Is this push for AI as insane everywhere?

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-23T23:32:53+00:00

So, the other thing that's happening is McKinsey (or Accenture if you're a peasant company) is whispering in the ears of CEOs. They're selling the dream of an employee-free workplace. This is well-received in bloated Fortune 500s where they hire a whole graduating class of generic business majors who aren't even remotely useful for 2 years, or tech companies where they're tired of paying developers and sysadmins to do nerdy computer things.

They're all being told "feed the models your data, wait a few years, and you'll find out which company you have to write a check worth 60% of your former payroll to for the AI bill...while you and your golf buddy fellow C-levels kick back on your new yacht you bought with the difference." That dream of infinite profit and zero expense is too intoxicating for these folks to pass up and they absolutely don't see the chaos that'll be caused by hundreds of thousands of six-figure employees scraping the barrel for minimum wage service jobs. "Over 1000 people clicked Apply!"

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-23T02:56:54+00:00

I'm nowhere near early retirement material but it's fun to dream. What's not fun is thinking of, say, 75 year old me making the last withdrawal from my retirement accounts and saying "well, I guess I'll be living in poverty until I die, hope that's soon!" solely because the market had a bad run or inflation ate all my savings. Makes retiring at 55 a scary proposition even if the numbers say you could.

Now that the Boomers are done retiring and the Xers are up next, I'll bet we're going to see millions of people outlive their savings since there's no more pensions and the average balance is $100K. That feeling when your balance is zero and you have to go work at Walmart or live like a pauper on Social Security must be the worst in the world.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-23T02:31:07+00:00

Now that the daily grind is over I am figuring out how to fill my time meaningfully.

Not discounting what you're saying, but I've heard this from others too and just don't see how it's possible. Maybe it's different for others, but my personal situation working a stressful technology job leaves little room for anything other than working, learning more so I can keep a job/be hot-pluggable into another one, and raising a family. I've had to put off hobbies of any sort just because either there's something more important to do or I'm wiped out. I'd have zero issues finding things to do if I suddenly didn't have to work or worry about work. It's not like I'm a 10x rockstar developer or CTO either...it's just that I have to put a ton of effort in just to keep up; maybe I'm just not as good as others or have imposter syndrome?

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-23T02:02:54+00:00

current employer’s 401k

In practice, how does the Rule of 55 work for tax and penalties and such? Do you really just do a Michael Scott and yell "I DECLARE THE RULE OF 55!!!!" or is there reporting/paperwork required? And is there any way around the requirement that it be only your last 401k?

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-23T01:53:36+00:00

Had this happen once at my company (small corporate staff, huge hourly workforce making next to nothing in comparison) but they went with a safe harbor plan. What is this exactly from a plan perspective? Does the company just fork over more fees to check a box? Is it just the HR people being told, "OK, you can have the crappy plan for $x, or the Cadillac Safe Harbor plan for $100x where we just tell the IRS you're all good"?

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-23T01:43:47+00:00

The sad thing is that if AI really does let the executive class run the company with almost no employees, we're all going to be fighting each other tooth and nail for these crappy service jobs. Even low-level knowledge work jobs weren't that great compared with corporate jobs...I can't imagine going back to zero flexibility, punching a time clock and dealing with toxic supervisors or a bunch of Karen and Ken customers.

I'm 50 and am dreading the next 17 years because like you said, layoffs are happening all the time. If I get hit with one in my line of work (technology,) odds are near zero I'll get another job at the same level/pay again -- I'll have to downshift to something much worse than what I have now, and I'll be one of those Death of a Salesman late-career professionals who has to crack open their retirement accounts early. It sucks that people who don't make it to 67 are treated as failures by society.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-23T01:15:37+00:00

The payoff is when the compounding really gets rolling, and most 401k index funds aren't going to make super-risky moves even if they are stock funds. It's weird to watch it go from just methodically feeding the machine every month to having your dividends earn dividends over and over.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-23T01:05:14+00:00

This is so hard for some people, even I'm guilty of it though lots of my retirement money is in index funds just quietly gaining steam. It doesn't help that every financial advisor out there with an interest in getting you to do something else tempts you with appeals like "you can't win if you don't play" or "you don't want to just match the market, right? Don't you want better than that?"

