Does anyone currently work in the tech industry (for a company, with other people, not your own independent thing) and is not thinking about getting out to do something else?
If so and you'd like to share, I'd love to hear what you love about this work today.
@mayintoronto I’m in house for a organization I like, maintaining systems I’ve been working on for 25 years. Other than my retirement in a few years I still enjoy the work and the challenge. A lot of that has to do with understanding how the organization is structured and runs and applying that to the systems we build for it.
@Chigaze That's the kind of stuff I love to hear. But also, your work has real tangible value to workers, and the rest of the industry... well....
@mayintoronto You might find this interesting. It’s a CBC interview with one of the data people working for the City of Edmonton. They sound very excited for the work they’re doing.
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/412-the-loop/episode/16247122-why-edmonton-is-so-good-at-ai
@mayintoronto Reasonable hours, remote work, health insurance that’s better than nothing, and a salary that supports my lifestyle and makes up for the mediocre health insurance.
@jnkrtech I feel like I'm a little too "the mission matters" driven to be okay with just that criteria, but also it's nice to have our basic needs taken care of.
@mayintoronto Good luck.
@mayintoronto slingin code is a lot like following a recipe or building a Lego set.
When you know the instructions by heart or when they are available you just follow logical steps and end up with something from almost nothing.
The deeper you go into it you find that you can change recipes so you can change results and make them better. And deeper still there is no one else that can cook like you or build like you. Your code is you.
And this helps entities enough that you dont need to starve.
@mayintoronto I used to. I worked for a startup where the people actually cared about the product and customers. The product was in the devtool space and wasn't anything world-changing, but it felt amazing to do quality work, get great pay/benefits, and have people within the company look out for you and the people that we served. I quit when the company shifted away from that to being sales-led, on top of the pressure to ship with AI at the cost of quality.
@mayintoronto I work at a big giant nonprofit in healthcare doing service design and digital strategy stuff. Today I worked with a UX designer and we're planning out building things to make it easier to understand costs. It's really hard, but I love the work and the people.
@mayintoronto I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, helping to keep Wikipedia and sister projects online and available for everybody to read and contribute to. Feels like a worthwhile thing to be doing :)
@demoographics Wishing you great success on your collective unionization efforts too!
@mayintoronto I work for the Flemish public employment service as a teamlead for the 4 big Drupal websites. 3 public ones and one intranet which includes a lot of knowledge systems, each with their own search and taxonomy.
The public websites (www.vdab.be) are a platform for all kinds of widgets, applications and tools that help match jobseekers and employers, digital first, accessible etc.
I love being at the crossroads of many teams and also I love the #Drupal community.
@Klara That sounds delightful and meaningful!
@mayintoronto
For once I don’t hate my job. It’s a remote startup with a friendly team. The founder is a business guy but listens. Mistakes were made that I am trying to straighten out. I wish it was a bit more professional. But that’s one of the reasons I was hired. And while I‘d prefer to focus more on the product, I feel my contribution serves a good purpose. Also, at some point it could actually really help women.
And I only work part time as freelancer and I just love the flexibility!
@samy My fellow product people. <3
@mayintoronto I'm still enjoying working in a team on mid scale (10s of thousands of users) software for independent healthcare professionals. I'm a bit shaken by the pace of change in the but I have always enjoyed learning and changing - so far so good, I feel like I can make choices and make a difference.
Nov 5, 2026, 8:47 PM@mayintoronto I continue to like my university system administrator job, but it seems to be increasingly detached from the "tech industry" in companies (more so than before, where we were already an anomaly for not using virtualization, containers, the cloud, and so on).
@mayintoronto Of no help here, because I did get out and retired. And was really glad I did - it was the right time.
Before that, I loved coding. That was the annoying thing, that the part I loved was being taken over by AI. The rest of it sucked.
Getting stuck into technical problems and finding solutions, that drove me for 40 years.
It makes me so angry that my skills have almost become redundant. And yet, my experience has not, but that has been lost.