What is it like to work in tech every day? This winter we surveyed people who work in tech about their jobs, common misconceptions about their industry and what they think it is for. Below you’ll find a selection of their answers.
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Efe Karakus
Senior software engineer at a big-tech company, 32
Seattle, Washington
Why did you start working in tech?
I randomly decided to take a comp-sci class my freshman year and the lecturer was amazing. I immediately got hooked on how the work felt like solving puzzles and I really enjoyed finding different ways of writing the same piece of code, so I switched my major from industrial engineering to computer science and naturally transitioned into a software-engineering role after graduation. I got a return after my internship in junior year at a big-tech company and have been working there for the past eight years.
What does your job look like on the day-to-day?
I build an open-source command-line interface for developers and operators to build, release and operate applications on the cloud.
Typically, my day starts around 8:30 a.m. and I create a to-do list of tasks for the day by reviewing emails, Slack messages and leftover work from the previous day. There will be roughly two scheduled meetings per day for thirty minutes to an hour talking about product work or one-on-ones with a mentee or manager. Otherwise, as the most experienced engineer on the team, I try to dedicate roughly 30 to 40 percent of my day to reviewing code or design documents from my peers. Once I have unblocked my colleagues, I focus on my own tasks. Usually that means either writing a design document or a project proposal, or executing on a project and writing code.
What do you find most interesting about your job? Most challenging?
I constantly have to be learning something new. Whether that’s how to execute on bigger-scoped projects, or having to dive deep and master a new piece of technology, my work forces me to learn a different aspect of software engineering all the time.
The most challenging part is really figuring out the right problem to solve. The tech space is both ambiguous and requires you to acquire specific skills to deliver the right solution. Talking to customers and product managers to first define the right vision and getting buy-in from executives isn’t always easy. I’m also really worried that having to constantly keep up with new technology trends and forming mental models as I get older could get difficult and exhausting.
What is the biggest misconception about people who work in tech?
Perhaps people think that our work is mostly isolated, where we just spend the bulk of our time writing code. At least in big tech, it’s quite the opposite. A lot of effort goes into communicating work, escalating and creating consensus, which requires a lot of talking to colleagues.
Are you a tech optimist? Why or why not?
I’m mostly a tech optimist. I really love tech, especially if it comes from a point of view of really being customer-obsessed and not just creating technology for the sake of it. I believe that human-computer interaction can really help humans be better at what makes us human and leave the computational/repetitive/risky aspects to machines instead. Having said that, I try to limit my use of computers and phones, as most applications just really care about keeping you engaged on the platform. But when done well, tech is really useful.
What is tech for?
Creating new abstractions that increase our quality of life.
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Ann
Retired technical manager at Oracle, 60
Bloomfield, Michigan
Why did you start working in tech?
In 1980, I was a woman who was good at math. My family wasn’t wealthy, and I needed to be able to work out of college. I was pushed into a degree in electrical and computer engineering to ensure employability, and to show that women could succeed in “men’s fields.” I was one of five women in my 144-person EE/CE class.
What does your job look like on the day-to-day?
First job was literally in front of a screen all day, talking to no one. Moved into roles that were more customer-facing and project management, so I interacted with customers, designed specs and training plans, managed people.
What do you find most interesting about your job? Most challenging?
In consulting, I loved learning other people’s businesses. I worked with a frozen-vegetable business, bakery mix and flours, medical devices, insurance, pharmaceuticals, fuel deliveries for the Department of Defense, etc. I also loved not being part of whatever trauma and drama was going on in their business.
What is the biggest misconception about people who work in tech?
That people who look a certain way, are a certain gender and come from certain countries are more brilliant and better at tech work. The most admired tech workers are usually not very productive. They enjoy complicated programming problems and overly complicated programming solutions, instead of producing maintainable, testable, readable, usable code that does what is needed by the customer.
Are you a tech optimist? Why or why not?
I’m not sure how to answer that. “Tech” is built into our lives, and has changed everything about how we live. So I am an optimist, in that tech will continue to improve our lives in important ways. Tech will bring solutions to the climate crisis, or at least allow us to reduce our impact on the environment. Tech solutions in health care will increase life spans.
On the other hand, people pursue “tech” for purely financial gain, so there are certainly technological innovations that do not improve lives, and in fact reduce quality of life. It is unlikely people will turn their backs on technological innovations that make lives worse, as long as there is money there.
