I’ve heard a version of the phrase “This isn’t what I signed up for” a few times this week, from vastly different folks in tech. People in very different companies of different scales and in different disciplines. But all were expressing the same basic sentiment, which was more or less “Working with AI all day and not other humans is not what I wanted to be doing, but here I am.”
I’ve seen many a disconnect between leadership at companies and the folks on the ground to varying degrees throughout my career, but the AI disconnect is the sharpest one by far. We’re gonna have to figure this out pretty soon though, because whether they’re saying it out loud or just trying to get by, folks are craving the human loop of software work.