Med school interests me, but I'm a woman in my late 20s who would like to have children, and if I started down the med school road now I wouldn't be done with training until my late 30s, where PA and nursing school don't have that problem. Medical physics is kind of in the middle.
No one cares at best, or I'm callously told "keep up or fall behind" at worst. When that's not even the problem, it just, sucks now. There's no joy in anything I do professionally.
Can I ask where you went? I'm seriously looking for an exit, I just don't know what yet. Maybe a trade, in Scandinavia the pay is actually comparable, I just don't want to go back to school.
It can feel that way with all the hype but I very much doubt that is really true. I see an industry that is rapidly dividing into two camps - "move fast and break things" and "this actually needs to work". Writing everything with agents and merging while barely even checking what is in the PR has become standard practice in the former but it will get you laughed out of the room in the latter.
Often, the lack of meaningfully challenging demands being put on you is punishing on its own. It can feel like a relief for a week or month or year, but if you catch a glimpse of that being your whole future, you can come to recognize yourself as being in a mind-eroding secular purgatory.
This anguish is especially common among on highly capable people, high achievers, and those used to some kind of ambition. And by accident of its history, there's a lot of those people in this industry and some of them are going nuts now.
I went nuts for years, until I sold off my interest in my dream partnership.
10 years of heaven. All the benefits and none of the downsides of my internal colleagues. Then 14 years of bureaucracy aimed at predictability over progress, which was infinitely more difficult for me to dodge as an external player.
Compensation for my interest was very objectively valued, with the rate of stalled progress priced in. Which made complete sense, while also being its own madness.
I walked away from so much value, but I don't regret it for a minute.
Pretty much this. I know it sounds melodramatic but it literally feels like rotting.
I don't solve anything anymore. I don't get any spark of fixing bugs. I don't DO ANYTHING, and it's fucking chipping away at me.
Also I'm fairly sure people are going to realise soon that if they're happy with slop, they don't actually need highly trained engineers anymore.
This whole thread actually prompted me to look into electrician work, especially in renewables that we have here in Norway.
I might fix my burnout and go to school to get my 2 year qualification. AI can't rewire a hydro dam.