What is tech for?
Understand that “tech” is the business in a lot of cases. Southwest Airlines, for instance, flies planes… but when their tech systems fail, the entire company fails. Shopping (online or in person), logistics, healthcare… the databases and interactions with users are what the business does. Tech is the nervous system of society.
So what is “tech for”? Tech is a tool like any other tool. It is “for” increasing efficiency, offering services that were impossible before, improving lives. It can also be used “for” making money, bending minds, reinforcing inequality, influencing politics. Like any tool, it has a positive purpose, but can also be misused.
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Ben Smitthimedhin
Software engineer at a religious nonprofit, 27
Forest, Virginia
Why did you start working in tech?
I was about to immigrate to the U.S. from Thailand. I had earned an M.A. in English literature but knew that finding work in the U.S. with that degree would be difficult, so I took online courses on software engineering and got myself into the field to support my family.
What does your job look like on the day-to-day?
I go to meetings to talk about what the team is building, ensure that users of our applications (churches overseas) get their bugs fixed, write code to build features for existing applications for the next release and document how these applications work for newcomers.
What do you find most interesting about your job? Most challenging?
The most interesting part of my job is the problem-solving aspect of writing code: there are scenarios in which churches overseas are without internet, without smartphones, and still need their apps to function correctly. This requires not just looking up how to build the most cutting-edge technology but how our team can build products that meet global needs, apps that are specifically requested by churches overseas. The most challenging part of my job is the amount of research that goes into building such products every day; technology evolves very quickly, and finding out which software, tool, programming language, framework, etc., is the most helpful can often be time-consuming and overwhelming.
What is the biggest misconception about people who work in tech?
That people “in tech” just means people who work in FAANG companies [Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google], and that we’re devoted to a transhumanistic vision of human flourishing.
Are you a tech optimist? Why or why not?
I am tech neutral. I do believe many in tech are focused on the newest/shiniest framework, tool, programming language, AI tool (ChatGPT is currently making waves) and have not explored the depths of how existing, older technologies can be helpful for the common good.
What is tech for?
I’m an orthodox Christian, so I believe technology is meant to be used for the common good, aiding us wherever there is need and freeing where there is restraint to allow more leisure time (and less distraction) in pursuit of what is Good, True and Beautiful in the world.
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Jasmine Sun
Product manager at Substack, 23
San Francisco, California
Why did you start working in tech?
I never planned to be a tech person—far from it. I entered undergrad as a baby “social justice warrior” planning to major in ethnic studies and become a professor. I was deeply skeptical of capitalism and the state, so academia seemed like a refuge—the only career path that was intellectually and politically pure. But when I arrived at Stanford in the wake of the 2016 election and the start of the “techlash,” I was shocked to see how much money, power and attention still poured into the pockets of twentysomething engineers who clearly had little idea of what to do with it. Whether or not I liked it, tech was having a huge impact on the communities and issues I cared about, so I wanted to get up to speed. The more I learned, the more I found myself surprisingly enthralled by the experimental, fast-moving and forward-looking culture of the startup scene. Tech leaders possessed an infectious optimism—an unfailing belief in the possibility of making the world better than they found it.
What does your job look like on the day-to-day?
Most days, I take the 5 to our office in San Francisco’s Financial District around 8 a.m., squeeze in an hour or two of prep, then do meetings—standup, design reviews, one-on-ones, user interviews—until the early afternoon, when I get my second focus block.
Product management involves a lot of facilitation, note-taking, cat-herding, strategy and planning. It sounds like a fake job when I put it that way, but it’s just acting as the mortar between the bricks of the team—filling in gaps, making everyone look cohesive, taking the fall for whatever goes wrong.
What do you find most interesting about your job? Most challenging?
I was recruiting for journalism jobs when I watched the media industry fall apart in 2020; reporters were warning me to stay away and just learn to code—no joke! Substack seemed like one of the best-positioned places to change the media industry at a root level. Plus, I’m not the kind of person who can grind on CRMs or crypto derivatives or whatever, so I’m lucky to work on problems that matter to me: building a better ecosystem for reading and writing online.
The most challenging thing about my job is also the most educational. Throughout undergrad, I was super interested in the ethics and social impact of technology, especially of social media platforms. But it’s one thing to make critiques at a theoretical level and an entirely different ball game to contend with real-world resource trade-offs and business incentives. Ultimately, I feel strongly that working in the industry makes me a better tech thinker and critic.
What is the biggest misconception about people who work in tech?
Not to be all “we are not a monolith,” but like, we are not a monolith. I grew up in the Seattle suburbs, where plenty of people worked in tech, but most treated it like a job to put food on the table for their family. It wasn’t until moving to the Bay Area that I saw tech as a real culture and ideology—and even here, it’s often a few loud voices (venture capitalists, founders, etc.) that dominate the conversation. There’s now a growing contingent of tech workers who are conscious of their status as workers (both the risks and the solidarity that implies), as well as the opportunity to impact politics via their roles.
Are you a tech optimist? Why or why not?
Yes, but it’s complicated. Outside of work, I run a nonprofit called Reboot. We describe ourselves as “a publication and community reimagining techno-optimism for a better collective future.” This confuses people, and I often clarify: We see optimism as an action, not a belief. We aren’t solutionists; we don’t assume that technological progress equals social progress. Neither are we pessimists who see technology as fundamentally flawed simply because it has been co-opted for oppression before. Rather, we reimagine techno-optimism as human optimism: faith in our ability as thinkers, builders and organizers to deploy technology for a better collective future.
What is tech for?
I’ve seen a lot of critics blanket-reject technology as an instrument of capitalism, white supremacy and oppression. But this has never sat right with me: like many others my age, I grew up on the internet. I learned to write by publishing on WordPress, pursued niche research passions from late nights on Google Scholar, and found community in online forums and Twitter group chats when I felt loneliest as a teen. I knew Google and Facebook didn’t have my best interests in mind, but quitting them felt equally untenable.
I’ve grown to see technology as neither inherently good nor bad, but as one tool in the toolbox—an immensely and undeniably powerful one—in fighting for the future we want. Since the 2000s, the internet has presented us with radical new ways of connecting with each other, sharing resources and creating knowledge outside of institutional and geographic bounds. Networked technologies formed the foundation for grassroots movements like the Arab Spring, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Smartphones enabled people to countersurveil police brutality, share the evidence and hold the state accountable. Technologists like NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have used their skills to uncover abuses of power, and others like Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike have built defensive infrastructures in their place.
Personally, I remain excited about the relationship between technology and openness: the access offered by open-source software, data sets, protocols and more.
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Anonymous
Co-founder and tech lead at an early-stage startup, 29
New York, New York
Why did you start working in tech?
Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley. My first post-college job was as an analyst at a medical-device firm that had developed a noninvasive alternative to colonoscopies. It was soul-crushingly boring. I’d come in, read the New York Times for one or two hours, chat with my boss and a few of the other analysts who sat nearby, take a long lunch and go for a walk in the nearby park, and then come back to my desk for more internet browsing and an hour or two of tasks I needed to complete. I received glowing performance reviews and was promoted each of my two years, but the incongruity between my lack of effort and the feedback I received from my superiors did not make sense to me. I felt as if I was on the outside of an inside joke. What was I missing?
Judge’s world, unlike mine, was dynamic and filled with engaged and intelligent individuals. Yes, there was backstabbing, and plenty of satire, but it was a world where ideas were acted upon and intelligence and effort were rewarded. Not wanting to attend graduate school, and lacking the connections or ability to start my own firm, I decided to apply to San Francisco-based startups. Six months later I signed an offer letter from Uber.
What does your job look like on the day-to-day?
I estimate that 60 percent of my day is spent having conversations, 30 percent is spent thinking, 10 percent coding and 10 percent on busywork such as expenses, database maintenance or recruiting.
What do you find most interesting about your job? Most challenging?
The most challenging is making myself understood. Ford was right when he said that people would ask for a faster horse. Sometimes what the market has identified as a “problem” is not really a problem. The heart of the matter is either misunderstood or not appreciated, and that can be frustrating.
The most interesting parts of my job are the conceptual ones. Our product applies machine-learning technologies to a legacy industry. Deconstructing the material world into mathematical and spatial realms, and then translating the deconstruction into code, is an incredibly exciting process. Yes, the output might be something banal such as business-intelligence software, but getting there, breaking down the world as it appears into a realm of yes/no, 1/0 logical statements is very exciting.
What is the biggest misconception about people who work in tech?