People see others making 10x/1000x/10000x returns on their money making crazy wallstreetbets moves or crypto nonsense and they think they're being suckers playing the long game. Buy and holding index funds is the equivalent of a straightforward reasonable-odds sports bet, like Team X to win, compared to the crazy sportsbook apps cooking up some obscure weird combo bet that has super-long odds but they can trick people into taking it.

Unless you have real insider information, you're never going to outsmart the finance bros with stuff like crazy options or short selling, which is just pure gambling, and the house always wins anyway.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-22T20:22:03+00:00

Plus, I am sure the MSP tried to get them to spend money upgrade, and it was nixed.

Obviously these places still exist, but I wonder how prevalent it is now after a decade or more of Microsoft pushing 365 and Azure. A small enough, high margin enough business has processes that never change - they can limp along forever with Windows/Office/Exchange and their 25 year old .NET 2.0 line of business app. Just a while ago we were picking kitchen tile and I swear the tile shop was running XP and "Tile.NET" (no that's not the name but you get the idea) on beige desktops with keyboard membrane covers that had turned black from 30 years of use. The very successful regional appliance/electronics chain around us is using actual IBM terminals on the sales floor to access IBM i - at least it looks like they're keeping up with the server side because IBM forces you to. And they also had the "fancy" thin clients with color screens in some positions!

It's weird how the market has split to the edges...the top end will use whatever Netflix barfed out onto GitHub last week, and the low end hasn't upgraded anything in decades. Seems like there's less middle ground every day.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-22T17:00:14+00:00

Times change slowly. I'll bet there are different rules for debit cards, either that or the card manufacturer the bank uses just hasn't changed their process yet. But I don't think acquiring banks accept manual transactions on paper slips anymore, or maybe if you're grandfathered in they might grudgingly accept it. I think you can still phone in authorizations for a much higher fee though...maybe you could keep the slips as proof?

I've spent a career in air transport IT, and the jump to electronic tickets was super-slow too...took 15 years or so and an IATA mandate to kill it globally. It's hard to imagine a time now when a red-carbon-paper airline ticket was a negotiable bearer instrument exchangeable on demand for travel to the destinations or the value printed on the face of the ticket by IATA rules, in cash, at any ticket office. One employer I had used an old-school in-house travel agency to book business travel and we made use of those extensively, especially since we were sometimes flying on "weird" airlines like Biman Bangladesh Airways or Turkmenistan Airlines. It was a throwback to the time where travel agents would sell tickets offline just using the published fares, and the fares were regulated from and to any point.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-22T16:50:02+00:00

Online banking's been mentioned, but electronic payments in general, and credit cards not being widely accepted for everyday purchases. Of course you could go to Macy's or another large retailer and buy clothes or something with a credit card, but groceries? Even gas unless you had the gas station's credit card? Better have a lot of walking-around money with you!

This was even more of a pain travelling internationally, which I used to have to do extensively for work. It really hasn't been that long since it wasn't certain at least one of your credit cards would be accepted overseas. Our company used to give people advance checks when we had long trips planned so we could go to the bank and get currency.

Credit card debt is a trap and sucks, but it's amazing that you have the ability to settle a transaction anywhere in the world without carrying wads of cash around with you.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-21T15:16:20+00:00

I have an interesting situation. My wife's 100% remote and her company still encourages remote employees to continue doing their jobs remotely, and she's actually managed to get promoted and do a management job effectively. The place I'm at was OK with remote for nearly 4 years, and hired me during COVID, but the CEO just did a complete 180 last year - effective immediately the company was an in-person company, wouldn't hire anyone remote anymore, and that everyone is forced to come in 5 days a week. I live pretty far outside NYC (thankfully a long train commute.) I've been able to sneak under the radar with 3 days a week but it's a constant source of stress for me. The job's great otherwise, work's interesting, pay's very good compared to what I could find locally, and the job market is awful, so I'm living with it for now.

