The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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My friends and acquaintances that work in tech have been getting let go left and right in the past year and a lot of them are pretty much mentally and physically checking out. One has been solo travelling for the past 6 months with no plans to stop, burning through his big tech severance package and savings. The other spent almost a year trying to get another job in tech but no luck at all, probably because of past experience being QA and frontend only. The other one had a very laid back 20 hour/week remote job and knew he was going to get eliminated eventually ever since ChatGPT came out few years back, but was too lazy to prepare for it and it finally happened a few months ago, now just sitting around, burning through savings, not sure what to do. One more is in accounting, and not fired yet, but was pretty much told it will happen in the next 6 months, so he's now desperately trying to come up with his own side hustle/business so he doesn't have to look for another job since he thinks accounting prospects will only get worse from here. Even my friend's brother, who has some senior position at Meta is totally burnt out and expecting to get fired at some point soon, now just trying to save up as much as possible.
I remain grateful for giving up on my (rather progressed) plans to switch from medicine to CS or ML a few years back. I'd started teaching myself when GPT 3.5 came out, and when 4 was realized, I gulped and decided medicine was the safer option.
I do not regret this decision. You guys are, unfortunately, rather screwed. I hope that we as a society figure something out, and soonish, it's only going to accelerate from here.
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This shit keeps me up at night. I work as a software developer, but I don't work "in tech", per se. I constantly hear these horror stories, and I'm just waiting for the contagion to spread to my little corner of the industry. It really makes me wonder if any of my backup plans are even worth it.
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I'm kinda in this boat, been on a sabbatical from tech for two years, considering possibly going back to work next year.
Really feeling very good about my decision to bank 70% of my tech salary for a decade. It's not quite retirement, but being within spitting distance has made the AI revolution taking a big slice out of demand for my career while I'm out of work a lot less threatening to my financial stability than it otherwise would have been.
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That's me! Fired a few months ago, no luck with job applications. I'm smart but also seriously stupid and burnt-out. Might go work at a warehouse or something. The prospect of spending a few years in college to go into another field is very demoralizing
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Nobody has any clue what the fuck to do, nobody has any idea of what the next 5 years are going to look like let alone the next 20, and depression of this type is a happiness-rationing system designed to protect you from this type of circumstance (mostly so that you don't blow your entire stockpile of resources on something really risky trying to get back to that state).
And really, that's just the way it is now. Welcome to the post '90s Japanese economy, I guess.
Maybe once the data centers get built out there'll be enough room in the economy to fund software again (as in, "now we need people to do the thing the data centers were for"), but who knows? Industry in particular has been missing its 'smarter than the average bear'-types for a while, especially those that are smarter than the automation.
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