Ghettos of Abu Nawas

On Dippin'

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Haven't written anything in ages, so I figured I'm overdue for an update. