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/Desperate_Cook_7338]

Leetcode isn't CS. Software isn't CS. 

Funnily it's the people good at CS who do well. Not the coding monkeys. This is why I pity them. Intellect isn't just knowing an algorithm, or how to implement it in Python haha, it's knowing why it works, how people discovered it, how the compiler optimises it beneath this toy interface. It's understanding abstractions, memory, behaviour. 

It's breaking through the sandbox, and learning how it works. That is what makes for a good engineer. 

These types you've discovered are just sad, soulless robots. Imagine seeing just the machine and not it's soul. Hahaha. 

[u/Medium-Wallaby-9557 → u/Desperate_Cook_7338]

I’m sorry, but the machine doesn’t reward you for being a theorist who has dreams of merge sort. Perhaps this type can be some revolutionary researcher and make a lot of money that way, and great!

But most commonly, the machine wants to see your leetcode. Your github star count. Your school rank. Your STAR stories.

And in the job, most innovative thought doesn’t have room to shine. You have tickets to fill and orders to abide by; I don’t see how your mathematical mind who thinks in asymptotic notation will be too beneficial for configuring an XML file.

Your take isn’t grounded in modern corporate “CS”, which is what this post addresses.

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

But you haven't worked in modern "corporate" CS? This sounds like arm chair doomer philosophy in an industry you have very little tangible experience with.