First, a few things that are true: we cannot succinctly describe our jobs, the majority of us are boring and do contribute to a slow but steady homogenization of the cities and neighborhoods we settle in, and our salaries very rarely correspond to a tangible societal benefit.
The biggest misconception is that tech workers are more intelligent than workers in other industries. They are smart—to work at Google one needs to be capable—but what really sets FAANG/VC-backed employees apart from other workers are their social and decision-making skills. My peers can run with the loosest directions and produce high-quality work. They also understand how to build social profiles and leverage those profiles for their own benefit.
When I worked at the medical-device firm, the standard attitude was that promotions and raises were things that one earned through hard work—putting in time, showing up early and leaving late, staying in the same role for multiple years and enthusiastically supporting and implementing the initiatives that leadership was selling. Tech workers, on the other hand, are relentless careerists. They intuit the reality of a social situation, position themselves as needed and pull the trigger when necessary.
Are you a tech optimist? Why or why not?
Do I believe that technology has the ability to improve people’s lives? Sure, why not? Do I think the technology industry—the one associated with Silicon Valley, venture capital and offices with coffee bars and open-concept seating arrangements—has an ability to change the world for the better? Probably not.
The minds and the resources of the industry have the potential to create plenty of life-improving technologies, but the nature of funding and VC’s shortsighted horizon make it impossible (well, nearly) for anything of real or lasting value to emerge from the tech industry. There is also a complete lack of political or class consciousness among tech workers. For many, creating wealth is seen as a social good in itself. Yes, your software may not really help anyone and might actually make life more frustrating (or in many cases—Uber—might even degrade it), but as long as it continues to sell, if revenue continues to increase, everyone and everything in the industry tells you that you are doing the right thing.
What is tech for?
It is an investment vehicle. Since ’08 tech has become increasingly attractive to investors. That money is now going into increasingly abstract and speculative firms. Tech will exist as an industry until there is somewhere more appealing to the global investor class.
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Brickey LeQuire
Software engineer at a health-care company, 42
Chicago, Illinois
Why did you start working in tech?
I suspected (correctly, in my case, as it turned out) it would be more lucrative than an academic career in political theory. My work in data engineering also satisfies an impulse that previously drove me toward theoretical rather than empirical research: good data is hard to come by, especially at scale, and it’s satisfying to focus my daily efforts on making that available to researchers and decision-makers. And I wanted to be a computer programmer as a kid; I’d tinker for hours with my BASIC script, “Dr. Bitwise,” capable of delivering praise, insults and canned responses on at least a dozen topics.
What does your job look like on the day-to-day?
Way less solitary coding than I first expected—lots of testing, troubleshooting and design and code-review meetings. My team does a lot of collaborative “pair programming,” and (in part because of my background in education) I get to work a lot with more junior developers, as well as coordinate a series of learning opportunities for my colleagues. The most recent addition to my workflow is ChatGPT, which I use to analyze, translate and even generate code (not to mention parodies of work Teams chats).
What do you find most interesting about your job? Most challenging?
I like the immersive challenges that come with moving and transforming big data. When you’ve got many billions of records, your logic has to handle a lot of edge cases, otherwise you’re throwing out valuable information. And the sheer scale of it means there are bottlenecks you can’t get around simply by throwing more resources at it—you’ve got to understand problems unique to your data set and figure out creative solutions based somewhat in technical knowledge but also in gut feelings informed by lots of trial and error.
More frustrating challenges include navigating bureaucracy and security policies. Don’t get me wrong—especially when working with sensitive data in a large organization, those layers are absolutely necessary. But (as with any job), there’s “your work,” and then there’s the work you do in order to get to do “your work.”
What is the biggest misconception about people who work in tech?
That they’re all “tech people.” So many of my colleagues are curious and well-read. Topics like Stoicism, philosopher-kings, the Allegory of the Cave, the Golden Rule, the invisible hand—all of these have come up in divisional meetings or casual conversation.
Are you a tech optimist? Why or why not?
No. I was, once, as a teenager in the mid-1990s, when a PC and dial-up modem connected me from my family’s rural home to a virtual world populated mostly by people at universities. Then came AOL, and the democratization and corporatization of the internet. The passions of the mob manipulated for the profit of the elite. If only the genie would go back in the bottle. (Sent from my iPhone.)
What is tech for?
What man chooses to make of it.
Image credit: People work in a large room full of tables of IBM 2915 computers, 1970-71. Courtesy of the Missouri State Archives.
