The OP is not alone. I’ve worked for a lot of different types of companies of all sizes with all different cultures. If you come from a high-pressure environment (like a Big-4 or a FAANG company) where you are constantly at 110% and suddenly shift to a slower paced company, it can often feel very disconcerting. Sort of like how a shark needs to be in constant motion or it dies.
For example, I used to work for a consulting company. Often I would get clients where they were nuts and there simply wasn’t enough people working enough hours in the day to perform all the bullshit work that was being assigned. Plus on top of that you had to contribute to sales. Plus on top of THAT you had to work on "community activities like training or DEI initiatives or whatever. This was actually pretty standard at most consulting firms I worked at. So when a client ends (particularly if it ends unexpectedly) you have literally no work to do (besides helping with sales and community BS). There is a literal clock that starts ticking for finding your next project otherwise you’ll be fired.
The most stress-free time is actually when you’re “on the bench” but are signed to a client contract just waiting for them to finish the paperwork and setting up your laptop.
Every job has lulls. Time between projects or waiting for decisions to happen. And that’s fine. But what causes anxiety is your brain trying to decipher signals based on the cadence of work. If you go from constantly putting out fires to radio silence, you might start wondering things like:
Why am I not getting invited to whatever meetings my managers or coworkers are going to?
Why am I not getting these big meaty projects that require lots of actual work?
Why does no one seem to care if I’m doing any work?
Does my company even think me or my group is important enough to keep?
That feeling is largely caused by Corporate America culture over the past several decades where you have five bosses constantly demanding TPS reports to show all the important BS work they are doing so they aren’t cut in the next round of random layoffs.
For the OP, I would suggest that if you boss seems to like you, work with him to get invited to meetings to be seen talking about stuff. It seems like it’s valued more than actually “doing” stuff.
Also, what is your “job”? Like where does it fit in with the company? What are you responsible for? Just sitting around waiting for little projects to happen isn’t a real “job” (unless you’re a project manager maybe). You mentioned something that sounds like some sort of customer success manager / site reliability engineer role. During your down time, why not do stuff that actually helps build and scale that role for when you do get busy?
Yeah, that’s all sensible enough. I won’t worry about it too much, then, but will try to use some of that time on professional development, and also look for specific opportunities to jump into (or propose to my boss), within the earlier constraints.
That would be interesting. I’ve been thinking about asking to attend some conferences in the US, getting a booth for the company to help advertise in-person to US customers. Might be a better use of their only US-based asset than me just duplicating the other work that’s already happening, just less efficiently…
I feel like I’m quickly aging out of this field, both physically (in my 40s) and intellectually (I simply cannot keep pace with all the rapid AI developments). I’m lucky that many of our customers are, for now, slower-moving companies that are still using the technologies of 4-5+ years ago, stuff that I was still able to understand and reason about.
AI is very quickly changing our field (web software) — how we make it, who uses it, how support works, how we interact with and understand it, etc.
Coding is relatively easy (and mostly deterministic), but the LLM stuff is way above my head, both educationally and probably intellectually, if I’m being honest to myself. It’s a lot of math, vectors, matrices, graphs, statistics, etc., none of which I have any training in (or really, interest). That sort of probabilistic modeling is very different from what drew me into web work to begin with (the more creative & visual frontend side of things). I admire it and am impressed by it, but I can’t really see myself working in it.
Anyway, even a couple years ago, none of the AI stuff was quite viable enough to worry about. Then a year ago it was already quite a bit better just from their own improvements. Six months ago we taught them to use our own documentation and they got massively better overnight. Three months ago they started improving that documentation and rewriting our code better than we could’ve, ourselves. A month ago they were able to mostly release new features on their own.
Two years ago I was already a dinosaur in my field. Today I’m a fossil. Tomorrow I’ll be, I dunno, a puddle of oil? Nobody’s going to hire a depreciating asset like me, especially in the US, where companies typically chase short-term bubbles instead of long-term sustainability.
It’s not just me, either… my previous company laid off 90% of my team a few weeks after I left. Nobody could find work. I happened to have a European contact who gave me this job, or I’d be screwed. Others weren’t so lucky and spent months, or in some cases, years, looking for a new job. One became a farmer instead (lucky man).
