intelligent and progressive is hyperbole; a side effect of a privileged class of the labor sector for 50 years for the simple reason of growth. Morals and ethics are after-thoughts. Communitas is to the FAANG nothing more than growth. As smart as this class thinks it is, it will wither and die when the corp welfare dries up.

I was feeling burnt out until I got a pretty cool job a couple of years back. Instead of corporate crap we're building a product for scientists. I'm working on a small team with minimal interference. It feels good.

The downside is that this kind of job is rare. If/when this ends I'll probably need to go right back to the corporate grind. I don't have any other marketable skills, nor a financial runway, so.... realistically I need to do this until I die/retire.

I'm both excited and terrified about how the AI thing is going to play out.

I'm a fan. It's obviously the future. But I think it might entirely replace us, or at least 95% of us.

I imagine this won't help right now, as you and everyone else need work immediately, but for the future I'd suggest you research opening a small software development business with other programmers or, even better, a cooperative. This requires learning business management, and assuming risks, but as you see it isn't like normal job really provides security.

The main advantage is that under this arrangement the people who are your bosses, or otherwise rule over that you do, in a normal corporate job, such as sales people and accountants, become your employees and have to answer to you and your peers. Technical merit and knowledg becomes the driving force, not fantasy sales pitches and bean counting.

The main downside, besides the business risk, is likely going to be lower pay. But you'll be doing what you find valuable, so you'll have much higher enjoyment at what you do.

Work is an intersection between what the company wants and what I'm willing to do. I can leave the company, try to change it from the inside and accept the consequences, or adapt to the situation until I can find or create something better.

But I find that whinging that work should fit my worldview becomes dis-empowering quickly. The temporary dopamine hit from getting sympathy venting and believing that the rest of the world is crazy makes me feel like something has changed when nothing has or perhaps will. And that just causes me to feel worse over time.

It's also interesting to see how opinions of what is fair, right, reasonsable, etc start to change as the contributor becomes a manager of a team and then an owner. The individual's context can have a lot to do with shaping the opinion.

Software engineer from the 1970s here - it's run its course. It's like the music industry; it was what it was until it no longer was anymore. AI replaces processes, which replaces people. Qualified and educated software engineers coming out of Asia are cheap and plentiful, and the majors are stocking up on them and dumping the end of career Caucasians. Don't waste your time; unless you have a great idea then code that bitch and see if anyone will buy it. Develop people skills, get an MBA, learn to sell. AI can't do that (yet). And, yes, it's all about 'realizing the value' which means revenue generation and cost savings. Loyalty died decades ago.

Pretty done.

Employers: Making it an obligation that I act like we have in house tools that were meant to exist 3 years ago, doing everything manually.

Customers: So beholden to their technical debt that they would rather pay ten times the opex than the capex to remove the debt.

Shits me to tears.

Do you have any friends who work minimum wage jobs? If not, find some and talk to them. I find it's EXCELLENT motivation to stay in this industry no matter how crap it seems.

I absolutely resonate with how you feel and what you have written though.

Note that many companies are pretending to hire in order to look successful/growing. They might be willing to hire if some unicorn candidate comes along, but in practice the job ad is just marketing.

It sounds like you have burnout and a burnout-related attitude issue, it is understandable but not always helpful. A lot of people find professional help talking through this to be very beneficial.

I found working at a restaurant as a cook delightful for 6 months, it wasn't at all fair as I was also still living off severance but it was very relaxing having straightforward work that was always done at the end of the shift as well as a creative outlet where I could do something with my hands.

The frustration is understandable but now you've got to find your new direction either a new way to approach tech work to increase your marketability and to find jobs where you'll be happier or a different direction and something different to do. You can be furious but unless you channel that into something positive it's just hurting yourself. Let yourself be mad for a while and then make yourself ready for whatever is next.

After 35 years in tech and 10 years with the same company, today is my last day at a Fortune 100 tech firm. I left voluntarily with no new job lined up.

Never felt so relieved.

