#joma tech

[theartofmany]

“A junior engineer tries solve a coding problem, but he has trouble finding the solution. He needs help, will he be able to solve it?” From Youtube channel Joma Tech: If Programming Was An Anime ಠ_ಠ Nani? xD Enjoy...

[irarelypostanything]

If you’re working in tech...

If you’re working in tech, and you work in the Bay Area, then you’re probably making more money than most of the world.  Maybe your office is “Instagram-worthy.”  Maybe you have snack bars, even arcades and pinball machines.  You don’t have to be someone who writes code to be in tech.  You can be a software engineer, but you can also be QA, product management, technical writing.  And you get to have it - the Bay Area address and the free food and the pinball machines.

I never really saw a depiction of it until I watched the HBO series Silicon Valley.  It parodied the whole thing, but I like how they made it kind of fade into the background, instead of becoming a very heavy-handed thing - people in Silicon Valley often work in gorgeous places, but the rent is so high that some of them have to move out.  That’s it.  That’s really the only irony.  I can visualize the non-tech people asking them to cry a river, so sad that they have to commute a long way (unless they work remotely, which is a thing now) or maybe, God forbid, start working as tech people outside of the Bay Area.

I know that the truth is somewhere.  I was born and raised in San Francisco and moved away when I was 18, yet I keep coming back in memory to those 12 weeks of a tech internship I had.  We had arcades.  We had free snack bars.  And even then, I remember this massive, existential dread.  Nothing seemed real.  I don’t know what it was.  Maybe it wasn’t the setting at all, which was actually fine, but the age I was and the thoughts of what I would do with my life after college.

When I watch people like Jona Tech tour their apartments and brag about their tech incomes, I ask myself - is he doing non-tech people a service?  Is he being inspiring, or is he overselling?  You still have to work a tech job.  If you’re software, then you still have to write code.  If you write code, you might ask yourself how much it matters that you have all this luxury, so long as you can have a quiet place to think and maybe (if you’re lucky) a whiteboard to draw on.  But of course I’m oversimplifying.

Luxury is...nice.  It’s the concept of luxury.

The concept of luxury...it’s an interesting phrase, right?  I imagine this life, which is what I experienced for 12 weeks, and I imagine the actual work isn’t very different from what I’m doing now as a software engineer outside of the Bay Area.  The difference is I can take pictures of things, and take Uber everywhere because driving your own car doesn’t seem nearly as common, and get coffee every day instead of making my own, and have catered food instead of making my own.  When you’re there, it’s awesome.  On the outside, I imagine it seems either extremely great and surreal, or strange and unnecessary and almost infantilizing.  

If you’re working in tech, you’re probably making a good chunk of money every year.  It’s probably more than what your average person makes.  The downside seems like an upside - the ego boost.  The belief that you have to remain in it to be valuable, the belief that whatever you are isn’t enough unless some boss or product manager tells you you’re enough.  A feeling that you can’t really move anywhere, be anything if it doesn’t pay a salary comparable to what you make now.

It’s probably true for any field, and it’s probably rubbing people the wrong way now, in a time in which so many people simply can’t work.  But “when we bleed, we bleed the same.”  I can only imagine how it feels to be a new grad, ready for the summer, job offer in hand, feeling ready to take on the world.

And then having it rescinded because of all of this.