Name: Joe
Location: Pacific Northwest
I’m a software developer, hoping to be promoted this year to software engineer. I was formerly every flavor of QA that you could be. That’s how I got started there. I’ve been at my current company about 8 years, longer than, I think, 92% or 93% of the company.
Before that, I was a Domino’s delivery driver for three months. I think that was the platonic ideal of a minimum wage job. Minimum wage jobs suck. But if you’re going to do one, that’s the one. Before that, I was unemployed, and before that, I worked for a seismic processing and exploration company. They work in oil, technically, they don’t have to, but ain’t no one else asking what’s under the seabed.
I went to school for physics. Physics, math and astronomy, actually. I went to UT. I came in with a ton of AP credits because I like bopping around. If it’s easy, I’ll always add it. I’m really good at finding low-hanging fruit, so I’d take AP tests. What’s the worst that’ll happen? It’s, like, $15 to take the test. I thought I wanted to do physics, then I had a panic attack during Christmas before the last semester, and said, “I’m not ready to be an adult. I don’t know how to get a job”. So, like many people in college, I added another year. I was lucky because with a physics major, you’re doing so much math, and the overlap with astronomy is so high that I could add 2 degrees, and I only had to take, like, 5 classes. I graduated in 2013. The economy was kind of un-shambled, but it was still sort of in shambles. At the same time, oil was doing gangbusters. There are two major modes in oil: “The price of oil is so high, let’s hire everyone and throw money at them like there’s no tomorrow!” Then, there’s “Oh God, it crashed. Who could have seen this coming? Lay everyone off.”
You have to be curious how things work.
If you’re in QA, you either love QA or you realize that the job gets laid off every 5 years. I prefer the job stability now. I live in Seattle, and, you know, tech is big here. I know how computers work pretty well, and I was reading job descriptions. There’s no geophysical work up here, and I didn’t want to do it anyway. There’s IT work, there’s customer service and client-facing stuff, which I’m no good at. There’s generic engineering, which I’m no good at, and then there was QA, which will hire you without any specialized knowledge except for knowing how to learn. It’s a personality type more than anything. You have to be curious how things work. Back when I worked in QA, I did a lot of interviews, and we were supposed to be testing for skill, but the thing was, I don’t care about your skills. The question was, are you asking questions? Are you putting things together or are you taking feedback and learning?
I got into software engineering because QA is the first group that gets laid off whenever a company is in trouble, especially in software. I did kind of a self-taught coding bootcamp, more to get through the interview process than anything else. I got through the interview, there weren’t any open positions. Then, one person offhandedly mentioned an open position, and knowing how the bureaucracy worked, I reached out to the hiring manager and went, “Hey, your idea is bad, but I want to do it and we’ll do what you ultimately want, but you shouldn’t do what you’re thinking”. He wanted to move an automation engineer, which was my title, over to his team , and then he would work to transition them to a software engineer after a while. He had an open software engineer position at that moment, though, and I told him not to change it, to keep the software engineer position rather than the automation engineer position. It was the right call, because 6 months later, my company did its first-ever layoff, they laid off every manual QA engineer, and about 2/3 of the automation engineers.
The new work is easier to describe, but it’s more cog-in-a-machine-style stuff. It’s low level developer work, so it feels very boring to describe.
So, a developer and an engineer? There’s not really any difference. We just needed a word for people who are junior that they’re taking a chance on. Basically, it let them fire me after 2 years, if it was a mistake to hire me. It’s the same job, same role, same meetings, same tickets, but I will do bigger, more complex tickets and contribute to the team. You know, you get higher and higher up the chain because eventually the job is about never doing any real work and just going to meetings and telling people who do real work what to do.
We had layoffs — again, separate from the QA heavy layoffs — so I’m on a new team, which helps, because no one expects me to do anything. For context, my team stretches from Brazil to Seattle. It’s, like, all the time zones possible. I think most people follow roughly the same system. There’s a morning meeting. This one is way too early, except it’s at 9AM, which is really not that early. I usually drop my kid off at daycare, go to that meeting, then putter around for a minute trying to remember what I’m supposed to be doing, then grab my actual ticket that I’m working on. Tickets are a variety of things. It’s weird for software developers, because you can get anything from a ticket, like, “Make an entire new project to ingest data and spit it out”, to a ticket that says we should rename our alert so it makes sense.
ChatGPT can pump out this code, but that’s not your job. Your job is knowing what code you need to write.
