Do I Regret Focusing on 'Just Being' A Software Engineer?

Level setting

I didn't imagine that I would have a want to exit "tech". I used to know someone who's more of a technophobe that they'd care to admit and with good reason, in this landscape^[1]. At times, it felt a bit over-the-top when they actively clumped anyone working in the more "branded" roles as equal collaborators to CEOs and board members, the direct enforcers of harm in the industry. If your good friends are all in it and are "retire-at-40" wealthy from it, as it was for them, I could see why some mixture of resentment and fear would grow. It's misplaced of a target, of course, but the development makes sense either way. The software engineering industry is quite complex^[2] in terms of how it handles hiring, pay and everything dealing with human management. Expanding this for all workers in tech that hold positions of lower management and below, it's clear how that explicitly hierarchical systems can rarely work in favor of people at the bottom and operate to optimize profit and perceived company health over everything else. I use "perceived" because companies can and have cumulatively laid off thousands of workers^[3] while parading in the tech press about new products, profits swelling and more ventures going forward (where did that money come from if a quarter ago things were dire?) We're told, those who are "lucky" to remain, that you are the few chosen to power forward. However, this internal marketing line is beginning to wear and folks have begun looking for other ways to define what it does mean to be a worker and finding direct means of securing stability at work^[4].

This approach works when you're at work. Or have a place of work to be at. Syndicalism is a fancy word to say "ayo you work and produce value? hmm you don't own your output? hold it back then!" — wobbly wobbly in the house. A semi-academic way to define it, thanks to Wikipedia, would be an approach adapted from the French to get workers together and push their objectives by withholding the one thing CEOs, boards and vice presidents have resigned themselves from engaging in: doing the work themselves at the pay of the workers below them. This concept is something I had to introduce to myself, through reading, talking to workers and interrogating what it is that we were building. American education outlets aggressively refrain from any sort of direct literature that points to forms of direct action — the closest I can think of was the Montgomery Bus boycott but even the exclusion of how community activism kept people afloat would have been too inspirational for the youth to understand the State is the source of lack. But before I get deeper into this, I need to explain my alignment in terms of activism and community engagement.

Cue the Sepia Filter of ... 2012?

A decade ago, I involved myself as a volunteer with the New York Justice League. I had no concrete ideas of what it'd involve me in. I was also using Ubuntu for the first time in my life. It grew from "oh ha ha, I got Firefox working" to the legitimate idea of being able to work on something that you also used (and relied on). This was easy for me to grasp as a kid whose family couldn't afford a license from Microsoft for "the permission" to use the computer they paid for already^[5]. This was even worse in the case of Cupertino-designed, forcibly-in-China built machines. These undertones are thinly ignored when you see a lot of anecdotes of peoples' reflection into the industry. The first machine my family got was a HP Compaq machine (with the cowprint and everything) running Windows 98 - around 2004. I managed to figure out how to update it at the library and asked for blank CDs there^[6]. Fast forward back to the time with NYJL, I ended up saving up from a contract job enough to get a Dell PC, ones I've read online that were serviceable since the ability to easily repair extended the lifespan of the device (and reduced the perceived switching cost)^[7]. There's some personal stuff that I'm refraining from getting into because it still has a lingering impact on my life but a calamity of sorts kept me inside. Being inside kept me on the computer — a lot. I worked on random projects, namely a neural net project and a speech recognition training tool using PocketSphinx for Ubuntu. The latter project got pretty far and was usable, for a first-time C++ programmer. It wasn't easy and it definitely influenced how I looked at code for those first years. I didn't have the formal instruction others were getting about networking and the like — I met folks online like Paul who put me onto the concepts of MOTU and how packaging as a concept work for open source software, extremely different from the box-CD era of the such.

This allowed me to eventually apply and find a job at Shutterstock, my first "serious" tech job. I met a lot of people, experienced the "wow, you're not even 25!" phases of being the space and got a chance to really understand why people didn't like waterfall development.

I grew more in touch with other Black people in the tech space - folks who had more formal training and development. A few people that remain embedded in my mind are Kyle and Mary. Kyle, I met through his project, Black Techies and that enabled me to have way more fun with the things I was only beginning to play with. I learned and become obsessed with digital security thanks to a good friend, Matt who's both taught me and many others what does it mean to be safe under government surveillance and from other malicious actors with his work at CryptoHarlem - a well known hub in the heart of Harlem consistently putting people of color onto game.