What is it like to work in tech every day? This winter we surveyed people who work in tech about their jobs, common misconceptions about their industry and what they think it is for. Below you’ll find a selection of their answers.
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Efe Karakus
Senior software engineer at a big-tech company, 32
Seattle, Washington
Why did you start working in tech?
I randomly decided to take a comp-sci class my freshman year and the lecturer was amazing. I immediately got hooked on how the work felt like solving puzzles and I really enjoyed finding different ways of writing the same piece of code, so I switched my major from industrial engineering to computer science and naturally transitioned into a software-engineering role after graduation. I got a return after my internship in junior year at a big-tech company and have been working there for the past eight years.
What does your job look like on the day-to-day?
I build an open-source command-line interface for developers and operators to build, release and operate applications on the cloud.
Typically, my day starts around 8:30 a.m. and I create a to-do list of tasks for the day by reviewing emails, Slack messages and leftover work from the previous day. There will be roughly two scheduled meetings per day for thirty minutes to an hour talking about product work or one-on-ones with a mentee or manager. Otherwise, as the most experienced engineer on the team, I try to dedicate roughly 30 to 40 percent of my day to reviewing code or design documents from my peers. Once I have unblocked my colleagues, I focus on my own tasks. Usually that means either writing a design document or a project proposal, or executing on a project and writing code.
What do you find most interesting about your job? Most challenging?
I constantly have to be learning something new. Whether that’s how to execute on bigger-scoped projects, or having to dive deep and master a new piece of technology, my work forces me to learn a different aspect of software engineering all the time.
The most challenging part is really figuring out the right problem to solve. The tech space is both ambiguous and requires you to acquire specific skills to deliver the right solution. Talking to customers and product managers to first define the right vision and getting buy-in from executives isn’t always easy. I’m also really worried that having to constantly keep up with new technology trends and forming mental models as I get older could get difficult and exhausting.
What is the biggest misconception about people who work in tech?
Perhaps people think that our work is mostly isolated, where we just spend the bulk of our time writing code. At least in big tech, it’s quite the opposite. A lot of effort goes into communicating work, escalating and creating consensus, which requires a lot of talking to colleagues.
Are you a tech optimist? Why or why not?
I’m mostly a tech optimist. I really love tech, especially if it comes from a point of view of really being customer-obsessed and not just creating technology for the sake of it. I believe that human-computer interaction can really help humans be better at what makes us human and leave the computational/repetitive/risky aspects to machines instead. Having said that, I try to limit my use of computers and phones, as most applications just really care about keeping you engaged on the platform. But when done well, tech is really useful.
What is tech for?
Creating new abstractions that increase our quality of life.
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Ann
Retired technical manager at Oracle, 60
Bloomfield, Michigan
Why did you start working in tech?
In 1980, I was a woman who was good at math. My family wasn’t wealthy, and I needed to be able to work out of college. I was pushed into a degree in electrical and computer engineering to ensure employability, and to show that women could succeed in “men’s fields.” I was one of five women in my 144-person EE/CE class.
What does your job look like on the day-to-day?
First job was literally in front of a screen all day, talking to no one. Moved into roles that were more customer-facing and project management, so I interacted with customers, designed specs and training plans, managed people.
What do you find most interesting about your job? Most challenging?
In consulting, I loved learning other people’s businesses. I worked with a frozen-vegetable business, bakery mix and flours, medical devices, insurance, pharmaceuticals, fuel deliveries for the Department of Defense, etc. I also loved not being part of whatever trauma and drama was going on in their business.
What is the biggest misconception about people who work in tech?
That people who look a certain way, are a certain gender and come from certain countries are more brilliant and better at tech work. The most admired tech workers are usually not very productive. They enjoy complicated programming problems and overly complicated programming solutions, instead of producing maintainable, testable, readable, usable code that does what is needed by the customer.
Are you a tech optimist? Why or why not?
I’m not sure how to answer that. “Tech” is built into our lives, and has changed everything about how we live. So I am an optimist, in that tech will continue to improve our lives in important ways. Tech will bring solutions to the climate crisis, or at least allow us to reduce our impact on the environment. Tech solutions in health care will increase life spans.
On the other hand, people pursue “tech” for purely financial gain, so there are certainly technological innovations that do not improve lives, and in fact reduce quality of life. It is unlikely people will turn their backs on technological innovations that make lives worse, as long as there is money there.
