#eti vs employment

[etirabys]

I've been experimenting with "identifying as stupid and lazy" and it's going pretty well. This month I went to a Javascript meetup with the explicit goal of being slightly stupid there, got into an AI conversation, said a few coherent things, and then mentioned I just didn't want to put in the work into understanding e.g. transformers. Also I said as a simplification that I'd flunked out of linear algebra in college which isn't true (I got an A in linalg but flunked out of the ML course where linalg was heavily in use) but felt. WEIRDLY. pleasurable to say.

When I talked about this on Discord, one of them brought up Stupidism, which is from a good post @mark-gently made. But there's something about my wanton dignity-discarding that goes several steps further from Stupidism and feels very liberating.

Last year I read a weird... pagan?... book, Existential Kink, that invites you to notice how much of your life is shaped to bring about outcomes you supposedly hate, and how you secretly take joy in those outcomes. This seems false for the majority of things one tries to avoid, but leaning into it sure is interesting to try out! And I'm finding it is surprisingly true for "coming off as stupid".

There's something absurdly joyful/thrilling about deciding to go to a meetup and presenting as a moron. Some years ago I would have gone NOOO at the thought, and now I feel like an adrenaline junkie being invited to a new type of gambling event or weird sex thing.

I fully expect to tire of "identifying/presenting as stupid and lazy", but when I move on from it I expect to be more integrated or whatever. Less afraid of being stupid and lazy because I've just gone and done it openly.

One of the stupid things I said at the Javascript meetup was that I hate using libraries in almost full generality. I'm too lazy to read docs or troubleshoot my calls to other people's code. Someone recced me a different meetup for people who roll their own tooling, but warned me it was all male, because he knew I'd found all-male programming contexts stressful in the past.

In college I tended to not even really notice if a lab or a team was all male, because I was a top-half student and just felt totally secure about being in class. But I became phobic of it in jobs because I'm usually the worst dev in any remotely selective workplace, and being the worst dev AND the only woman sucks. I was ashamed of being bad at my job, obviously, but I was mortified at being the entity that diversity posters and mandatory trainings point at to say "if you think women are like that you are a terrible person and causing problems in society". But... I am like that. I guess for society's good I need to hide this as hard as possible?

(I solved this by going to a much less selective workplace and almost explicitly saying "I will be kind of a bad programmer, but I come cheap". I am pretty happy now.)

So, given that I got twisted up by that employment record, current me is delighted at the thought of being openly dumb at an all-male CS meetup. This wouldn't be good for the men (some of whom Want To Unlearn Sexism, etc) nor for Women In Tech, but it would be good for ME. Time to abandon class consciousness and defect on women for my own gain.

It is, well, yeah, existentially kinky to imagine going to this meetup and cheerfully asking dumb questions & occasionally responding with "I don't think I'm ever going to understand that, sorry, you should stop explaining that because I don't want to waste your time".

[etirabys]

the past week for me was mildly rollercoastery on a professional level – I spent the previous week in a funk where I could not do any work, roused enough to start doing work a week ago, ran into problems, did the bare minimum by expending all my life energy, ran into problems again that I found insurmountable, coded up a garbage solution, got on a call today with senior dev with dread in my heart, and somehow found myself giving a lucid and reasonable explanation of what I was doing (that I had been unable to articulate to myself before the call), got a reasonable suggestion back, implemented it

upon assessing my performance for the past week, I give myself a grade of Slightly Below Average. which is astonishing

[etirabys]

hooooow do I make myself pay attention during standup? everyone says "I did [incomprehensible out of context] thing for [project I don't know anything about]", and I know in theory that if I listened perfectly to everything for about 2 weeks in a row I'd finally catch up and have context, which would make it easier to focus in the future

but I'm not going to do that. so... what's a way I can do just 10% better?

maybe one of

focus when the two guys I collaborate with most are saying things

focus when the tech lead is saying something

and that's all i got got for now

[etirabys]