Anyway, my role and my skillset are probably not long of this world. This is probably my last IT job unless I can find a different niche…
Not trying to sound all defeatist, it’s just that this is probably the single biggest change in the industry that I’ve ever seen, in like 30 years of being in it. I’d have to be blind to not be at least a little anxious about it.
Yeah, that’s a good point. I’ll consider myself lucky, then!
I almost splurted out my coffee
I will probably never be able to retire. And certainly not now, in my 40s, with, oh, I don’t know… a couple grand in my retirement account? That’s a whole different story (which I’ve been very properly chastized over in another thread).
Thankfully, my work ethic has been much better than my investment ethic. I’ve got that going for me, at least…
Heh, exactly this. It’s ironic how my career has gone. I started out in extremely high-intensity environments, managing all of our mission-critical production servers and constantly putting out fires (some of which I started, to be fair ). I was paid much less, but had much greater responsibilities, and a backlog of work months if not years long. Now I mostly just take however much time I need to answer emails, on whatever schedule I want. It’s the opposite of how I expected things to go. I certainly didn’t expect my work life to get easier over time.
One truism I’ve come to realize about this industry is that pay has little correlation to job skill or difficulty. It’s more affected by timing (macroeconomic conditions), differences between individual companies, management culture and level of knowledge, etc. My highest-paying jobs were also my easiest, and my lowest-paying ones were by far the most difficult and nerve-wracking. Weird how that works. Out of the fryer and onto the… armchair?
I often wonder this myself In a nutshell, my team is responsible for customer satisfaction in its various forms: everything from meet-and-greets to pricing adjustments to technical support, etc. We wear many hats, but ultimately we exist to make sure our customers are happy, at almost any cost. This is a very stark difference to most US software companies that don’t even offer human support, just a bunch of pre-written FAQs and AI chatbots. We go out of our way to make flesh-and-blood humans available to our customers to address their each and every whim.
My specific role within this team is similarly ill-defined. Some days I am literally resetting forgotten passwords. Other days I am helping sole proprietorships understand basic HTML. Yet other days, there is some major service provider outage, and I’m the only one awake, so I end up doing crisis communications. And once in a while, some huge multinational enterprise needs help with some part of their giant codebase used by their twenty global teams, and suddenly I’m investigating everything between their code and their network and our code and our network, spanning some probably some 20-30 different systems and half as many languages, both human and computer.
Ultimately, my job is to do whatever I can to make our customers happy. Mind you, this was never really explicitly told to me, and I’ve received maybe a total of 2 hours of training in my time at this company. It’s just what I think my job is. It’s all really ad-hoc, lol. I’m at once both the first-line receptionist and simultaneously also the most experienced web dev on the support team. It’s a pretty bizarre role, and I’ve never been in a company that operated like this. Not that I’m complaining, mind you… I love the diversity of work, and people, that I’m exposed to. It’s by far my favorite job I’ve ever had. I just wish there was less downtime (strange thought, I know).
A typically efficiency-oriented US company would probably have looked at this situation and thought “this is a waste of resources, we need to tier our support, hire some cheaper script-readers to deal with the frontline issues and have an escalation process for the harder situations — but only if the customers pay for it”. Not so here. We’re so small and so flat that everybody just does whatever they can.
Yep, that is ultimately the goal. I’ve offered many, many times to help improve some of our systems that aren’t so optimized. I’m experienced with them, I have a plan to improve them, and (I believe, at least) I have the technical know-how to do so safely. But I’ve been turned down every time so far. Part of it is that many of these systems do tie into our more critical export-sensitive systems, but part of it is also probably just part of a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. Very different again to the orgs I’d previously been a part of, which were always looking to improve and hyperoptimize everything all the time.
I’ll have to keep looking and hoping something pops up…
Sorry this is all so long and thought-rambly. I’ve just never been in a situation like this. The culture couldn’t be more different… compared to anything I’ve worked in in the US, calling this a complete 180 would still be underselling it. It’s just a totally different way of existing…
Naw, t’was but my own life choices I own them. I’ve had a good, full life already — far better than most, and more than I deserved, I think. I’m grateful for it, and it’s OK if it’ll get harder in the future. I chose this.
And if I splurt out too much coffee… that’s ok, it was good coffee and I wouldn’t mind another.
Absolutely. The last thing like this was when PCs started to proliferate. A lot of the geezers just couldn’t figure out how to use a spreadsheet or deal with the fact that they had to use a word processor and couldn’t hand something to a secretary to type up for them. They would print out emails and put them in a file folder. The ones who couldn’t keep up ended up having to work in a department store or something.
