Screwtape wrote me some kind words after yesterday's phlog post about
my resignation. Thank you so much for that! I do enjoy reading your
phlog. It makes me wish I'd like LISP more than I do! :) One of these
days you may get me to fire up the 'ol emacs again.
I should also note, in all fairness, that the one reason me and so
many of my ex-colleagues are upset about the whole ordeal is because
prior to the acquisition, Datto was actually a pretty decent place to
work. And Prior to the VC firm taking over, which was before my time,
it sounds like it was a great place to work.
Out of all of my previous jobs, the people on my team at Datto were,
I think, some of the more knowledgeable and experienced. And aside of
some "scrum" bullshit pushed onto us from above, for the most part, I
was able to mostly do my work by myself and be left alone, which is
really kind of rare at companies that size these days. The meeting-
load wasn't bad. Although there was a noticeable corporatification
between when I first started and the time I left, in part due to an
aggressive growth and going public. Still, I did always kind of feel
kind of out-of-place. But I always feel out of place in any type of
bussiness-y situation. I just want to be me. I really really refuse
to play the 'put on your work mask' game that is expected, and I tend
to have a rather low bullshit-tolerance, to the point that after
each 'all hands' meeting where a bunch of wishy-washy buzzword-laden
words would be rapidly fired at the entire company, I'd feel quite
depressed and question 'the fuck am I doing here' every time.
I wish I could say that not working for a corporation would 'fix' the
problem, but it won't. The way this society works, the things people
attach value to, fork money out for, are usually things that involve
a certain amount of bullshit, marketing, whatever. I have seen and
learned that it doesn't even have to be useful or good products. If
something has enough marketing behind it to trick people that they
are better than their neighbors when buying some product, it will
sell. At the end of the day, all of the wrong fucked up things boil
down to one inescapable fact: Humanity is severely flawed.
Most of the software/computing industry exists solely for the sake of
the software/computing industry itself. And if practicality is truly
irrelevant, it is an industry of our own making. As screwtape pointed
out in 'Drop out of society', in spite of all the noise, there really
is an abundance of tools and software to create ANYTHING with. Just
have to do it. If software sucks, choose to create software which
does not suck.
As such, I now choose to write software I like writing. For fun! I do
believe it will result in a better end-result ultimately. To circle
back to the original rant:
I'm not in any way better or morally superior for leaving the job out
of principle. The truth is I am just lucky. I happen to be finding
myself in a position where it's easy for me to do so. Don't have kids
and live relatively cheaply. I mean, it is still scary, and when I
inevitably run out of money and haven't been able to establish any
other form of income, I'll have to go job-searching again, but even
if everything fails miserably, I'll still have had the opportunity to
write a bunch of software for fun, which is a net positive at the end
of the day. But this kind of thing should be easier. Money taints and
changes everything, including software projects. It is truly sad that
life has to be a continuous struggle to "earn a living", as if the
suffering of life itself is some sort of gift we deserve to suffer
even more for. And I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm privileged enough
to even get to have these kinds of thoughts. I mean, if you're really
struggling to make it through the day, then you don't think about
this stuff at all,- you're just trying to make it to tomorrow. I can
not escape the feeling that any sort of exchange of money involves
some sort of exploitation somehow. Then there's the really, really
filthy rich, who have embraced the exploitation and are worshipped
for it. It's a jarring contrast I find hard to wrap my mind around...
Humanity is indeed, severely flawed. Not that humanity is some sort
of external static force. It does indeed include me. And me is easier
to change.