Then came the police murder. The knowledge of the violence of New York City's local military^[8] is known to folks who live under its constant surveillance. My neighborhood in Brooklyn and the others I frequent in East New York, Canarsie and Flatbush all know that if police are around, to act as invisible and "cool" as possible, as to not agitate the people with the guns. Sadly, this is never enough to stop the centuries-old American tradition of lynching (in all of the forms it took). A protest took over New York City, from Harlem, across the Brooklyn Bridge to the edges of Brooklyn, into neighborhoods folks from out of town where suggested to not be out in at night. This was in protest of the grand jury's inability to indict the cowardice of Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer who killed Eric Garner with his own hands^[9]. We walked, marched and yelled for hours and for miles. We were in Times Square, clogging up stores, on the bridge stopping traffic. All to have people understand that an injury to one is a blow to everyone.

I was held by police in Brooklyn for "obstructing traffic", willing to be taken back to One Police Plaza and released thanks to a ACLU advocate. Unfortunately, I didn't report back in time for work as I was held longer (I was old enough for them to not have to call my parents and I didn't take off time from work). It didn't help that I also found it difficult at work to be taken more seriously on project proposals - advocacy of self wasn't something I had at 20. Wrangling that and hyper-local events made it extremely difficult for me to keep things going. I was getting really sad given how much more this job helped out at home (and my mom's new confidence in me being able to do something with my life). Missing three days of work was the final nail to have my employment at Shutterstock terminated. It didn't matter to my manager's manager what was going on just below in the streets. And that began my life in the software industry - figuring how to balance being true to myself, not having any of the certificates or clearances needed (at the time) to get through a door and wanting to use something I enjoyed a lot to push for advocacy.

Leaping into the Future

The "thing" people might recognize my name (if they do) is the situation that happened with Google Photos and their world-class image recognition system labelling a friend of mine as a gorilla. I have many issues with how this went down; from the number of people who kept assuming we were a couple, assuming that we both were tagged or that it was just one photo^[10]. I don't know what happened with it, but when I was in California, some film crew working for Google had me doing a bit of a conversation about it^[11]. Either way, people immediately became less concerned on my technical ability and more concerned on how this made me feel. I can't say I was mad at being flown out to Austin for the first time to attend a conference on the matter. I had a lot of firsts, because of tech. My mother suggested I sue the multinational; said multinational interviewed me (and rejected me after the first screen).

One fledging startup in California did take a chance on me and that continued the canonical time of my career in tech and my time in advocacy and community work.

I'll zoom through the stuff I spent time with in the Bay, from initial interactions with Peoples' Breakfast in its early years, door knocking for Catt Brooks, joining and participating with the civic hacktivist group OpenOakland, helping random vendors at the Ashby flea market support mobile payments to reduce the on-hand cash handling as they served food^[12] and other things that helped me embed myself into the community I saw a future in.

I can't go without mentioning the project Amèlie, Catt and I worked on being GoodForPoC, an attempt to bring visibility to a problem that tech is staunchly working to not correct: its obsession with imperialistic white supremacist patriarchy within the industry. We didn't use that phrase but it clicks now, after some study of bell hooks.

I found ways, thanks to locals, how to let work support community advocacy, like taking days to volunteer with the Oakland Unified School District for read-ins for Black History Month to expose kids to books I was fortunate to have in my classrooms and volunteering with folks to serve as a judge for coding competitions with the youth and give them a persistent line of mentorship that they could reach out to as they continued playing with software on the side, as I had when I was growing up.

There's a lot of other things I was indirectly involved with. Things like Interact^[13] led me to meet more folks in the industry and build different relationships, not even based on identity but around what our passions were aligned with. It didn't have to identical or even symmetrical and folks were down for each other.

I have to make one thing clear too: none of this would have been possible without the people who took the time to hear me out, find common ground and look towards what can happen next. I'm consistently appreciative and a defender of people working in community towards common goals: only from working from below can concrete change occur and I believe that I've worked and touched things that've contributed to the such.

The Bits and Bytes of Organizing

By the time I got to Glitch, the idea of organizing existed solely in the streets to me. It involved knocking on doors, doing interviews with active listening, reporting back to folks about where things are headed, agitating folks around shared values and pushing folks towards action. I'm extremely happy to have spent time with them and CWA to help form a union at Glitch, despite the uphill fucking battle it took.

At this point, my stances on politics weren't hidden; I wasn't a fan of capitalism and the tech industry being the brainchild of such an economic beast meant I either had to swallow my thoughts or yell them loud enough to push away those who were more ardent supporters of it. Today, this has led to a dramatic reconfiguration of the community of folks I have around me in tech. It used to be with folks you'd recognize, some at Microsoft, from Twitter and many other places. When Dorsey became more open with his alignment with passive white supremacy - a now-common underbelly of most tech executives from Sam Altman to Chris Best testing the bounds, I held to the same roots I came to nurture when I developed myself into this space: an anti-capitalist, anti-white-supremacist, anti-anything-that-reduces-the-movement-to-end-oppression (so anti-supremacism). I wasn't expecting people to get it — as you can see now, my path into the space was marked with many actions that made clear what I was about and who I was for. I admire folks I've come to know like Idalin who, in my eye, remains some of the few in the industry who's authentically connected to the struggle off-rip and refuses to compromise that for access to whiteness (and in turn, alignment with white supremacy in a double-speak nature) in this industry. She's taken a more practical approach than I, which had inspired me to do more studying and research.