I realized that the depression I was experiencing was caused entirely by leadership, not my job. No matter which products I worked on, the same feelings of depression and ultimately loathing of the environment and process kept returning.

Don't get me wrong. My employer is world-class, and the benefits were amazing, but the software development and engineering culture are destroying their employees.

A sabbatical to rethink my career is in order.

I've saved for the past 20 years and realized that unless I take time now, I might never have the real opportunity to enjoy life the way I’ve dreamed. I now have two years of savings set aside, so we will see where life takes me. I might work for myself or simply step down from technology development into a new role.

Modern software engineering is killing its employees. Global teams across time zones working from 5:00am to 10:00pm., on projects that aren’t even mine—just because someone else left and needed someone competent to pick up the slack and carry the project to completion. Leaders overpromise and commit to deadlines without even asking if the solutions are feasible. Being reprimanded when you push back and say that the solution they just promised isn’t realistic or even possible.

I was at Amazon warehouse for a year, I was getting contract offers for 6 months I was like f that wanting security. Eventually I took one and I'm at it now, six fig job. It was crazy though like impossible to get hired unless you went through a recruiter. I don't have a degree but have years of work exp.

Edit: I did see some news thing about trying to undo/keep 174.

Anyone who can engineer software systems is likely able to engineer some kind of company. Not the path for everyone, but it is one way of moving forward without staying linked to the industry.

The core issue here isn't just market conditions or bad hiring practices. It's that tech _workers_ have spent decades thinking they were somehow different from other _workers_, that they were 'partners' with capital rather than the labor behind it.

You're experiencing what people in every other industry have dealt with for generations: being treated as a disposable cost center when it's convenient for ownership. The solution isn't individual resilience or '''grinding harder''', it's collective action.

Tech workers need to organize. We need unions. We need to stop pretending that stock options and ping pong tables make us anything other than workers whose interests are fundamentally opposed to those who fire us on a whim to boost quarterly numbers.

The people who laid you off, who are outsourcing jobs, who are trying to replace workers with AI — they are not on your side! They never were! This is class warfare, and we tech workers have been deluding ourselves supporting the wrong side.

In some way, software development is going the way hardware development went years ago. The engineers built tools and modules that put most of them out of work. Who designs amps or discrete circuits these days? Once you design a piece of hardware that works well, it can be re-used ad-infinitum, and most hardware today is really firmware running on microcontrollers. So it is a natural evolution that software is becoming automated. Unfortunate, but also an opportunity to do more interesting things. It is the managers that need to be replaced unless they can see further than the tecchies, and I have known some that do, usually they are ex-tecchies.

I'm still trying to get my foot in the door. Ever since I started building 'raw' pages for people who had either "business ideas" or ran a 100 person sales team, no one has known or respected the difficulty of what goes into what we build or how it is actually a better solution than whatever they were asking for originally. Maybe once I actually break into the industry i will finally find a manager who understands what the solution is and how we get there in six months and equates that to a proper working solution instead of a internal-politics motivated project to get and edge over some other dept.

Not done, but hedging my bets. I started licensed life insurance business, also a licensed day trader. I have 40 years of experience. Got laid of in 2003, 2021, and recently 2025 a few months ago. Software development is now just a hobby for me now. From what I have seen the job market is very specific. The recruiters are only looking for rare skill sets, but also folks who have the update skill sets for cloud migration projects. What has made the field bad is fragmentation of development. C/C++ was the meal ticket years ago. I remember in 2003 I had to get a java programmers cert just to get a job, back then 1000 people would apply for 1 job, then in 2004 the job market opened back up.

After a few months I finally got a job interview this week. Someone called back from a previous job I worked on.

I have noticed that a lot of places development is offshore in India or eastern europe.

It's not just ai that is taken jobs, but also cutbacks in government contracting. The tech layoff wave that started in 2022 was partially fueled by a change in the US tax code, specifically Section 174 of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). This change significantly altered how companies could deduct research and development (R&D) expenses. Previously, companies could fully deduct R&D costs in the year they were incurred, but the TCJA mandated that these expenses be amortized over several years (5 years for domestic and 15 years for foreign). This resulted in higher tax burdens for tech companies, especially those heavily invested in R&D.

