[ethagnawl]

This really resonates. I'm a dev/sysadmin/whatever with 15+ years of experience and I've been seriously considering applying for a job at my local Tractor Supply.

I've been having trouble finding consistent work for the last year but was recently accepted into a recruitment network. Almost every posting on the network's job board is for AI/agentic bullshit (many of them in defense contexts) and I just can't bring myself to apply for any of them. I won't be able to fake the required enthusiasm. I've been through 4/5/6? hype cycles over the course of my career and I'm just over it all. Maybe the AI bubble will burst? Maybe it won't? Either way, it takes the fun out of what I've enjoyed doing -- even if it's because it's all anyone wants to talk about. Layer all of the surveillance* and age verification crap on top of that and ... I want off this train.

*Anecdote: I was a chaperone on an elementary school field tried yesterday and there were >8 cameras on the bus. This amount of surveillance and accompanying normalization of it hasn't prevented or even helped rectify multiple incidents my child has had while riding on school buses. So, all of the downsides and no upsides.