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I was going to audibly chuckle at your comment but I instead offloaded the small amount of joy and pleasure that it would have brought me to my AI agent.

This is honestly a career path I’ve never really considered, but after reading about it a little bit the role sounds like it would be right up my alley. I’m going to explore the market for sales engineers here in Sweden and see what kinds of roles are available. Thanks for your comment.

> Do they say they like what you do there or not?

That is the strange part. My boss who is head of product for my organization has given me good feedback so far. It's mainly just me who is beating myself up. But it's mainly because I have a strong feeling I know what is to come. If we can't even ship a few trivial GET endpoints in six months, how the hell are we going to implement more complex API endpoints in any meaningful amount of time? Is the whole project just going to get scrapped when they finally realize I wasn't exaggerating about how long things will take if a few simple endpoints take this long to ship?

> While you give less time and space to the annoying part of the job, find something that displaces it.

Definitely doing my best here. Long walks listening to some podcasts have helped a lot. Spending time with my family has helped a lot too. But above all I'm trying to stay positive, because I feel like being negative and constantly being in a bad mood is just going to make things worse.

There definitely are people out there. A lot of skilled individuals in Sweden are currently unemployed. But whether or not companies have the budget to hire them is a different story.

I didn't want to get into this in my original post, but this is definitely part of the problem. The development team needs modernization. We have a lot of excellent developers, but these developers have spent many years developing on a tech stack of PowerBuilder, COBOL, and SQL stored procedures. API development, testing, deployment, and maintenance are not anything that they have worked with before.

Finally after months of me complaining, the management team has gotten the approval to hire one additional developer who has experience with API development. To be honest though, I am skeptical if one developer is going to change anything, and I can imagine that a lot of skilled developers won't be staying here long when they see that we don't really have the personnel in place to deliver on the vision that the management team has set.

I definitely am not a people manager (nor do I want to be again, been there done that), but I can imagine that our engineering manager is in a tough place right now too. A lot of the development team are close to retirement age and he can't really push them too much due to the fear of them leaving and taking their years or decades of domain knowledge with them.

I agree that I care too much. I've always had a very challenging time decoupling my life from my job. It works the other way around too though, where when things are going well at work and I enjoy the work I do, I feel excellent even outside of the office. But when it doesn't, I don't feel well at all. I really need to learn how to leave work at the office because to be honest this will probably not be my last job that sucks.

When it comes to the AI crash honestly my biggest concern is what is going to happen to the job market during and the years following the crash. Not sure how things are in the rest of the world, but as someone in their early 30s working in the IT industry in Sweden I’ve never seen the market this competitive before, even for mid level and senior roles, and it worries me what the future of employment is going to look like.

Maybe those older than me have been through this kind of thing before in 2008-2009 and in the early 2000s but the state of the IT job market in the last year or two has been really concerning to me. Anecdotally I’ve also heard it’s very tough for new graduates these days.

My personal opinion is that these days most people simply wouldn’t be able to tell that the photos are AI generated, and even if they could, they wouldn’t care or have any strong thoughts about it. I don’t think my parents or any adults aged 50+ in my family have spent any time at all playing around with AI image generation tools or comparing AI-generated images to non-AI-generated images to be able to have any opinions about these things.

So until more people frequenting restaurants care it’s a relatively low risk and low cost way to update your menu.

Is there any information available about which customers are going to be served ads? I would personally find it quite strange to be served ads if I'm paying tens or hundreds of USD per month for a ChatGPT subscription.

I'm not OP but just wanted to add my own experience with anti-depressants as someone who has battled mild depression and extreme anxiety for years. Ultimately in my case it turned out that I needed to try several different antidepressants that my doctor prescribed until I found one that worked to aid in decreasing my depression and anxiety symptoms with pretty much no side effects. I tried several which did not work for me or had a lot of side effects. Some antidepressants that helped my friends and family in their struggles did not help me. So definitely ask your doctor if they'd be willing to work with you to try and find a medication that works well for you with minimal side effects if they recommend that you take such medications.

Wish you all the best. Mental illness sucks.

I can sympathize with what you're going through OP. I have similar struggles myself (primarily with severe anxiety) and wouldn't wish most of what I have had to go through on my worst enemy.

I do have one comment though:

You mention stability in your goals, and how you want to find stability. What is stability to you? I've struggled for years with trying to find stability but it often just leads me back to thinking that there really is no such thing. You just never know what is going to happen in life. Finding a job and having stable employment are hard, and will likely only get harder as we age. Relationships have ups and downs, and their downs can be incredibly challenging to navigate. Most of us (at least in Europe) don't have the luxury of building wealth to escape the 9-5 grind. We simply need to work (and stay employable) until we have the ability to retire. I don't know how things work in your country, but here in Sweden I can't even start to collect my state pension until I turn 69. I need to find a way to remain employable until I am 69, or amass enough wealth to not need to worry about paying my bills if I don't have stable employment.

I could go on and on but honestly I think stability is a myth. Life is inherently unstable. But we human beings are also incredibly resiliant.

Take care of yourself. I wish you all the best OP.