Do you know what my goal was when I was in grad school? I wanted to be an engineer. I didn’t really care which kind, I just wanted that as my professional title. You see, when I was growing up, the engineer was always a character who could build or fix something. They used creativity and thought outside of the box, they were free to experiment.
For a brief time I actually had that experience.
It was fun to come into the office or log on to the network and see what kind of trouble we got ourselves into. Looking at what new things we were making. Getting a sneak peek into new products and ideas that were being thought of. I was a part of that process. My job was to mitigate the risk that came with the idea that hadn’t been tried before.
No job is perfect but the bad times were countered by the idea that we, as a collective, were trying to solve a problem together.
The introduction of AI was something, a marvel. Now those little things that dragged the job down could be handed off and automated.
We stopped solving problems together. It was no longer the team trying to work on something. It became trying to orchestrate a nameless, soulless, unaccountable entity to do it for us. Speed became second to none; even building a good product or implementing a good idea.
The best part of being an engineer is leveraging novelty to solve a problem. It is one of the few times, in my professional career, that gave me that proud moment of fulfillment. It allowed me to take ownership of something, warts and all. Maybe it was ugly, maybe it was inefficient. Maybe it didn’t work that well at baseline. But it was something that I made, it was an idea manifested. A question answered.
That isn’t the case anymore. I don’t solve problems in the same way that I used to. Instead of pouring hours into formulating creative solutions to complicated problems, I am spending hours monitoring tokens, tweaking steering files, and rummaging through an ever growing mountain of AI tools; many of which do the exact same thing.
Even the messages of success aren’t our own anymore. Colleagues post accomplishments that they didn’t create using messages that they didn’t even write.The very thing that made us all good at what we did was stripped and replaced in the name of efficiency on paper. Some mysterious metric in some jira dashboard we never see.
I used to be stressed about whether or not I did a good job. Did I contribute to the team enough? Was my solution strong enough? Could I defend my idea? Could I make it better? Those questions made me better at what I did. It made me proud of what I could do. It allowed me to iterate on something and see the results of my labor take shape, in real time.
Now, I no longer think about those things. Instead I wonder how long until those mysterious metrics on the dashboard I never see point at me and say it's more efficient if I wasn’t here. The stronger AI appears to be, the weaker I become. Even if it isn’t true.
Not only does that distract me from my job that I used to enjoy so much, it's worse. Now those anxieties penetrate into my every day. I no longer have things that I build that I am proud of, because I don’t build them anymore.
There is a certain kind of mourning that happens when your entire self image of who you are, as a professional, gets reduced to a prompt. A process to be automated, one piece at a time.
I enjoyed my job once. Maybe one day I will get the opportunity to enjoy it again.