What is tech for?
Understand that “tech” is the business in a lot of cases. Southwest Airlines, for instance, flies planes… but when their tech systems fail, the entire company fails. Shopping (online or in person), logistics, healthcare… the databases and interactions with users are what the business does. Tech is the nervous system of society.
So what is “tech for”? Tech is a tool like any other tool. It is “for” increasing efficiency, offering services that were impossible before, improving lives. It can also be used “for” making money, bending minds, reinforcing inequality, influencing politics. Like any tool, it has a positive purpose, but can also be misused.
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Ben Smitthimedhin
Software engineer at a religious nonprofit, 27
Forest, Virginia
Why did you start working in tech?
I was about to immigrate to the U.S. from Thailand. I had earned an M.A. in English literature but knew that finding work in the U.S. with that degree would be difficult, so I took online courses on software engineering and got myself into the field to support my family.
What does your job look like on the day-to-day?
I go to meetings to talk about what the team is building, ensure that users of our applications (churches overseas) get their bugs fixed, write code to build features for existing applications for the next release and document how these applications work for newcomers.
What do you find most interesting about your job? Most challenging?
The most interesting part of my job is the problem-solving aspect of writing code: there are scenarios in which churches overseas are without internet, without smartphones, and still need their apps to function correctly. This requires not just looking up how to build the most cutting-edge technology but how our team can build products that meet global needs, apps that are specifically requested by churches overseas. The most challenging part of my job is the amount of research that goes into building such products every day; technology evolves very quickly, and finding out which software, tool, programming language, framework, etc., is the most helpful can often be time-consuming and overwhelming.
What is the biggest misconception about people who work in tech?
That people “in tech” just means people who work in FAANG companies [Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google], and that we’re devoted to a transhumanistic vision of human flourishing.
Are you a tech optimist? Why or why not?
I am tech neutral. I do believe many in tech are focused on the newest/shiniest framework, tool, programming language, AI tool (ChatGPT is currently making waves) and have not explored the depths of how existing, older technologies can be helpful for the common good.
What is tech for?
I’m an orthodox Christian, so I believe technology is meant to be used for the common good, aiding us wherever there is need and freeing where there is restraint to allow more leisure time (and less distraction) in pursuit of what is Good, True and Beautiful in the world.
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Jasmine Sun
Product manager at Substack, 23
San Francisco, California
Why did you start working in tech?
I never planned to be a tech person—far from it. I entered undergrad as a baby “social justice warrior” planning to major in ethnic studies and become a professor. I was deeply skeptical of capitalism and the state, so academia seemed like a refuge—the only career path that was intellectually and politically pure. But when I arrived at Stanford in the wake of the 2016 election and the start of the “techlash,” I was shocked to see how much money, power and attention still poured into the pockets of twentysomething engineers who clearly had little idea of what to do with it. Whether or not I liked it, tech was having a huge impact on the communities and issues I cared about, so I wanted to get up to speed. The more I learned, the more I found myself surprisingly enthralled by the experimental, fast-moving and forward-looking culture of the startup scene. Tech leaders possessed an infectious optimism—an unfailing belief in the possibility of making the world better than they found it.
What does your job look like on the day-to-day?
Most days, I take the 5 to our office in San Francisco’s Financial District around 8 a.m., squeeze in an hour or two of prep, then do meetings—standup, design reviews, one-on-ones, user interviews—until the early afternoon, when I get my second focus block.
Product management involves a lot of facilitation, note-taking, cat-herding, strategy and planning. It sounds like a fake job when I put it that way, but it’s just acting as the mortar between the bricks of the team—filling in gaps, making everyone look cohesive, taking the fall for whatever goes wrong.
What do you find most interesting about your job? Most challenging?
I was recruiting for journalism jobs when I watched the media industry fall apart in 2020; reporters were warning me to stay away and just learn to code—no joke! Substack seemed like one of the best-positioned places to change the media industry at a root level. Plus, I’m not the kind of person who can grind on CRMs or crypto derivatives or whatever, so I’m lucky to work on problems that matter to me: building a better ecosystem for reading and writing online.
The most challenging thing about my job is also the most educational. Throughout undergrad, I was super interested in the ethics and social impact of technology, especially of social media platforms. But it’s one thing to make critiques at a theoretical level and an entirely different ball game to contend with real-world resource trade-offs and business incentives. Ultimately, I feel strongly that working in the industry makes me a better tech thinker and critic.