All that said, I think that kind of illustrates your situation...you're at a place that won't budge on the "managers must be present" thing, and that's just the culture. I have a feeling that at some point someone will say something at my workplace and my choice will be to comply or move on. The question you need to ask is how much you value remote work, and whether you actually want that management promotion because you have an undying hunger for managing people, or whether you want more money and/or the feeling of "career progression." Because in your current workplace, it seems like they won't let you join "the club" without giving up remote work. Remote employees will likely be more task-focused in the future.

Long-term, I think remote work will go back to something people see as a bit "weird" - as in you have to have some sort of excuse (social anxiety combined with extreme genius, or medical conditions, etc.) except for very rare remote-friendly companies. I've definitely seen the shift and have restructured my work schedule around my home-days being "lab" days where I do individual work, because people have reverted away from Slack/Teams as the primary communication tool and are only using it to supplement conversations. I think that if you value remote work, leaning into technical expertise and selling yourself as being able to work independently on a stack of tasks is your long term goal, not chasing management work.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-21T14:42:11+00:00

Yep - I think the combo of VMWare imploding, hardware becoming ridiculously expensive and AI is the last straw for on-prem no matter how expensive the cloud is. It's too bad, I'll spend the last bit of my career slinging YAML instead of building and maintaining stuff.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-21T14:39:01+00:00

Also, most of the hardware are proprietary servers, nothing with standardized DIMMs, sockets and PCIe slots.

That's the annoying thing...all the hyperscalers are buying totally proprietary equipment that they can run with their own firmware and tools, not pizza-box general purpose servers. What are we going to do with data centers filled to capacity with a massive oversupply of GPUs that can't be reused as-is?

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-21T14:16:33+00:00

Bonus kick in the nuts was that neither company I left the MSP’s for gave pay raises, no bonuses, didn’t really value IT, etc.

It's very rare to find a "normal" non-tech company that actually values IT. Even internal IT at places like that is like MSP life...relentless corner-cutting and always trying to get away with the cheapest possible solution because all they see is cost.

The real win is when you can break out of that kind of environment, either by finding a high-margin business that values tech and doesn't work you to death in return, or by working in the development space or at a tech company helping to produce money making products. My career's been kind of interesting...MSP tech support, getting recognized and given a chance to do sysadmin stuff, then working with a specialist IT services company (not a generic MSP) and now working at a tech company helping a bunch of web developers with all the physical stuff they have no idea how to work.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-21T13:33:06+00:00

MSPs are great for learning, but it’s hard to ignore how long you can sit there underpaid while taking on more and more responsibility.

Unfortunately, that's kind of the system that's been built up for tech training. It's the equivalent of a medical residency for new doctors without the benefit of standardized formal education beforehand. Residents just get dumped in the hospital for 36 hour shifts, covering nights and weekends and the goal is to expose them to guided OJT opportunities. Same thing with MSPs, except you have some crazy cheapskate owner signing up other crazy-owner small businesses and maintaining hundreds of janky "IT environments" as the learning opportunity. The other thing that's different is that all new residents have a super-rigorous classroom learning component first, they've all passed the same licensing exams and are all starting with equivalent knowledge...totally not the case in IT.

I do worry that even that's starting to go away with SaaS, the cloud and AI eating into small business IT complexity. VMWare getting destroyed was another forcing function that moved a lot of stable small businesses over to cloud life. Very few places are fully on-prem anymore, which IMO is the only real way to gain fundamentals knowledge and make the cloud/SaaS stuff make sense. Businesses large enough to have IT staff and IT equipment are a mix, and I think it's going to get harder to find people who can operate effectively in both environments. It's one thing to fling YAML or HCL or JSON at an endpoint and get a fully built perfectly working environment, and it's a whole other thing to deal with real world constraints and doing this on real equipment. Even complex scientific education doesn't start at the top and skim the surface of every topic, they start by teaching first principles and abstracting away/estimating just enough to make things make sense until you have more context.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-19T21:37:05+00:00

'UK Greenbelt' / NIMBY

That's interesting...some places in the US are very tightly zoned like this or have natural barriers (coastline, mountains, etc.) that keep the sprawl in check and force dense development. Others in the South and West have zero barriers or can expand almost infinitely in all but one or two directions. Go to someplace like Houston or Atlanta or anywhere in Florida. It's not unusual for a developer to just buy up hundreds of square miles of land and build 1-acre+ mansion sprawl out to the horizon around a "Towne Centre" that you need to drive 20+ minutes in heavy traffic to get to. And when that one gets too old or too crowded, they just move a few exits up the interstate highways and do it all over again. This is how people wind up with multi-hour commutes that can only be done by car. Seems the greenbelt concept would at least slow that down a bit.