Ive been around since 2004. I've seen this cycle a few times now in the industry.

An accountant, proper CPA, needs like 5-10 hours of training per year to keep on top of their industry.

IT? Are we on mainframes? no we moved to individual pcs? I mean we moved to the mainframe in the cloud? No we moved to individual ai on GPUs? No we moved to the ai in the cloud?

IT is constantly changing and 10 hours per day of training isnt enough and if you're caught on Y framework when the industry moved on from that framework. Then you're SOL. Not many people still got those fortran jobs.

I was very close to quitting software development but luckily I didn’t. I was frustrated with work-life balance, interview processes, etc.

Here people are comparing software development with minimum wage jobs and saying you should be thankful. Ok try comparing with equivalent jobs.

Many non-tech corporate jobs have similar or better work life balance. I have friends who were recently hired with one or two interviews. Pay may not be as high but their stress levels also seem a lot lower.

So I came close to switching career, took classes, talked to potential employers, they seemed eager to hire me. But I got cold feet. I thought about my dreams and decided to pursue one of my hobbies as a side business with ultimate goal of doing it full-time. At this point, job is simply a means to end

Yeah, I have heard that one way to ruin a hobby is to monetize it. Maybe it will happen to me eventually but I don’t feel burned out anymore. I’m energetic every morning, I work hard at my current job because it is providing seed money for my dream business.

This is to say go ahead try switching industry, take classes, make new friends, figure out something. Talking to various people actually helped me figure out my dreams.

First time?

I don't know your background or experience but I do know there are a lot of people in tech now who have never experienced a recession. Also, this startup image (which persisted to these being big companies) of them being employee-friendly, maverick and casual was really just a function of the boom times.

That veneer is long gone. We are now in the era of permanent layoffs to suppress wages and every one of us that can be replaced by AI will be.

I think for many tech workers, they're in for a rude awakening that they're just like any other worker and not special or somehow immune to the adversarial nature of the employer-employee relationship.

Back in 2000 and 2008 it took sa few years but the jobs came back. One might assume that'll happen again but I'm honestly not so sure. 2008 saw the elimination of a whole class of entry-level professional jobs for millenials that never came back.

Thing is, I don't think much of the economic activity in the tech sector is actually creating value anymore. Big tech are milking their respective golden geese until they inevitably die. Startups are largely just angling for a buyout in the AI gold rush that'll largely benefit the founders and the employees not so much.

If you have the money, there's nothing wrong with quitting and doing your own thing for a while. Alternately, working for a fundamentally different kind of company can be rewarding. I found working at a small business (a sales company where tech was an afterthought) to be delightful and weird; everything was non-standard and many roles were just not hired for, but everyone's door was open and there's no bureaucracy, so whatever I wanted to be would be in my domain. The workload was low, so I made my own work and got into Facilities work, learned how to check the fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, and elevators. -And you know what? I opened up some of the smoke detectors and detected prior smoke in them; visual charring and melted plastic. The smoke detectors had been recalled for catching fire. I filed for replacement costs from the company, and now our smoke detectors won't burn the building down, which I think's pretty neat.

Sometimes I feel like the guy in the mongodb is webscale video and just want to go get a farm out in the country and shovel pig shit all day.

Yes, you aren't alone

I'm exhausted and burned out too. I'm fortunate that I can take some time away from work to recover and hopefully regain some passion for this, but I'm strongly considering retraining for a different industry

I'm happy to talk, as someone also going through the same stuff. Let me know, I can drop some contact info

In many respects, the industry is destroying itself right now, it is a rotten system.

Blind people have taken hold of the reigns, and they believe that they can do whatever they want because you don't have a choice. This continues right up until it can't, and they learn the hard way that there is always a choice.

Quite a number of us feel this way, and its not just dev work either.

Many SA's, SREs, IT Architects etc all feel these things, and there is a lot of nonsense across the board both with and without AI.