What is the biggest misconception about people who work in tech?
Not to be all “we are not a monolith,” but like, we are not a monolith. I grew up in the Seattle suburbs, where plenty of people worked in tech, but most treated it like a job to put food on the table for their family. It wasn’t until moving to the Bay Area that I saw tech as a real culture and ideology—and even here, it’s often a few loud voices (venture capitalists, founders, etc.) that dominate the conversation. There’s now a growing contingent of tech workers who are conscious of their status as workers (both the risks and the solidarity that implies), as well as the opportunity to impact politics via their roles.
Are you a tech optimist? Why or why not?
Yes, but it’s complicated. Outside of work, I run a nonprofit called Reboot. We describe ourselves as “a publication and community reimagining techno-optimism for a better collective future.” This confuses people, and I often clarify: We see optimism as an action, not a belief. We aren’t solutionists; we don’t assume that technological progress equals social progress. Neither are we pessimists who see technology as fundamentally flawed simply because it has been co-opted for oppression before. Rather, we reimagine techno-optimism as human optimism: faith in our ability as thinkers, builders and organizers to deploy technology for a better collective future.
What is tech for?
I’ve seen a lot of critics blanket-reject technology as an instrument of capitalism, white supremacy and oppression. But this has never sat right with me: like many others my age, I grew up on the internet. I learned to write by publishing on WordPress, pursued niche research passions from late nights on Google Scholar, and found community in online forums and Twitter group chats when I felt loneliest as a teen. I knew Google and Facebook didn’t have my best interests in mind, but quitting them felt equally untenable.
I’ve grown to see technology as neither inherently good nor bad, but as one tool in the toolbox—an immensely and undeniably powerful one—in fighting for the future we want. Since the 2000s, the internet has presented us with radical new ways of connecting with each other, sharing resources and creating knowledge outside of institutional and geographic bounds. Networked technologies formed the foundation for grassroots movements like the Arab Spring, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Smartphones enabled people to countersurveil police brutality, share the evidence and hold the state accountable. Technologists like NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have used their skills to uncover abuses of power, and others like Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike have built defensive infrastructures in their place.
Personally, I remain excited about the relationship between technology and openness: the access offered by open-source software, data sets, protocols and more.
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Anonymous
Co-founder and tech lead at an early-stage startup, 29
New York, New York
Why did you start working in tech?
Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley. My first post-college job was as an analyst at a medical-device firm that had developed a noninvasive alternative to colonoscopies. It was soul-crushingly boring. I’d come in, read the New York Times for one or two hours, chat with my boss and a few of the other analysts who sat nearby, take a long lunch and go for a walk in the nearby park, and then come back to my desk for more internet browsing and an hour or two of tasks I needed to complete. I received glowing performance reviews and was promoted each of my two years, but the incongruity between my lack of effort and the feedback I received from my superiors did not make sense to me. I felt as if I was on the outside of an inside joke. What was I missing?
Judge’s world, unlike mine, was dynamic and filled with engaged and intelligent individuals. Yes, there was backstabbing, and plenty of satire, but it was a world where ideas were acted upon and intelligence and effort were rewarded. Not wanting to attend graduate school, and lacking the connections or ability to start my own firm, I decided to apply to San Francisco-based startups. Six months later I signed an offer letter from Uber.
What does your job look like on the day-to-day?
I estimate that 60 percent of my day is spent having conversations, 30 percent is spent thinking, 10 percent coding and 10 percent on busywork such as expenses, database maintenance or recruiting.
What do you find most interesting about your job? Most challenging?
The most challenging is making myself understood. Ford was right when he said that people would ask for a faster horse. Sometimes what the market has identified as a “problem” is not really a problem. The heart of the matter is either misunderstood or not appreciated, and that can be frustrating.
The most interesting parts of my job are the conceptual ones. Our product applies machine-learning technologies to a legacy industry. Deconstructing the material world into mathematical and spatial realms, and then translating the deconstruction into code, is an incredibly exciting process. Yes, the output might be something banal such as business-intelligence software, but getting there, breaking down the world as it appears into a realm of yes/no, 1/0 logical statements is very exciting.
What is the biggest misconception about people who work in tech?
First, a few things that are true: we cannot succinctly describe our jobs, the majority of us are boring and do contribute to a slow but steady homogenization of the cities and neighborhoods we settle in, and our salaries very rarely correspond to a tangible societal benefit.