I was just starting my career when this happened and I was horrified at their ineptitude and lack of ability to learn. I vowed that this would never happen to me. Obviously new stuff happened like the web and social media and smartphones but it was a incremental level in skill to get from one of those to the other. AI is the next game changer and I’m retired now. Probably just in time.
Yeah, exactly this. I was making websites and admin-ing BBSes when I was 8 years old, when 28.8kbps was the hot new thang. By the time I was a teenager I was hacking school systems, writing Excel macros, teaching computer classes, and explaining things to the school principal. It all just came naturally, easily, without any effort. Had I known then what I know now, I probably would’ve spent those brain cells on more worthwhile topics. Youth really is wasted on the young
Nowadays, it’s hard enough to just keep up with the progress of human-made technologies (like React) — there, at least, it was the result of human minds, my own species compatriots that my brain is more a less an analog of. With a lot of the LLM stuff, we are only barely able to understand them after the fact, as a mix of forensic investigations, statistical analyses, and plain old guesses. I don’t think anyone truly understands how they work completely, so we’re just kinda evolving them in these giant digital petri dishes and hoping they will grow to be more useful than deadly.
I’ve taken a look at some of the papers that started this field and some of the videos that try to explain it, but… honestly, it’s even more confusing to me than quantum mechanics.
I look back now at the old folks who struggled with an Excel formula, and realize I’ve become exactly the same And I’m only 40-(something). Probably the next generation will feel that way by the time they’re 20.
I was in server side development for much of the WWW boom and bailed out just as “cloud” was becoming a thing versus all on-prem or hosted servers in remote data centers.
I felt the same way; I’m too old to learn the volume of new shit turning my world inside out as I speak. Azure? AWS? 20 microservices running on 20 virtual servers all intercommunicating to do what had been one DLL installed on each webserver in a load-balanced cluster? Gaah! Stop the industry; I want to get off! I was just about 50 when that happened.
Fortunately I had an escape capsule. The tsunami of change wrought now by AI makes my displacement seem like nothing.
Ugh, tell me about it. I’m 61 in a tech-related industry. I’m just trying to hang on and stay relevant for a few more years until I can retire-- we’re not quite where I’d want to be to try early retirement, but circumstances may force it upon me.
As for AI, that’s been getting quite a bit of push within my company, with a lot of (too much, methinks) insistence that it’s not about replacing human jobs, it’s about making us more efficient and making our job easier! Riiiight. Even if that were true, who wants to be nothing but a ‘prompt jockey’? I watched a video on using AI to help with web design. The person who made the video prompted an AI to come up with 4 design ideas for a website for a coffee shop. The 4 designs were…fine. But who’s going to proudly say “See this website? Like the design? I prompted the the AI to design that!”. Where will we find any pride in our work in the future of AI, if we even have a job? It’s depressing.
All I can add for any more advice to you (whether at your current job or looking for another) is, figure out what your niche is, and really promote that. I came from a graphic design background originally, and moved to IT / web design and development. My niche has been that I’m a good bridge between the design side and the technical, back-end coding side of the biz. They are two very different disciplines that do not communicate well with each other, so I’m good at acting as an ‘interpreter’.
A good attitude. And know that sometimes it’s not ‘choice’ sometimes life sucks.
Two of my very best friends are kinda trying to navigate the path to retirement. It’s a rocky road for sure. I’m still trying to sort out the damn paperwork.
To retire from my job, I ended up getting 100 pages of paperwork. No security clearance or anything. It was just WTF?
Wait a minute, I said “good bye”. 3 months later I’m still working through it and have my own financial advisor.
The artists who painted on canvas with brushes said exactly the same thing when glass-plate photography was invented. Where’s the skill and artistry in pointing a box at a scene & pushing a button?
As I noted above, I totally feel for folks whose lifetime skillset and method of working is melting out from underneath them. As you’re experiencing. BTDT myself.
But I will push back a little on the idea that the new way is necessarily devoid of satisfaction for folks who’re good at it. Who will probably be younger than us.
Eh, maybe…but I don’t know if I quite buy it. There’s still a lot involved with a creative eye and technical know-how to compose and take a great photograph.