The borderline coercive exploitation, and market manipulation of factor markets, are driving a lot of people to other areas disruptively at great personal loss.

This transition naturally happens anytime the personal costs of work involved exceed the pay being provided in a workplace or business sector, and these blind people believe they can get ahead, and continue full steam ahead by imposing costs on others through chaotic distortions, without any real consequence.

Someday they will the consequence that shows they are wrong, but they won't recognize it, and those consequences are real.

Let them get what's coming to them, and just step out of the way. Do what's best for you.

It sounds like you should look at taking a break/breath then begin retooling so you can do something that you can support yourself with, and just let those people who are exploiting others burn themselves down. Karma can be a bitch.

Goodwill in such environments inevitably runs out, and people quiet quit and just collect a paycheck. Any intelligent person rolls back their individual production as the pay gap vs. personal cost increases. It is not your job to educate these suka people, and they wouldn't listen to you if you tried.

I would suggest meditating a bit on what exactly drives you and aim towards productive activities that follow that path, and finding like-minded people who do listen, this is quite hard today given Ahriman's influence but is still doable.

Inner clarity is inner strength.

Unlike professions like medicine, software industry had been permissive. And there were history major becoming CTOs of leading finance companies, which leaked every consumer recoreds. Once the industry will gets rid of the pretenders, the deserving people will find their place.

Just try to bear with it and keep applying, and prepare answers for the "stupid" questions, these are not going to go away. And yes, uncertainty is always tough.

You are also right in that the more deliberate way to get an increased salary or position is to change jobs. Yes, it happens internally as well, but it's harder to achieve. Also, going through multiple jobs is better for both experience but also in seeing what the industry actually looks like. When you work at the same company for many years, especially if that's pretty much the only job you've had, then you have just one data point, which is to say, you really don't know much.

The job market isn't booming, though it does seem to be picking up.

The tech industry was always a little slimy but it's out of hand now. I've lost too much respect for the role of innovation in this current version of our society. We've passed a point where it's used against people more than for people.

Day after day here watching people with no substantive activity on their account spam their endless shovelware slop projects, I just can't feel like I want to be a part of this anymore.

I just released this song… maybe somewhat related to these feelings.

The lyrics were inspired by Anthony de Mello's observation that most of us are like people on a bus, passing through the most beautiful country imaginable, but the shades are drawn and we are arguing about who has first place on the bus.

The music and song title were inspired by Warren Zevon - Lawyers, Guns And Money.

So inspired by two great philosophers.

https://lynkify.in/album/bus-rides-shades-and-windows/auUoEf...

Sure, but just keep in mind a couple things:

One it’s a down market, the worst since the dotcom bubble. Companies are going to be needlessly selective to keep the hiring people busy, and also to get people who are the most desperate and motivated as they’ll probably get them cheaper. Being self taught may not matter practically speaking, but it's not doing you any favors right now unfortunately.

The other thing the bear in mind is - this is the norm at a lot of industries, we in software have just frankly had it really easy for a couple decades now. What seems unreasonable to you is what lot of people have to go through even in a good market.

If you're willing to leave Silicon Valley, there are a lot of small companies out there that need one or two or a handful of decent software developers to do useful but non-cutting-edge work. They can't pay Silicon Valley money, obviously, but you get to be a lot closer to other kinds of work, which you might find satisfying in its own way.

I'm over the industry cause it over-promised an under-delivered and the way it "changed" the world is largely through monopolies, extractive middlemen and manipulation.

I feel getting paid to write code doesn't work anymore (did it ever work?).

The bar in FAANG, which I've been luckily employed at for 9 yrs, is to i) identify an important business problem ii) propose a design to solve it iii) implement the design yourself or with the team iv) demonstrate solution and/or real world impact.

Coding, it turns out, is the easy part, which can be done by AIs as of 2025 :)

Identifying important business problems to solve, and translating those into engineering systems is still beyond the reach of AIs (luckily).

That said, human's job is getting harder everyday. Expectations go up every f'in year. The demands often look impossible (it turns out this is how you get the most out of people).