The biggest misconception is that tech workers are more intelligent than workers in other industries. They are smart—to work at Google one needs to be capable—but what really sets FAANG/VC-backed employees apart from other workers are their social and decision-making skills. My peers can run with the loosest directions and produce high-quality work. They also understand how to build social profiles and leverage those profiles for their own benefit.
When I worked at the medical-device firm, the standard attitude was that promotions and raises were things that one earned through hard work—putting in time, showing up early and leaving late, staying in the same role for multiple years and enthusiastically supporting and implementing the initiatives that leadership was selling. Tech workers, on the other hand, are relentless careerists. They intuit the reality of a social situation, position themselves as needed and pull the trigger when necessary.
Are you a tech optimist? Why or why not?
Do I believe that technology has the ability to improve people’s lives? Sure, why not? Do I think the technology industry—the one associated with Silicon Valley, venture capital and offices with coffee bars and open-concept seating arrangements—has an ability to change the world for the better? Probably not.
The minds and the resources of the industry have the potential to create plenty of life-improving technologies, but the nature of funding and VC’s shortsighted horizon make it impossible (well, nearly) for anything of real or lasting value to emerge from the tech industry. There is also a complete lack of political or class consciousness among tech workers. For many, creating wealth is seen as a social good in itself. Yes, your software may not really help anyone and might actually make life more frustrating (or in many cases—Uber—might even degrade it), but as long as it continues to sell, if revenue continues to increase, everyone and everything in the industry tells you that you are doing the right thing.
What is tech for?
It is an investment vehicle. Since ’08 tech has become increasingly attractive to investors. That money is now going into increasingly abstract and speculative firms. Tech will exist as an industry until there is somewhere more appealing to the global investor class.
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Brickey LeQuire
Software engineer at a health-care company, 42
Chicago, Illinois
Why did you start working in tech?
I suspected (correctly, in my case, as it turned out) it would be more lucrative than an academic career in political theory. My work in data engineering also satisfies an impulse that previously drove me toward theoretical rather than empirical research: good data is hard to come by, especially at scale, and it’s satisfying to focus my daily efforts on making that available to researchers and decision-makers. And I wanted to be a computer programmer as a kid; I’d tinker for hours with my BASIC script, “Dr. Bitwise,” capable of delivering praise, insults and canned responses on at least a dozen topics.
What does your job look like on the day-to-day?
Way less solitary coding than I first expected—lots of testing, troubleshooting and design and code-review meetings. My team does a lot of collaborative “pair programming,” and (in part because of my background in education) I get to work a lot with more junior developers, as well as coordinate a series of learning opportunities for my colleagues. The most recent addition to my workflow is ChatGPT, which I use to analyze, translate and even generate code (not to mention parodies of work Teams chats).
What do you find most interesting about your job? Most challenging?
I like the immersive challenges that come with moving and transforming big data. When you’ve got many billions of records, your logic has to handle a lot of edge cases, otherwise you’re throwing out valuable information. And the sheer scale of it means there are bottlenecks you can’t get around simply by throwing more resources at it—you’ve got to understand problems unique to your data set and figure out creative solutions based somewhat in technical knowledge but also in gut feelings informed by lots of trial and error.
More frustrating challenges include navigating bureaucracy and security policies. Don’t get me wrong—especially when working with sensitive data in a large organization, those layers are absolutely necessary. But (as with any job), there’s “your work,” and then there’s the work you do in order to get to do “your work.”
What is the biggest misconception about people who work in tech?
That they’re all “tech people.” So many of my colleagues are curious and well-read. Topics like Stoicism, philosopher-kings, the Allegory of the Cave, the Golden Rule, the invisible hand—all of these have come up in divisional meetings or casual conversation.
Are you a tech optimist? Why or why not?
No. I was, once, as a teenager in the mid-1990s, when a PC and dial-up modem connected me from my family’s rural home to a virtual world populated mostly by people at universities. Then came AOL, and the democratization and corporatization of the internet. The passions of the mob manipulated for the profit of the elite. If only the genie would go back in the bottle. (Sent from my iPhone.)
What is tech for?
What man chooses to make of it.
Image credit: People work in a large room full of tables of IBM 2915 computers, 1970-71. Courtesy of the Missouri State Archives.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.