Why is modern IT work so boring and automated?
Heavy automation and cloud tooling have removed hands-on troubleshooting and direct infrastructure management, leaving professionals unable to actually fix things or login to routers. This lack of direct engagement drains the joy from the work, forcing people to find fulfillment coding solutions for their own personal tasks instead of their jobs.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1working for smaller companies, public sector organizations, or educational institutions with lower budgets
- 2joining managed service providers (MSPs) to touch a wider variety of systems
- 3looking elsewhere outside of employment tasks for the satisfaction that used to come from doing the job well
- 4Developing hobbies outside of work
- 5Picking up side gigs
- 6Using downtime to study for certifications like the CPA
- 7Riding the gravy train and enjoying the reduced stress and stability
- 8Embrace AI to maximize output and financial savings to reach early retirement (FIRE)
- 9Refuse to use AI and continue writing code manually until laid off
- 10Shift focus toward exploring the frontier where AI models still struggle
- 11Transition into management or other non-technical roles
- 12Use AI for side projects or mundane optimizations instead of core daily tasks
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I always get this feeling that scale, tooling, and automation has ruined the field.”source ↗
“I almost never even have to login to any routers.”source ↗
“I love troubleshooting and fixing, but I almost don’t even get to do it really.”source ↗
“Coding agents removed everything I loved, and - mostly - amplified everything I hated.”source ↗
“Now I am forced to increase my mental throughput multiple times. What took a couple of weeks now takes a couple of hours, and I still need to comprehend that. I always feel tired, I don't have enough mental capacity to hold that many abstractions and technical details.”source ↗
“Went from public accounting to private, fixed basically everything, and now I’m bored out of my mind.”source ↗
“I spend most of my day staring at it because it no longer needs me.”source ↗
“Frankly, I’m amazed the company made it this far without getting into significantly more legal/compliance trouble.”source ↗
“Now I make low six figures, have dramatically less stress, built a department that basically runs itself…and I’m bored out of my mind.”source ↗
“I genuinely feel like I waste my day sitting here doing nothing.”source ↗
“As I've more reliably produced reasonable quality code with automation I've found my joy coming from coding solutions to my own day-to-day problems and less to do with solving the problems I'm employed to solve.”source ↗
“My job pays me for output therefore I have no choice but to embrace the Claude pandemic.”source ↗
“We know AI makes mistakes all the time, and our job has become that of an AI corrector.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 3Why is corporate industry accounting so boring after public practice?
- 25Why do IT jobs require impossible skill sets?
- 6How to change careers when you are stuck in a niche
- 3Is it normal to have no work to do at a new job?
- 6Why does home maintenance feel like a never-ending job?
- 4Why can't I trust AI agents with production tasks?