So best of luck! It's pretty tough out there. Too many new grads struggling. And relatively few jobs.

That said, this too shall pass. I've seen 3 major downturns since 2000, and this is just one of them. Boom and bust happens...

I have good c++ tests, no degree, a portfolio, and I cannot find a job in France.

I think I'm going to change country, I wish Scandinavia.

Currently working in a kitchen for schools, I will probably lose weight. I go home around 3pm, nap, and do some 3d modeling and "level design".

>> I've taken to telling people with absurdly high meeting count hiring processes and one way video screenings that I'm not interested.

Same here — it’s gotten way out of hand.

You’ve clearly been through the wringer and picked up real experience. So why not grab two others like yourself and build something of your own? Pick any industry. Eventually, you’ll hit a similar wall. Everyone does. That’s the moment that sorts people. Most quit. Very very few push through. Those with passion, as you claim ("love").

Honestly, I’m one of those brain-dead folks, trying to jam AI into everything. Not because it’s always smart, but because I don't have a choice. We pitch anything without AI, and no one even listens. No budget, no job—simple as that.

It’s a social epidemic. People look at each other. We all keep pushing things too far in one direction, even when it makes no sense. There are many ways to do some other things. (I'm reminding myself here, not you).

Bottom line: pick yourself up, find your crew, and start building. Then, lead like a brain-alive exec.

If you have any capital saved, maybe it’s time to go on QuietLight or another site and buy a small SaaS company with an SBA loan and work for yourself.

used to see 80-100 lines of good code per programmer.

seeing up to 2400 lines a day in 4 hours of deep work. LLMs will greatly reduce the amount of people required, mainly seniors. erode the path for junior training and put further pressure in an industry continually contracting since 2021.

the amortization of software developing as R&D expense among many years implemented by the IRS didn't help either

Come to academia.

I don't mean "become a professor"; I mean be a software developer at a college or university. They need them in large teams (IT department of a larger university) down to solo devs (working for a single department at a small liberal arts college—this is where I've been for 15 years).

It's true that you won't get the same level of pay—frankly, I've been woefully underpaid—but, by and large, they're not trying to replace everyone with AI, they adhere to basic standards of ethics, and they don't subscribe to crunch culture. If you're working in an academic department, chances are your bosses will basically think you're doing magic all the time and give you massive respect. Plus the job security is overall much higher. (Well, it has been. I suppose the current political situation may create some extra instability, depending on the position.)

No.

But I live and breathe tech even in my spare time[1]. You gotta learn to roll with the sh-t and set boundaries. I hate to say it but turn off HN, this place a hype machine designed to make you feel bad. It's like "Roast and Toast" x 1000 on here, not reality. It's toxic in a very passive-aggressive way (rather than reddit toxic, which is just aggressive).

I've been at this since 1988. (Made a few personal bad choices so not retired, lol [2]) I've changed jobs every 5-7 years since the post-2000 implosion. Don't bother with the FAANGs, its all style over substance tossing-off investors: they don't care about you at all and their top level management just want to be centibillionaires (or trillionaires).

Find smaller companies, that's what I started doing 20 years ago. I started a new job as a senior director at a 5000 person company 3 years ago, most money I've ever made in my career, great people who enjoy their work, no pressure to move up the ladder unless you want to (not much ladder for me, but the younger devs are happy to stay put without the dumb pressure to give 150% every year). Our revenue is <10B, and it is a German company so there's minimal (unremarkable) equity, but the base salary is great.

Find a company that makes boring products that sell. Mine is a stable boring company, making real-ware silicon products and associated cloud services for medical and automotive industry. Look for a company trying to grow profits at a normal rate, not a FAANG rate. Avoid the hype. Be boring. Slow and steady.

[1] also, if you're only in tech because you think that's where you're supposed to be, and don't have a deep passion for it, you're gonna have a bad time.

[2] Oh, and don't accidentally get someone you don't like pregnant. Because then you're completely f--ked.

For whatever reason, my career has been driven by curiosity, first computers and Fortran II, then real-time medical data analysis, then compilers, then collection of batch financial data from dozens of sources, then low-latency financial trading backed by genetic programming, then application security.

