In some cases being told "just treat it like you are a manager", when we've always done our level best to avoid anything vaguely like management because we like doing things particularly the nitty gritty details.

> Because our daily complicity ...

Exactly this. We were (still are) complicit in our own destruction and worst yet when other courageous people spoke up we shout them down, hid away, laughed at their folly, or shunned them outright.

As a mid-career software dev I'm just sick of most of my job being a highly paid technical janitor mopping a floor that never gets clean.

I've had maybe 2-3 years combined where I actually got to build something I could be proud of, and made all the red tape worth it. The rest has been navigating/paying down other peoples' technical debt and being forced to add some of my own when there's no budget for maintenance and the band-aid becomes permanent.

At the start of my career I wondered why anyone retired early when there was so much cool stuff to work on... now I get it. The cool stuff is the extreme minority of available work, and the odds of you getting to work on any of it are down to being in the right place at the right time. As for the rest of the job, I'd sooner step on a nail if it didn't come with the pay and benefits.

Can I pick all?

All options are good because they are all true.

I think you can extend them.

> industry of tinkerers and designers

At no point in history was it ever thus.

>Because we watched our careers go from being in service of an industry of tinkerers and designers, to being in service of the worst people attempting to maximize wealth extraction no matter the human cost?

And this is different than other industries how?

Everything from electricity to the railroad to trucking to finance to environmentalism has had this arc from wild west to establishment.

I mean, yeah.

I got into IT because I loved working with technology, building communities and game servers and chatrooms and computers and the like. I got lucky that someone found me, my interest in these things, and showed me how it could be a career.

Nowadays though, so much of my time isn’t spent building so much as debunking the latest grift, scam, or lie. It’s spent unfucking arbitrary vendor changes that didn’t fix any actual problems but created a slew of new ones. It’s bristling at the notion that SAML, SSO, and SCIM remain Enterprise options so that a fraction of players can have total control over identity, instead of letting customers and users build solutions that fit their needs. So much time spent talking, not doing, and almost always in service of making some rich old billionaire fuck that much richer while I struggle to buy a home.

I got into this field because it brought disparate people together. People from all over the world, all walks of life, all backgrounds and belief systems and ideologies into a giant melting pot of community. Nowadays there’s so many corporate and nationally-erected fences that everyone is so carefully siloed into approved areas, and any attempts to cross imagined digital borders is viewed as suspect or criminal by default.

The technology of today does not enable, or empower, or bring us closer together. By design, it keeps us apart, distanced, agitated at difference or unbalanced from change. The stuff that fucking works - Home Assistant, the Pi-Hole, my Docker containers - are what is good, and leaves me time to deal with shitty OS updates breaking familial devices, or “smart” appliances that get unprompted updates that break connectivity.

We are miserable because those in charge of the direction of technology - the shareholders, the Boardrooms, the C-Suites, the VCs - all demand it be miserable and extractive, rather than empowering and liberating.

For a lot of folks, AI was the final canary in the toxic coalmine. The realization that this is not a noble cause or profession anymore. That we’re not helping people do better, at least not en masse, but instead making life actively worse for disproportionately more folks than those whose lives we make better.

And it’s a goddamn tragedy.

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