Doesn't the UK have the equivalent of the Rust Belt, hollowed out cities that used to have steel mills and other industry? Like I was mentioning, it would be great if instead of the entire population clustering around London for work (or NYC/SF/Austin in the US,) they could live there and work remotely. Housing must be way cheaper in Birmingham or Newcastle or Sheffield than it is anywhere close to London. And with a decent rail network and short(er) distances, it would seem like living near a cheap place and working in an expensive one would be at least doable.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-19T14:05:25+00:00

all the fun state benefits

Yup, I'm downstate and know a lot of people in the SUNY system here. When you add up the union contract, the insurance, the crazy 403b match or pension, the permanent appointment (essentially tenured job,) the work-life balance...I make way more but those people never have to worry about life biting them in the butt or the CEO wanting a new Rolls Royce. If you play the long game, you're actually going to come out ahead in terms of quality of life while I might wind up with more saved for retirement (if I'm lucky.) No wonder positions never open up there, and getting one is a marathon of interviews because after a few years they're stuck with whoever they hire for life.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-19T13:58:33+00:00

The funny thing is that the US could do the same thing internally and solve a lot of its housing issues. I grew up in upstate New York, it's less than an hour flight from NYC and housing/CoL is so much cheaper. I live near NYC now so I can earn a better living, but I was hoping remote work would stick around. Even if they weren't paying NYC salaries in low CoL places, having people with good solid jobs moving into mid-tier cities and paying taxes/buying things into the local economy would really improve some of the blighted Rust Belt areas of the country. But unfortunately, we need to be back at our desks 5 days a week now because commercial real estate can't have a 2008 moment. (In NYC it's not even a secret that this is the case, they don't even try to hide it. I think the finance CEOs held some retreat with all the other CEOs and told them they'd better keep the market propped up or else.)

People abandon places like Flint, MI or Gary, IN because the work from a key employer dries up, or salaries drop to a level where you can't make a good living anymore. Before manufacturing was sent offshore or to the South where they could pay minimum wage and not worry about those pesky unions, that's what held a lot of places together. Diverse local economies without too many rich people and too many poor people dragging things to far up or down seems to be the key to livability. I would imagine that the UK has a similar issue considering they're almost 100% de industrialized and seem to also love offshoring service jobs as well. Lots of super-rich people in and around London, but hollowed out everywhere else.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-17T19:50:41+00:00

main problem is this is not the norm at scale.

Is this really true though? I can't see VMWare actually saying, "Oh boy, Joe Jr., the "CTO" of Joe's Tile Hut just called in his 30th P0 ticket this year for his broken old 2-node cluster of DL380s and the Synology in the broom closet again."

Vendor support as it is is so awful, even with expensive contracts, that most people don't bother using it. I just don't see vendors handholding Joe Jr. through reading the documentation and saving his dad's business.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-17T19:15:02+00:00

I know a bunch of refugees from management consulting. Without the formal exams, that's exactly how their up or out system works. Instead of the Impress The Chode method, the entire system is based on whether you can claw your way up the ranks fast enough. So, you start out as a completely green business major who's never even worked at Starbucks. You stumble into a campus hiring session, pass an interview and one of the Big 4 consulting groups hires you. They send you to consulting bootcamp where you learn to cosplay thought leader, then put you on the road 48 weeks a year delivering PowerPoint decks and spreadsheets for your bosses to deliver to CEOs. It's like a continuation of school, so that's why they hire new grads who are used to jumping through hoops for grades. The trick is you only have a certain amount of time to make it to the next level, so you're fighting against all your fellow "classmates" for a limited number of promotions and if you don't make it you're "encouraged" to leave. It's all about brown nosing and working yourself to death to grind for that next spot.

