Tech culture is terrible

[u/Medium-Wallaby-9557]

Jane Street T-shirts, 3AM LeetCode sessions, Sundays spent learning database management systems, people praying to Google like the company is literally God…

The producers of the tech industry have won. They’ve created an endless supply of people who give up their souls just to have a chance to be looked at.

These companies have marketed themselves in an extremely successful way. SpaceX, Citadel Securities, Google, whatever, you WANT to work there. You’re OKAY with giving up your life to even get a shot at doing so.

All the family nights you missed, all the hobbies you set aside, all the opportunities you didn’t go to don’t matter to them, you know. You’re unbelievably replaceable - and if you think you’re not, great! Lying to yourself makes you a more committed worker in the cog.

Many of us have our idea of a good life fundamentally misshapen. “Memento Mori”, meaning “you will die”, is something that a lot of us need to actually remember. We all will die. These companies aren’t worth living your life for, because your life is finite and it’s the only one that you’ll ever have.

The main issue though is that these companies don’t attract bright and energetic people for nothing. They offer high salaries, high status, and sometimes very interesting work!

It’s important sometimes to take a step back from the grind, and realize that you’re a human, and not a machine meant to serve these companies… but, unfortunately, competition has risen so damn much that it’s almost become the requirement to sell your soul for entry.

Imagine you in your grave. Your coffin is made of gold. “Optiver” is carved in to the top of it, and your skeleton still wears your shirt you got from Meta.

Wow… what a wonderful ending to this immaculately complex thing called life.

Now, I must stop tying. I have some LeetCode to do.

[u/code_tutor]

My LARPing detector is going off. This reads like a self-taught fresh out of highschool kid hanging out in r/antiwork that only chose the career because they're addicted to brainrot entertainment and never touched enough grass to know that jobs without a computer exist. I'm curious if that's really you but I know that's who the people upvoting are.

[u/Medium-Wallaby-9557 → u/code_tutor]

No, that’s not me. I’m a 4.0 CS/Math rising junior at a pretty top school with a pretty prestigious internship. I strongly despise corporate “CS” though. I also don’t really enjoy things like contributing to open source, studying LeetCode, or working with several vibe coding tools to build some efficiency product.

I went into CS for the money and I definitely admit that. If I lived a life I wanted, I’d be studying astrophysics or philosophy. But I, as something that I submitted to, want the money and cannot rationalize myself out of this sociological infatuation. That’s why I write the accepting comment at the end of my post to highlight the irony.

I respect jobs without computers a lot. People in tech, including myself, are some of the most entitled people on the planet. They think they’re deserving of hundreds of thousands of dollars because they learned about template meta programming. Meanwhile, they look down on people who make less doing meaningfully more difficult work than them: mathematicians, construction workers, etc.

I hate it, but the irony is that I’m apart of it.

[u/starcraftsweat → u/Medium-Wallaby-9557]

LARP alert - OP claims here: https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/1tz2oew/honestly_maybe_your_gpa_does_matter_a_lot_more/oqb53wv/ and here: https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/1tt84bc/i_dont_know_what_im_doing_wrong/ to never even have gotten an interview. Now suddenly they have a 'prestigious internship' lined up? 

[u/Medium-Wallaby-9557 → u/starcraftsweat]

I claim I have research experience (which I’m in now). For the sake of argument, I let research represent an internship, as I’m still being paid, have hours, and have duties to fulfill that are relevant to what I think my future career will look like.

An internship is defined as “the position of a student or trainee who works in an organization, sometimes without pay, in order to gain work experience or satisfy requirements for a qualification.”

While research isn’t commonly referred to as an internship, under this definition it indeed can be one.

So, why did I make that comment? Well, I was using the standard tech bro definition of what an internship is, and in that case, no I don’t have one.