I've luckily managed to avoid too many brain-dead execs, but there have been spells that the gig is boring.

Looking back on it, there have been very few spells in which I have not been programming, if not for a gig, but on my own to explore my curiosity.

It's the highest paying cushiest career on earth. If you don't want to grind a little bit to secure that then don't. Just make less money doing something harder. It's your choice and personally I'm happy if there's less competition

Now Hiring: Not You (2017): https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/now-hiring-not-...

Hard not to feel this way sometimes given the quality of some job listings and the negativity bias here and broader media. In such moments of despair I recall two axioms: change is inevitable and ongoing, and talent rarely resides in the C-suite.

I'm only 10 years in and currently at a science non-profit using a dead/toy framework, and honestly woefully unprepared for market at the moment. I'm constantly looking at job listings, though, and engaging with scads of recruiters to maintain a good feel for the market to inform my next steps. I see plenty of ads that are hyper-specific about the tooling du-jour, but a non-trivial percentage of the listings I see make it clear that higher-level prowess, like understanding a language and best practices, are more important than what ultimately boils down to the ability to RTFM for whatever widgets the CTO/CE is currently enamored with. These are the jobs I'm looking at. Sure, this could narrow your pool during what appears to be a tight market, but you're more likely to have worthwhile interviews. I'll apply to less intriguing jobs to avoid getting rusty at interviewing, though.

This kind of funk also inevitably drives me harder to just _do what I want to do_. What language and tools _do I want to use_? _What kind of problems do I want to solve_ moving forward? If you've sorted these out, great. Sure, this could _also_ narrow your pool even more, but you're more likely to find a high-quality match.

Finally, all of these companies foaming at the mouth to replace people with AI will regret it; it's already happening, in fact. It's happening in less/non-technical jobs (lol Klarna), so I'm not worried about coding jobs at all in the long run (not to diminish and current or short term turbulence, though). Smart execs/founders will see AI for what it is: a force multiplier, only as good as your existing staff. That said, I think it behooves devs to get right with AI/chat-assisted development. Of all the buzzy tools people fall in love with, I think this is the highest ROI I've seen yet.

TL;DR: I'm just not going to apply to jobs that don't give me "smart exec" smells, and I'm only applying if it really looks like something I'll care about doing. I realize this exudes some degree of privilege, hubris, and/or naivete, but I work my ass off and you only live once.

The eager fascism permeating the industry, the tidal wave of AI propaganda pushing people into tepid custodial work, and the active hostility of executives towards their workers disgusts me and probably means that I won't be touching Silicon Valley tech companies anymore. If anything, I will aim to work against their interests whenever I can.

I still love programming and making things. Fortunately, I have the means to go off and do my own stuff for the foreseeable future.

I'm nearly done after seeing the nonstop indianization of my topics on google.

Niches from motorcycles to tech to music have become a punjab yellowpages and no one is even talking about it.

Google the most popular korean boyband in the world "BTS"

6/7 of my results are indian domains. What's the point of even trying anymore when ESL slop like that gets a massive SERP advantage for years now and is only getting worse?

Has little to do with “industry” and everything to do with America being led by post war, Cold War paranoids who drank lead water and huffed lead gas fumes, brains wired to march to a steady drum, right into building a shit hole country.

Sure is a whole lot of demand to show up just so from ossified gerontocrat pols who can’t provide for themselves and mock us to our faces about freedom.

A bunch of randos socialize we’re off the hook for each other, good luck! While also expecting we show up for jobs that secure their investments or they send out the riot cops. It’s a fucking brain dead social culture of learned helplessness copy pasted around office worker meat suits. An obvious, making it pointless, LARP.

Zero flexibility in human agency when too few know how to fix their stuff and need these brain dead jobs to trickle down to the poorer service workers.

you should never have allowed yourself to get sucked into corporate work. its the most common mistake that people make

Don’t be so weak. The world is a harsh, cruel place. You are owed nothing. A man makes himself.