I’ve seen several AI prompting training videos and done several AI tutorials on image manipulation and design. I understand there’s a certain knack involved in telling the AI exactly what you’re looking for. But it just doesn’t seem like typing a few descriptive sentences into an AI bot to come up with an image or web design can possibly give the same sense of satisfaction in a job well done, as it does when actually creating it out of one’s own imagination.
Not to mention, if the technical workforce (of those humans who still have a job) migrates to something like 99% ‘prompt jockeys’ and 1% upper management, where are the profits going to go? I doubt the prompt jockeys are going to make anywhere near the salary that highly skilled workers used to make.
But, maybe that’s just me turning into a crotchety old man, shaking my fist at the computer screen saying “that’s not how it was done in my day! We designed and coded things the right way, dagnabbit!”
One of my first IT jobs was writing assembler for IBM S/370s. In a good days’ work you got a bug fixed or wrote a few pages of fresh code. Which accomplished very little actual useful computation or data manipulation. That took hundreds of pages of code.
~15 years ago when I bailed out of IT we were writing in C# v6ish. I still wrote a few pages of fresh code on a good day. But what that day’s worth of C# code could do would’ve taken a month to write in assembler. And even longer to debug. What was satisfying was how much more useful my day’s brain busting was than it had been 30 years previously.
The person hand-crafting an image or some HTML & CSS can feel good about the page they finished today, Friday, after working on it all week. The AI jockey can be satisfied about the 100 images or pages they finished in the same time.
For damned sure the employment economics of AI are very, very scary unless you’re a fatcat investor and not a worker.
But that’s a separate issue unrelated to the nature of job satisfaction. IMO YMMV.
Well, paradigms will shift; not much a person can do but try to ride the wave or get off.
I’m old enough that when I first started as a graphic designer I was doing it with Rapidograph pens on vellum paper, using art boards and Rubylith overlays to shoot film negatives from to make the print plates. When I migrated to doing all my work on computer I embraced it, and got good at not only working on computers, but networking computers and peripherals together.
I eventually got hired to manage a graphic art department at 29. I was replacing a manager, I’ll call him George, who was the exact age I am now. He was beloved by the people who worked for him, but still ran the department using artboards and overlays and such. I was tasked with modernizing the department into a Mac shop. I felt a little bad about my part in forcing out George into early retirement, but it wasn’t my choice, and if I wasn’t hired, they would have hired someone else to replace him.
I remember thinking, at least I don’t have to worry about a paradigm shift in the industry like paper and pen to computer-- what’s going to replace us working on computers? It didn’t occur to me at the time that the computers might someday replace us. I’m still gainfully employed (for now, at least), but these days I find myself thinking of ol’ George, and how what goes around comes around
I don’t know. I’m 53 but I kind of feel like due to the nature of my job I’m in a constant state of “learning new shit”. I often joke that I actually have only one real “skill”. That is you can put me in a room full of total strangers, introduce me to some new technology I’ve never seen before, and then help them figure out how to use it to solve some business problem."
Be careful. A booth at a conference is a big investment, and one person can’t really do it. I’ve done a booth with my group, and then, far better, with others in my company who had specialists in dealing with the conference, setting it up, doing the graphics, and all the other stuff. A table, maybe, if the conference supports that. Did you know that you need to fill out the paperwork and pay a fee (a big one) to plug your laptop into the power supply on the floor of the exhibit hall?
Just going to a conference to meet people and get new ideas though is an excellent idea.
To be honest, @Reply is probably correct to be anxious about his job on some level. It’s a small <20 person software company where he is in what to them is a foreign satellite office trying to break into the largest and arguably most competitive economies in the world. And his customer facing role doesn’t really sound well defined. Unless you think you’re working at the next Instagram, it’s an inherently precarious position IMHO.
My advice to @Reply (again coming from a consultant / entrepreneurial tech-bro mindset) is don’t go around asking for more “busywork”. Go around and look for problems to solve and come to your manager with solutions.
Your role sounds “bizarre” because it’s ill-defined in what is an operating model that’s poorly defined as little more than “make the client happy”.
Parts of it sound like a Sales Engineer where you meet and great with the client and act as a technical SME during the sales process.
It also reads like a Customer Success Manager where you engage in a long-term relationship with the client finding use cases for your product.
Parts of it sound like a Site Reliability Engineer where you work on making the product more stable
And some of it is very much L1 Tech Support where you are the first one they call when they have a problem.