How do I expect my day-to-day job to evolve? You’re always going to need people like me. Like, there was this idea when ChatGPT came out, that, because it could spit out code, people would go, “Oh my God, that’s my code! What am I going to do?”, but the answer is that this was always possible, right? That’s Stack Overflow. ChatGPT can pump out this code, but that’s not your job. Your job is knowing what code you need to write. What you have to know is, “What should I code? How should I code?” ChatGPT can tell you how you can use java strings, and how you can format it, and ChatGPT does a halfway-decent job, but it can’t tell you: “Should you even use a string here?” It can’t make value judgments. That’s what the developer does. It is legitimately acceptable to close a ticket by saying, “We’re not going to do this”. That’s still a ticket done. It doesn’t matter if it’s a ticket that would take 16 months of work, if you can safely say, “This is a bad idea, here’s how I got all the stakeholders to agree, I had all the conversations” then you saved 16 months of work. It doesn’t matter if ChatGPT could do 90% of that work and do it in 6 weeks.
As the code gets more automated, it becomes more and more clear that our job is to go to meetings and talk to people. I know that sounds horrific to a lot of people, but, like, there’s a reason meetings are super common, because they get everyone in agreement, and let everyone have voices. It’s the democratic process in action. Even when it’s top-down, if you are allowed to speak, you have a voice. So, for me personally, hopefully, getting more into management means going to the meetings and saying “We shouldn’t do this”, and saving everyone 6 months of work.
A lot of industries are solved, kind of, a lot of people that went to work at Meta are probably incredibly depressed, because Meta has been done for a decade now. They’re just rearranging deck chairs. You’re fixing stuff as it breaks, but that’s Ops. You’re tweaking deck chairs, but that’s Product, if you do it right. So then, what are we doing here? You have this, you know, $100B company making titanic sums of cash, and it’s slowly dawning on everyone involved that they don’t need to have employees. They need some, but they don’t need a lot. A lot of companies are facing this issue. Cloud storage is (kind of) a solved product. A lot of companies could stop hiring people to do new product development, aside from, you know, marginal stuff, because the core product offering is fine and they make money for the parent companies, or make money for the shareholders, and they could give all of their employees raises. As employees leave, they don’t have to backfill them. As long as you’re not having outages, that’s fine. Each employee rakes in piles of cash. A lot of companies that aren’t, like, Microsoft, Google or Apple are facing that problem, right?
Google and Apple and Microsoft all have enough fingers in enough pies that they might be investing elsewhere, but I think the big problem now for companies is whether they accept what they do. ChatGPT is not a risk factor at all for my life, but my financial well-being is staring down an existential gun, because they don’t need to hire another Me to do product work.
The bad news is, almost none of the work we’re doing ultimately matters. There was the example of Google forever ago, they tested 20 different colors, and they found the best out of 20 colors because with a 95% confidence interval, this was the best color. Each color has a 1-in-20 chance, or, a 5% chance of being random. Which means if you tested 20 of them, what you saw was random noise. A lot of experiments are doing that. You think, “I found the best color that all people care about!”, and all you found was noise.
But the good news is, no color matters. So like, okay, you made the wrong choice. But it’s not the wrong choice because no choice is the wrong choice. It doesn’t matter. The fact that this is so much of what a lot of us developers are doing is terrifying.
During the pandemic, I managed to just about automate myself out of a job.
I think my big problem with describing tech is that you’re working on widgets, none of the widgets are the same size, and it’s hard to generalize, and it’s best not to explain how much money you make doing these dumb tasks. My wife worked for the Health Care Authority, which handles state health care. She has a master’s degree. She worked there for 3 or 4 years, she was top-rung. I think the next promotion was managing things. She got a $10 million grant for the state. She was working with thousands of hospitals, controlling a lot of people’s lives and making people’s lives better or worse with a tremendous amount of power. During the pandemic, I managed to just about automate myself out of a job. My job was uninteresting, because there was no work to do for a year. They gave me a promotion that I did not work hard for. During the promotion, my boss was like, “Hey, by the way, here’s your wife’s salary in stock. That’ll pay out over the next 3 years, because obviously you’ve done such a good job. Also, we’re worried because now that you’ve been promoted, your bonuses aren’t going to be as big, and we’re worried about that for you, so here’s your wife’s salary again in stock as an apology for that”. And I was like, “I have not done an honest day’s work in a month”.
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