THE TRIAL

yesterday I asked a coworker to hop on a call with me to explain a thing I thought he knew well. It turned out he didn't, so I had to end the call while not seeming to blame him in any way (which I didn't). stared into space after hanging up, noticing my social brain had worked up a lather

the moment he started hemming and hawwing I felt pure panic, like oh GOD I got us into this situation and now I have to artfully extricate us

if I had zero social skills I would go "it's fine dude, I was taking a gamble that you knew this, you don't have to justify not knowing". but unfortunately instead of zero social skills i have 🤏 social skills so I was navigating us out of the DMZ in my tricycle. little leggies pumping grimly

I backtracked, explained my overarching code dilemma that I had wanted specific knowledge (that he turned out not to have) to solve, got his opinion on the overarching dilemma, thanked him, hung up

(strategy = "if X feels any fear about feeling useless, make X feel useful")

I feel obliged to note that his opinion was good, he's a smart guy, and the social dance was (on my part) 80% sending the honest signal that I think he's a smart and useful person

[etirabys]

standup is in the morning when my anxiety is at its peak and my ability to process complicated answers is as its nadir so I compulsively lie about how much I'm going to get done that day and fail to ask questions about things that technically aren’t blocking me per se but sure seem useful to know

[etirabys]

saying goodbye at the end of a 1:1 with my manager in my smoothest most relaxed voice, and then hammering panickedly at my trackpad to leave the call so I’m not awkwardly and visibly staying behind after we’ve exchanged the FIN packets

[etirabys]

trying to switch to biphasic sleep, am sleep deprived and disinhibited; after repro'ing a bug that my coworkers had failed to repro (no virtue of mine, just had the right device at hand) I had to stop myself from saying "let's nail this baby"

[etirabys]

Three weeks in. I think I accidentally stumbled into a good company culture despite having given up on filtering for such a thing because it’s impossible to tell at the interview stage.

there was a guy who (upon seeing me drink soylent) talked about his nootropics stack and cheerfully said he was That Guy in 2010 who was talking about nootropics on reddit and buying bitcoin. This is not good company culture for everyone but is for me. More That Guys, please.

People admitting outright that they’d been zoned out for the past few minutes, can you repeat that

People openly saying “ugh, don’t want to do that” about a task – not refusing it, just making it clear the work will make them kind of cranky

I was so dismayed when I asked the engineering manager on my second interview what the team talked about in social time and he said something like “a lot of us snowboard, so we talk about snowboarding, and music”, but it turns out they ACTUALLY talk about cool things like art charities being a money laundering vector 

Despite having gone for this company in part because the interviews were so easy I hope-predicted they had low expectations for their employees, everyone strikes me as competent and good at working in a team. On the one hand, darn! On the other hand, it’s always more enjoyable to respect everyone you’re working with.

Not a culture thing, but:

I searched the codebase for "res.locals.models =" to see where that field was being set, and saw ONE RESULT that was clearly the code I was looking for. That would NEVER happen at Facebook. I searched for it in a state of learned helplessness gloom – "this never works but I have to try the obvious things – whoa, what's that..." I had a kind of emotional anti-meltdown about that, the unexpected reward hit me like heroin.

[etirabys]

thinking about how nice it is to be a software engineer because my skills are so in demand the material incentives are for prospective and real employers to be very nice to me – talked to the CEO of a startup that I’m pretty sure will give me an offer tomorrow and he was talking about how he’d love to see me learn and eventually leave the company and apply those skills to other projects

That’s weird. “We’d like to invest in you, and we understand that the life cycle of software employment is such that you’ll leave in a single digit number of years and make more money elsewhere, maybe start your own company. And that’s great!”

Reminds me of the thing where states that shifted from agrarian economies to industrial/mercantile ones suddenly had incentives to treat their citizens very well and give them more rights because (by some process I don’t understand) they couldn’t compete on the global economic stage if they just had a bunch of serfs

My professional caste is in the middle of a kind of whalefall, and it means that now and for however many more decades, we have so much desirability and negotiating power that we are some of the best treated professionals in the world – such that prospective employers take it for granted that we’ll leave within a decade and use our job training to make more money at the next place, and (claim to) try to help us do it because they can’t compete otherwise

And my friends and mentors who give me advice tell me not to get ripped off, tell me to negotiate harder, to ‘know what I’m worth’, but it’s not about what I’m worth, it’s about where I stand at the nexus of technological advance and demand outstripping labor supply as the entire world tries to go digital

And recruiters and friends alike use that frame, that it’s about my internal value, and while it’s not untrue – frames are not facts, you can slide them over facts – it just doesn’t seem like the intuitive one. Have to stop myself autistically talking about this stuff, have to accept their frame.