Or maybe it’s just they need someone sitting around in the good ole’ US of A waiting to help out in the event of a problem. But that’s not really a real “job”. The other things I described are actual jobs at enterprise-level SaaS companies and many of them pay six figures.
So if you are sitting around board, go to career pages for AWS, Microsoft, or any other software company and look at the different position that seem similar to the work you are doing or those that I described. Start defining and documenting some SOPs for the work you are doing, but imagine if like you had to figure out how to deal with 1000x the workload (i.e. how you would manage a team of people to help you). Maybe talk to your NA sales people and see how you can support their efforts. Use AI to help you.
Like you don’t have to kill yourself with work. But they are already paying you and if you can come up with ways that make things easier to go from a 20 person company to a 200 person company, that’s the sort of stuff bosses tend to appreciate.
But if you want a job where you kind of sometimes have to work a bit and your bosses in Europe are content just running a little lifestyle tech business, that’s fine too. But just understand the economics is such that at some point they may just decide they don’t need someone across the pond not doing much or the broader economy might decide it for them.
Also the point of conferences is to make sales. It’s not just showing up with your booth and some branded swag to give away on the exhibit hall. Conferences are only worthwhile if you are also collecting leads (ie the girls who scan the QR code on your badge) and setting up demos with real buyers.
It sounds to me like you should be using that down time to take some AI classes. You are going to need to stay employed for some time to come, and it doesn’t sound as if this role will last throughout your career. Use this time to build the skills that will keep you employed long-term. (And possibly help this company to keep up.)
Certs and classes are fine, but really I think @Reply needs to articulate what he does in a way that resonates with employers.
It’s not just about a collection of skills and resume padding. Particularly given that the OP is in his 40s. I don’t know if it’s “ageism” per se, but I think hiring managers tend to look at if they just need “skills” they want cheap skills with 1-5 years of experience. In your 40s, they want someone with 15 to 20 years expertise in something.
As for all the AI stuff, it remains to be seen whether it becomes a net positive or a net negative — or probably a mix of both, depending on where you fall on the social ladder.
One thing I don’t like about it, already, is how capital-intensive it is. Part of what drew me to the Web to begin with was its early hacker ethos; anybody with a modem and a computer could claim their little online homestead, whether that’s a Geocities page or a brand new search engine. It was more or less a meritocracy in a free marketplace of ideas.
That is no longer the case. Anybody can learn to use AI now, but that doesn’t really lead anywhere except the “slop factories” we already have too many of. Code is cheap now, but polish is not — humans reviewing the AI output is both the bottleneck and where the actual value-added “work” is now being done. For now, the company I work for thankfully still prioritizes quality and humans-in-the-loop, but that may not remain the case forever. There will probably come a day, soon, when other AIs can review AI output better than humans can, anyway, or at least better than I can.
The real innovation and opportunity in AI is in the modeling and training, and that requires unfathomably large capital investments — on the scale of multinational conglomerates or nation-states — between data centers, chips, power, and cooling. It’s not something an individual or small company can do on their own. That part of it is definitely a concentration of power and resources in, unfortunately, some of the world’s already-largest and least-ethical companies. I have no interest in working for them, even if I were capable of the job (which I’m not).
My “expertise”, such as it were, thankfully isn’t that ill-defined: I am simply a web developer, for all that it entails and all that it doesn’t. I’m familiar with web and web-adjacent technologies (networking and databases, for example), but I’m not a data scientist or machine learning specialist (no math beyond algebra).
What they usually call me at work depends on the company’s size: big ones say I’m a frontend engineer, medium ones call me full-stack, and small ones just call me a web developer. The job itself barely changes between them; mostly it’s just title inflation and bureaucracies trying to pigeonhole their minions. I have always simply called myself a web developer, and I’ve always preferred working for tiny organizations where that title was enough. I took simple pleasure in the act of using code to bring designs to life; I loved the mix of creativity and technicality, and my favorite part of the job was always working with designers and users — the other humans, not necessarily the computer stuff.
My career goal has never been to “make it rich”, merely to earn enough to pay the bills while working on something that makes the world “better” in some small way, or at least doesn’t directly collide with my values.
