Career break and a bit of a ramble.
What a career break looks like for me. Well, now it looks like more of a career change, and several factors have led me to this decision.
Long story short, a manufatured firing the company called a "layoff," played out right in front of my eyes in an hour or two on what should have been a regular, mundane Tuesday morning back in February of 2024. "Your position is being dissolved," I believe were the words, verbatim, of a C-level who has since been canned due to various, nefarious under-the-table dealings (HA!). This caused me and my family an immense amount of stress that words are ill-equipped to describe. Naturally, this resulted in months of searching on and off and realizing the tech market has gone full-in on contracts with far less emphasis on FTE hiring and even less respect for anyone with talent. Prior to the public release of ChatGPT, I could quit one job and land another often at a higher wage, within 6-8 weeks, no problem. That couldn't be further from the case today.
Like many, in order to stay afloat, I had to pull nearly all of my retirement savings early and take the hit from Uncle Sam. Savings for which I thank my past self profusely for being smart enough to invest in. This allowed me to land a few contract gigs, as my page reflects. It also led to some negative personal choices that came with consequences of their own relevent to this post, but not appropriate to go into in any detail on a public forum.
I have decided to take some time to reevaluate the current tech market as it continues to become impacted by AI and numerous other economic threats. Any technology presented in a manner that causes mass layoffs and other things disruptive to your average worker just looking to pay their bills and support their families is one that should not be embraced. Rather, it’s one we should reflect on and take a hardline stance against if it continues to put up barriers for human talent. Talent that ultimately is lost and never guaranteed back. Observation now tells me AI buy-in by board members and C-levels just a year or two ago is causing a not-insignificant amount of psychosis at the top levels of their companies and resulting in potentially irreparable damage to their products and services, or folding of their business entirely. The tokenization pricing model switch this year alone has caused many to backpedal, which I find both hilarious and promising, but only if things return to a sane level of FTE hiring and not asking tech professionals to do the job of 2-3 different people for less pay. This is also all too common for comfort today. It's insulting, plain and simple. The amount of interviews I've done asking me to wear 3-5 different hats for half the wage I used to get paid to wear 1 or 2 is insane.
No company can expect any 1 person to do quality work when asking them to be a network engineer, a systems administrator, and a help desk technician without commensurate pay and an adequate team to back them up. Like it used to be, for decades. AI has already proven to fail with extreme prejudice at interacting with customers via chatbots. It has caused entire environments to go hard-down because of scripts "vibe-coded" by naive technicians or developers who lack the true knowledge to review such things prior to running them in a production environment. Often, they don't even run them in a test environment first. As my Gen Z friends would say, "Oof." There goes money, time, and likely that person's job. Which, let's get real, was just to write prompts to begin with.
What did their bosses expect?!
The mind. It boggles. We are seeing a political slide back to "better times," supposedly. When America was great? When did we stop being great?! We WERE great until this shenanigans began a few years back.
In my opinion, the way forward now is to look back to pre-GPT hiring practices and begin to leverage them once more. Leveraging AI as a tool and not an employee itself is fine in my book. But, don't rely on it to replace a dedicated, talented team of people who individually can only be pushed so far until they stop trying to get hired. Or "quiet quit," as the saying went a while back when it was en vogue. I don't blame anyone who did that or is presently doing that, if they are meeting the above criteria regarding responsibilities without a solid, competitive wage.
Let me clarify by saying that I agree with sane recruiters, of which there are MANY still out there working hard to land people like me good jobs. Whenever and wherever those can be found. Let's hope searching for such roles is getting easier as AI becomes less of a boon as a replacement model, instead being used as an augmentation tool for people to leverage during their workday.