It’s weird.

[etirabys]

in my experience being a woman in tech is great if you can get over the humiliation of the first few years of being a woman in tech and personally destroying feminism by asking stupid questions as a junior engineer to a room full of men who have taken sensitivity workshops and are excruciatingly nice to you about it

[etirabys]

Two weeks into work. Haven’t posted much. Nothing to say when this tired. I get knocked out of the running every workday if I get less than 8.5 hours of sleep. I get knocked out if I don’t eat enough (and I basically never want to eat before 1pm, and whatever I force myself to eat often enough becomes so aversive it makes me nauseous). Even if I get those things right I might get knocked out because random depression, which I can decrease by exercising, an activity I revile. I revised “number of days per week I can take a prescription stimulant” from one to two to three. So, it’s going pretty much like the last job, except right now is the golden age when I’ve lost my tolerance to stimulants.

The following is an especially pessimistic frame, but it seems like if I exert discipline on my life routines more stringent than I’ve ever achieved, and am extremely cunning about switching up what drugs I’m on to avoid building tolerance, I can do well at a full time job and have basically no energy for intellectual and creative engagement with the world in my personal life. And it seems that this is a trade I’m trying desperately to make.

Some thoughts I wrote out while thinking about this problem:

I am afraid that I am trying in a stupid way because I'm numb to the problem, and am not Truly Interested in trying in a smart way.

And it will be, in fact, so easy for me to just keep trying in a stupid way, taking stimulants, feeling physically ill, failing to sleep or exercise regularly, and quitting my job six months in and deciding to take the easy way out of being financially dependent on my mentally healthy spouse.

I'll hate it and feel genuinely agonized! It will be costly and painful! And it will in some way be easy.

I am rarely trying my best

it is true that I am generally trying hard, but frequently I am trying hard in stupid and familiar ways that don't actually achieve my goals

the shorthand I have for this right now is "are you actually trying to solve the problem or merely playing the role of someone who is trying to solve the problem"

at my old job, I was very insecure about not getting enough work done and would come into the office at a work-respectable hour even though this meant I got less sleep than was ideal, and sleep was absolutely critical in mental functioning

[etirabys]

EVERY DAY I HAVE TO PUT ON MY BRA FOR ZOOM MEETINGS

[etirabys]

recurring visual brain noise today as I draft a message to my manager about unclear expectations while getting feedback from the giant and online friends: a gaggle of ~8 children seriously pointing at a diagram of a rocket, captioned "me and my autistic friends crafting a work email to my neurotypical boss"

[etirabys]

Coming up on 4 months of unemployment. Original target was 3~6 months before finding a job, max 9. I’ve spent the last month getting back into programming –

Learned my first FP language (Clojure), tangible achievement = solved all the intermediate problems on 4clojure.org

Watched the first ~5 lectures of the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming (I haven’t been very disciplined at this, if you want to join me for a 3/week watch group starting at ep 5, reply saying so)

Set up a personal website, learned basic networking and web server concepts along the way

Learned regex basics

Skimmed a 200 page Linux handbook (contravening my principle of Never Read Books because it’s far less value-dense than most other programming learning activities) and put in all the useful things into Anki to remember forever

Learned bash script basics and wrote the bash version of a python script I run on my fiction folder to get yearly writing stats.

My pattern is something like 2~3 off days where I amble around wretchedly and do some house chores, and 2~3 good days where I get 2~3 hours of uninterrupted focus in. This feels simultaneously unsatisfactory – such low yield! – and amazing – this is tangible improvement, and I’m actually learning and getting things done!