My last job at the Fortune 500 did pay six figures, more or less by happenstance. I didn’t try to negotiate it; I just showed them the median pay for a web developer in my area, and they and I were both fine with it. It’s not what drew me to the job, and it didn’t keep me there. I loved working there because I got to work on solar PV controllers (which had long been a side interest, and part of my undergrad). There aren’t many web developers who also happen to have a background in solar, so it was kinda a match made in heaven — at least at first.
When I first joined, they were a undergoing a transition from a small engineering consultancy into becoming part of a huge bureaucracy post acqui-hire. The first year was great, but by halfway through the second year, the bureaucracy was well into its digestive process, swallowing up workers and either pigeonholing them successfully or spitting them out if they didn’t quite fit. My job went from “get the work done, whatever it takes” (which I loved) to “reporting up and constantly explaining why this work needs to be done to people who don’t understand it and don’t care to” (which I did not love). I quit soon after.
At my current job, it is very much back to “get the work done, whatever it takes”. I do miss solar, but at least the day-to-day work here is extremely enjoyable, solving real people’s real problems instead of make-believe work estimating t-shirt sizes or whatever (which was what the Fortune 500 used to try to gauge the difficulty of subdivided project parts… we spent more time arguing whether something was a Small or Extra Small piece of work than actually just coding the damned thing…). Still gives me nightmares of 3-hour meetings where nothing was accomplished.
Anyhow… all of that is just to say that people like me don’t really belong at giant corporations, either in skillset (not specialized enough) or culture (my anti-authoritarian streak doesn’t sit well with bureaucracies). On the other hand, being a jack of all trades is both sufficient and appreciated at smaller orgs, where wearing many hats is the norm.
So I don’t think a corporate future would be in the cards for me. I wouldn’t want to work for a big tech firm even if they paid a million a year. I wouldn’t even get in, besides — like msmith537 said, it’s far easier for them to grab that talented young person with all the requisite, up-to-date skills and without the decades of baggage. The youngins are often simply better at the job, and have more desire to grow and climb the ladder and suck up as necessary.
I have family in the Bay who do work for those kinds of giant tech firms, and their lifestyles, mentalities, dreams, and personalities are entirely different from mine… I’m very much the black sheep of an otherwise “successful” and well-adjusted family I’m OK with that, sometimes to the chagrin of the traditionalists among them. They earn (at least) 4x-5x what I make, but overall, I think I am happier, and definitely far less stressed.
@msmith537’s posts (which, to be clear, I always appreciate even if I don’t necessarily agree with them — they often come with a very different perspective and outlook on life, and I appreciate them for making me pause and think and reflect) often remind me of what my dad would say. He was very much the staunch corporatist who put his career achievements above everything else in life, including his marriage and family. It was probably growing up with that experience that made me come to dislike it so much — a household full of material wealth but no warmth or belonging did not make for a very fulfilling childhood. As a result, I’ve probably swung a bit too far in the other direction, prioritizing relationships and community above income and wealth acquisition.
Of course, reality has a nasty habit of kicking us naive idealists over and over in the balls until we learn our lessons. Apparently I haven’t yet, lol. I’m sure it’s there in the near future.
My real dream is to be able to move somewhere as far away from US corporatism as possible, maybe start a little hostel & coffee shop (solar-powered, of course) in the countryside of Europe somewhere, with many plants and happy people. Wouldn’t that be nice… lol.
Me too. It was horrible. We are a lot alike and I feel you. Early in my career I’d be asked where I wanted to be in five years or whatever. I said, “don’t promote me to management. I just want to be a senior engineer.” I did well enough at it that every job I ever got after grad school was from a reference who respected me.
On the other subject, I miss the old web so much. The 90s were a blast. It really was surfing the web. You’d start at one place and half an hour later you’d be down some crazy and fun rabbit hole. And using search engines to find something was a skill. Then Google came along and it was easy to find anything. Now AI results are useless and inaccurate. I hope they get better.
In a nutshell, my team is responsible for customer satisfaction in its various forms: everything from meet-and-greets to pricing adjustments to technical support, etc. We wear many hats, but ultimately we exist to make sure our customers are happy, at almost any cost. This is a very stark difference to most US software companies that don’t even offer human support, just a bunch of pre-written FAQs and AI chatbots. We go out of our way to make flesh-and-blood humans available to our customers to address their each and every whim.
I’m OK with that, sometimes to the chagrin of the traditionalists among them. They earn (at least) 4x-5x what I make, but overall, I think I am happier, and definitely far less stressed.