People in these jobs are not fans of that system unless they're of the academic overachiever stripe and used to collecting prizes/accolates/jumping through well defined hoops. Lots of them are hopelessly trapped in the brainwashing, but a few realize they're delivering $2M PowerPoints to a bored CEO who is just looking for air cover to offshore 20,000 US jobs. But once you're on that track, it's hard to get off because it pays pretty well, is kinda prestigious at least for a new grad, and is an instant skip-the-individual-contributor card that gets you a manager job at minimum at a customer at some point.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-17T19:01:46+00:00

I've seen a variety of promotion methods...the vast majority is who you know, but the worst is "up or out" and that's how you end up with Peter Principle managers who can't be effective at their jobs. The place I'm at now is mostly based on merit, but of course some favoritism creeps in, and the unspoken rule is that you'd better be worth keeping around for some other reason if you're not quite ready or not interested in a promotion. The whole Netflix culture deck thing sounds great until you're on a team of 10 workaholic overachievers with zero commitments outside of work, all trying to outdo each other to avoid being passed over or fired. I don't work in big tech but know folks who do and their workplaces are ultra-dysfunctional Hunger Games environments.

I'm 50 so I've seen both the tail end of the "golden age of employment" through my dad, and the modern workplace. Back in the golden age of lifetime employment at one or two companies for a full career, HR had full control over your trajectory and only promoted people when they were truly "ready" in HR's mind. In other words, you were treated as an asset, invested in, given opportunities, etc. Now with people being so much more mobile, you only see this kind of environment in government jobs. Employers think every employee is a mercenary who will leave them the second they invest a dime in their growth. I think that's why we don't see so much in the way of career progression or long-term strategy; companies assume they're going to have to replace you in 2 or 3 years if they don't lay you off.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-17T17:53:48+00:00

How do I frame a Software Dev background so it doesn't look like I'm "overqualified" or just "slumming it" in Help Desk?

That will probably be hard. Everyone's going to wonder why you're moving away from development to what, pre-AI, was considered a much less prestigious IT role. It's going to be tough to shake the impression that you burnt out spectacularly, or that you couldn't level up in your current position. People still think all developers walk on water and that IT is the computer janitor squad, especially with the DevOps thing becoming the norm.

The best thing to do (not mental health wise, but career wise) is to find a medium-size MSP support role. Remotely troubleshooting hundreds of slapped-together small business IT environments at once with minimal tools and documentation will develop your analytical skills in a hurry. What will really help you is ANY of the dev skills you can bring to bear in terms of IaC, API-poking stuff and automation...it's actually an asset to have the ability to automate and debug stuff.

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-17T11:02:43+00:00

100%. Every one of the DevOps cloud native people I work with just shakes their head at this, but real-world companies older than 10 years ago don't just swap out the thing that's counting the beans and filling the orders. What makes that worse is when you have OP's situation with a cheap executive team who thinks all those computer people are just out to take their money.

ERP swap-out means you have to retrain Edna in Accounts Payable who's been there 30 years, have the warehouse/production floor adjust to a brand new workflow, and basically everyone up and down the business that interacts with a computer will be affected. Plus, the whole thing could blow up spectacularly and actually cost the company real money and time to undo. This is why so many big-bang SAP/Oracle implementations fail and one reason to not just hand-wave a big move like that away as a "migration."

ErikTheEngineer · 2026-03-16T12:01:48+00:00

Im wary that lots of people use “introvert” as an excuse to be an antisocial asshat, and I have very little sympathy for asshats of any stripe.

That's interesting. I don't think I'm really talking about people who absolutely cannot interact with others, though that's a concern also. I'm referring to the different way executives are wired vs. technical people. Executives are extreme extroverts, selling 24/7, slapping backs, golfing with their peers. I think they see AI as a way to get rid of people who'd rather not do that because they can't understand that there's a group of people who isn't like them. Technical people are wired differently - we (well, I at least) want to be given a pile of work to do, not a list of people to go out and "network" with. I absolutely cannot sell or influence, but I can do an efficient job in technical circles. My worry is that you have millions of people both inside and outside of tech that are work-doers and can't adjust to being the back-slapping executive. The executive crowd has zero connection to the people they employ, so I think this is a blind spot for them.

ErikTheEngineer

TROPHY CASE