There’s a part of me that says it’s really embarrassing and failure-y to stay unemployed for more than six months, and it doesn’t matter where I am when the six month timer is up, I should get a job immediately.

And there’s the part that says: you’re on the right track, you’re learning how to learn, you’re learning how to keep a work schedule (sort of), you’re learning how to prioritize core commitments and todos, you’re getting better at the kind of emotional regulation that will help with anxiety and frustration at work. Don’t pull out. If it takes six more months, take that. If it takes a year, take that. You cannot solve the problem of “not un-burning out fast enough” by jumping right back into the situations that burn you out. (Even this part sets limits on unemployment length, though – it outputs ‘2 years’ as an unemployment limit, for both budget and ‘expected marginal return quite low at this point’ considerations.)

Reasoning about this is not complicated. When I look at the issue clearly, I know I want to take the second track. Yet there’s all this difficulty because committing to that, or accepting that it’s what I want to do, sets off a “you are making a life mistake” alarm that I haven’t disabled yet. It’s embarrassing to be visibly non-functional. It’s scary to not make money. It’s shameful and unvirtuous in some way to have a west-coast-programmer-nice life without making a west-coast-programmer income.

Anyway, for future-looking’s sake, here are some upcoming items on my ‘reviewing things I never learned properly’ syllabus

Databases

Git

Microcorruption

Write a chrome extension

Compiler basics

Really understand env vars

Deep dive into chrome dev tools

My immediate next subproject is to use a static site generator tool (Jekyll, maybe?) to create a page on my personal website that grabs all the static HTML file in my blog directory and concats them by post date.

The subproject after that might be migrating my daily health data log from the massive google spreadsheet I use to a back-end database, with a corresponding web view that can do some data visualization and analysis.

[etirabys]

Hi! I’m quitting; told my manager and everything! I was going to leave by the end of the week, but people talked me into officially staying employed 2 weeks more to look good, and I talked my brain (which has been in ‘not a single day more than absolutely necessary’ mode for a while) into doing this with the caveat that I can fuck around and do no work every other day. So I’ve spent today fucking around, and also going through Rust tutorials. I just had the delightful experience of googling one of the language operators...

and be ominously warned about the dangers...

[etirabys]

When I left my job I decided something like ‘I want 2.5 months not actively trying to get another job’ (this was a great choice, I’ve had one of the most relaxed times of my life), and scheduled “start worrying about jobs again” on my calendar 11 weeks from my quit date just in case, you know, I somehow forgot to worry. That’s today.

I took Ritalin again yesterday to get stuff done and had a hell of a time – after a productive afternoon, I curled up uselessly with a headache, brainfog, twisted-up-stomach. I was gingerly sipping water, stopping whenever I felt like puking, when I thought: oh wow, this was a normal day when I was employed. That’s – that’s insane. I lived like this? How did I manage this? I really don’t want to go back!

Looking at my options, I see something like

1) Go back anyway to full time software work, with the expectation of burning out in another 1~1.5 years. Maybe plan on this being a cycle. Maybe find an employer that can deal with this being a cycle. If I want to make weird deals like “I’ll work a year, then quit for 3 months, and then come back and do it again” I’ll probably have to find small flexible companies.

2) Part time software work. (I’ve ruled out contract work for the time being.) Amazon has a 30h/week program for some teams, and there’s an open position I’m actually qualified for and interested in. My first choice is a startup that might cut some flexible deal with me, but that’s a long shot. Other companies, I don’t know. When/if I’ve ruled out the startup I’ll start a proper hunt. I learned in an economic sociology class that networking is really useful to get nonstandard jobs that fit your specific requirements, so I’d have to get pretty aggressive about messaging all sorts of weak tie contacts.

3) Switch careers and find a full time job I can do without stimulants. I have an acquaintance I’ve asked about their security-guard-working-night-shifts-to-avoid-people job and it frankly sounds fantastic, and feasible for me if I learn to drive. Sounds better than anything else I’ve generated, although I haven’t generated much. I’m enamored at time of writing at being an agricultural survey statistician for the government.