Learning about the activist history of Oakland, where I used to live in the Lower Bottoms, how the West Oakland BART station was created after razing down dozens of homes in the area that came from the migration period was a humbling and stark experience. That led to a yo-yo when I went back to Brooklyn to visit family to learn about the history of the S.L.A.V.E theatres out there^[14]. Being able to tie the geographical plights inflicted by industry on people across 2,700 miles was the final pin in my mind: people need to work together to get what they need and people have to be aligned on objectives lest infighting and corruption destroy it all.

I moved more towards labor organizing in research - only scraping the surface as I still had to focus on balancing work and staying engaged with community. Huey Newton made the point that political education is vital but education without practice is meaningless, in "Revolutionary Suicide". I tie this with James Baldwin's notice of the professional managerial class' inability to use what resources and access they have to work to help people, in "The Fire Next Time", and instead of holding rent parties, they throw dinner parties (or in its modern form, cruises or voyeuristic trips to tourism-riddled territories). I spent more time trying to figure out how to help people reconfigure spaces in companies to build power. At Lyft, that was via employee resource group efforts. It was great at building comrades but horrible at building power since it was purely at the whim of executives.

Today-ish

By this point, there's less for me to say that you wouldn't know if you've been following my Mastodon account. In short, after Glitch and some other stops (like Nava which honed an interest and discovery of a civic technologist as a viable career path), ended up at Code for America and that ended up ... the way it did with a historic win. I've been bringing myself to more spaces around labor to develop more praxis from all of the theory we've been conjuring up. But what does this mean in terms of a career in technology?

I have no clue. You see, the biggest names in the industry are aggressively focusing on making it very difficult to either introduce or approach anything that would promote an open society. Apple's inability to support third-party app stores without legal pressure demonstrates what we see in industry and in history. The app store itself wasn't in the roadmap for Jobs' vision of the iPhone — and he initially thought it was a bad idea until people - internally and externally - had to pressure him to yield. That effort could have been spent on making so much more, if it wasn't run by someone like Jobs or in a non-capital obsessed way (Jobs was a salesman at the end of the day; that's a core component of what a CEO does), we could have seen a world where, perhaps, the iPhone wouldn't have been so expensive and had support for progressive web applications out of the box^[15]. You can learn more about this in Brian Merchant's The One Device.

I'm looking for work (which is part of the reason why I'm giving my life story above to give folks a clearer image about me) and raising money to stay housed as I do that. I probably wouldn't be in this situation if I didn't donate thousands to the organizations I worked with over the years, or didn't have debt that restricts my ability to borrow and get back on my feet. There's very little I can do about that now and I rarely regret that. My deeper regrets come from a sense of feeling of not having done enough in the time I've spent. I could have fought harder for the discrimination case I had on two former Facebook workers at Lyft (which was textbook but Lyft does not like talking about race). If anything, each of these moments gave me more pointed stances on the concept of work and has taught me to expect nearly nothing from executives since their direct reports and their managers have no focus on well-being of workers (outside of trying to prevent them from quitting and even that is extremely thin). The goal is to make money and nothing else. Fuck the planet, women, children — get more of it in the bombs. And that's just focusing on multinational companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon; of which most of the tech leaders obsessively form their organization (or fiefdom) around.

I don't know how much longer I can comfortably call myself a "technologist" when this is what being a technologist is today. And to play on an idea of separation of the "art from the artwork" while actively defending their organizations (failing that, their outputs and indirectly their contributions) works to be a free agent of marketing for them. It's similar to a private company opening up a non-profit to launder the notion of doing good to build a moat of social capital. How does one comfortably reconcile that?

With money. Enough of it to numb your heart and soul. The starting price is around $175,000 USD currently, it seems; around $250,000 USD if you're an executive. But money will never be enough. We see how it turns people to demand more and more (and more). It converts them into subversions of their stances (if they had any) and makes clear the role of celebrities (even in our industry). Ideally, I'll land something that's enough to get me back on my feet. That's all I need right now. Because the rest of my energy is going to be spent working on the same things that brought me in. So I don't think I have regret for being a software engineer. But I do regret not working enough to pull more folks along in a productive way. But I can fix that now. 🤭