Changing Directions

As a Fireman/EMT of 7 years whos been in high-tech for almost 10 - I feel sorry for this guy.

Sure, some parts of work will definitely get better and feel different. But a lot will get worse.

Say goodbye to good working conditions and simple problems. Work life balance is meaningless when your work has a habit of sticking around everytime you close your eyes. And the hero culture of EMS wears off quick when you realize 90% of the time you're societies janitor. That 10% you make a difference is amazing, but for the most part it's medics who are really making an impact and that world is almost as political and overmanaged as technology is.

The real problem is trying to make your career your life source rather than just an income stream. Tech utopia is no different than emergency-medicine utopia - its all fantasies that have no bearing to real life.

I wish the author the best of luck, and the issues they bring up are oh so real, but the source of the problem lies elsewhere in my humble opinion.

So I totally get feeling disillusioned...tech has definitely caused harm, no question. But writing off the whole industry as just a force for bad is kinda missing the full picture. It's like only seeing the shadows and ignoring all the light.

Yeah, "surveillance capitalism" is real (though I might take issue with the terminology). So are predatory gig models and all the rest. But the same tech that powers that stuff also lets a kid in a village take a free coding class. It lets someone stuck in a war zone video call their family. It lets people in remote places talk to a doctor without traveling hours. It helps small business owners make a living without middlemen, gives a global voice to folks who used to be ignored, and helps disabled people live with more freedom.

Tech has also made a huge difference in:

- making communication and education basically free

- speeding up medical breakthroughs (including vaccines)

- Helping organize disaster relief and mutual aid

- connecting people to jobs, homes, and communities

- bringing corruption and injustice to light thanks to mass documentation

Of course there's a dark side. Every powerful system has one. But saying "this is all tech ever did" isn't clarity...it's a kind of burnout talking. Which is, of course, understandable. You're allowed to feel that.

But I don't think it's fair or illuminating to erase the very real ways this stuff has made life better for billions. It's not perfect. But better. And worth building on.

Being an EMT has its rewards I’m sure. But a lot of it is showing up to help yet another person who hasn’t done anything to live a healthy life, or leads a violent life, or has abused alcohol or drugs or food, now demands the most expensive form of healthcare delivery we have, and is unable to pay a penny for it, and consumes resources that an accident victim may now have to wait for, and will go right back to those behaviors again and again.

Burn out is a thing in that line of work too.

"Jacobian" and "changing direction" is already sort-of a pun, but the actual text is of drier humor.

I feel the same way as the author. I wrote tonnes of Terraform, Ansible, Go, YAML, Bash, Python code years ago at <company-name> and I often think, "Who knows what that code is doing now. Who cares? Does anyone care?"

I have a few answers for the author and anyone willing to give me their time:

1. Go part-time in the tech field (contract or consult for a few hours per week) and reduce your involvement whilst capitalising on the high income

2. Produce (digital) goods that are closer to the consumer: videos, books, etc. on anything that takes your interest

3. Use your free time to do something like cleaning up your local community of trash

For (2), what I'm doing is getting back into making YouTube videos. Even then, I've fallen into a trap for weeks now. A trap of thinking: "What should the format look like? What amount of work should go into it?" And so on. In the end, I decided to turn on the web cam, record, throw the footage in Canva and do some basic editing and overlays, and publish. Quick, simple and, to get back to your point (or rather to attempt to counter it): I'll have produced something that I can see, through stats, is being observed and having a positive impact on people. That's hopefully going to help too.

For (3), go into your local community, even just your street, or a neighbouring street, and clean it. Take a thick bin bag, a pair of pinchers for picking up trash, and clean up. Do that once or twice a week, and the impact will be massive for you and everyone around you. You'll feel better for it because it's physical and "real".

It's a tough position the OP is in, but I'm getting there my self as well. I can feel it.

Leaving tech to become an EMT is a bold decision. Good luck!

I'm just a little surprised when I see a post like this, not because of the change in career and possibly lifestyle, but because I would never imagine to post stuff like this online.

Even if I were in an incredibly visible position, I just can't imagine who out there would care that I'm leaving to have fun in my hobby farm. This sounds like something I'll share with a friend over a beer. Publicly, I'll just post about leaving.

I do wish the author best of luck and well regards.

> It’s been incredibly demoralizing to discover what the tech industry actually did was to invent surveillance capitalism, create exploitative “gig economy” business models,create a new generation of robber barons, enable the rise of global fascism, facilitate genoicde,

Is the world actually good?

I struggle with this idea that if you actually create some sort of game changing tech, the business incentives will eventually use it to cause net negative harm for society. At best this takes the form of just resource extraction of customers. At worst it will be twisted by societies current power centers to further each of their collective tragectories (not net positive)?

Why create things for a society that will abuse them.

I see these kinds of proclamations all the time: “Tech failed me so I quit.”

I don’t relate at all.

I grew up poor, tech was a way to survive, not the path to a “woo woo socialist utopia”[0] a la Star Trek. Why would anyone think it would be? Tech isn’t special it’s just a tool. Tech didn’t fail, the political apparatus did.

Making yourself small and giving up your power to make a large scale impact is akin to wizards burning their spell books to focus on their dagger collections. Sure it might bring them joy, but they’re going to be doing 1d4-1 damage for the foreseeable future. And that’s if they ever even land a hit.

Tech is neither good nor bad. And, the demonization of tech and tech workers is at best unproductive, and, at worst will cause the conscientious to self-select out of tech.

People are free to do whatever they want but I wish we were giving people positive reasons to be in and in love with tech instead of trotting out trite jokes about <insert tech villain of the week> and showing nothing but surrender.

I’ve been burned out since 2013 but I don’t have the luxury of walking away or even taking a break. Even if I was rich I’d keep going because a) it’s what I love and b) unless you all want to elect me king it’s going to be the best way for me to make an impact in 2025.

I wish Jacob all the best.

Anyway, I’m going to quit swimming because teaching people to swim has increased the number of potential recreational drownings.

[0]: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S02E03. “Tell the Louvre to get off my back!” God, I love Carol Kane.

Also, in universe, Star Trek’s socialist utopia only came about after a period of inequality, instability, science run amok, tyranny, and war. So, we’re on track!

> I cringe at past-Jacob’s naiveté. It’s been incredibly demoralizing to discover....

I don't think he's reached the end of his road to cynacism; maintaining the moral high of looking for a utopia requires not spending any time assessing the evidence presented by reality. If he has complaints about the tech industry, stocked full of utopianists, he's in for a rude shock in the rest of the world if he keeps thinking about work in moral terms. The economy is a material system that optimises material results. The best outcome is making people you like materially better off (which can be easily done in tech, FWIW), but there are always going to be side effects because the world is messy and competitive.

A fun challenge is to come up with a set of moral principles where most people aren't enabling evil. There is a reason that sociopaths tend to rise to the top, principled people don't get much support and are going to struggle with the actual impacts of what they do.

> I cringe at past-Jacob’s naiveté. It’s been incredibly demoralizing to discover what the tech industry actually did was to invent surveillance capitalism, create exploitative “gig economy” business models,create a new generation of robber barons, enable the rise of global fascism, facilitate genoicde, and I could go on but Christ I’m exhausted.

At least he acknowledges this. A lot of people getting their 6-7 figure salaries deny any wrongdoing. A good number of them post on this forum.