for a while tech was kind of like the "escape hatch" for people who couldn't or wouldn't fit in at other corporations and now it's sort of like a flaming timber fell on the escape hatch while people were still lining up to get in
so it’s kind of like seeing ppl go “oh my god, what do we do?” and i’m just shrugging like that’s what i’ve been trying to figure out for almost twenty years
its part of why i wrote this— i feel like a lot of it is like dealing with grief. https://mastodon.social/@emaytch/117243186284387541
@emaytch as i said earlier today:
how do you cope when you've wasted your entire life?
@datarama you haven't, though, unless you let it be wasted. it's good to take the time to grieve, but realize that your experiences and skills may not be useful in the current industry, but it doesn't mean they aren't or won't be useful.
and if you've been struggling in your current position, you might even be relieved to look at something you never would've considered before; i know i thought certain things about myself that turned out not to be true when i was forced into unexpected roles
@datarama one of the traps of the way modern society makes us look at ourselves is to make us think we can only ever do one thing, but we're resilient. and you can still help others, even if it means withdrawing from what you thought was helping before. and it might even be that you need help first, before you can help others.
it's part of why i'm always on here being quixotic about encouraging people to organize, and to think differently about the way the world operates and the way we use tech
@emaytch I strongly feel (and keep being told, by people with power over me) that it's not just my skillset, but my entire kind of person, which is now superfluous. Three years later and I'm still reeling from being told, to my face, in those exact words, that now we can get rid of "the code autists".
Maybe for a while I can eke out a living doing some kind of manual labour where robots are still too expensive (until they aren't), but I'm getting old and I'm physically weak and clumsy, and frankly I'm not really very good at anything other than things AI is now taking over.
@datarama i don't believe that your entire person is superfluous. i certainly don't believe that the industry is all of computers, or that AI will do much on a practical level to replace other jobs so much as make them even more tedious
@datarama
i understand the urge to catastrophize about losing your place in the world, certainly i've done plenty of that. but a society is its people and nothing else, and we can organize and we can fight what others tell us we need to be. we just need to realize it's both possible and worth fighting.
@emaytch it is my hope that it only replaces ours, because then at least there will be enough left of the economy to absorb a bunch of ex-programmers. A year ago I hoped that we wouldn't be replaced either, but that seems to me now to be a ridiculous grasping cope attempt. Our time is up.
but, well. I think that personally I have a too "specialized" kind of brain to ever really be able to usefully contribute with much of anything else. I *am* one of those "code autists". For a while I worked as a teacher ... teaching software development. Which is neither a workable skillset or a skillset worth teaching anymore.
(In fact, I am absolutely wracked with guilt over those years - I *thought* I was doing some social good, but all I really did was trick a bunch of young people into going into a dying field, wasting years of their lives.)
@emaytch basically, all I am is a programmer. and now that that is going away, I am nothing.
Oct 8, 2026, 7:44 PM
@alex @datarama @emaytch I don't have a lot of answers buuuut
Maybe this little bit will help?
Programmers are Systems Thinkers. We understand and design and redesign systems.
That's not a code specific skill. It's in everything that's actually still working okay. (A lot of things are breaking down, we just don't acknowledge them)
We can design good systems, and while it's hard to do that and pay rent, that's a skill that will become critical as more and more things collapse.
Oct 10, 2026, 10:43 PM@Epic_Null @alex @datarama @emaytch
One other aspect of this is worth mentioning: autists have very spiky skillsets — we can be surprisingly good at some things and absolutely useless at tasks that other people take in their stride. That leads to a strong feeling of being a one-trick pony — "I'm a developer or I'm nothing at all" — and makes it harder to move into other jobs, or even to feel that that's possible.
And it's amazing how many of the strongest developers you know are autistic, even if they haven't figured it out yet.
I'm in my sixties, so my plan is to play the game, hang on as long as possible and then retire. If I were younger, I'd be seriously worried.
Oct 11, 2026, 7:56 AM@Epic_Null @alex @datarama @emaytch
A lot of #ActuallyAutistic people are attracted to engineering in general, and software engineering in particular, because it matches the logical way we think. A program is right or it's wrong; code says exactly what it means; a statement is true or it's false; and there's no point in pretending it's true when it's false, or acting as if it were true because we really wish it were true, or going along with it because other people seem to believe it when we know it's false. These are characteristically autistic modes of thought, and we're often surprised and disappointed when other people don't think in the same way.
Oct 8, 2026, 8:28 PM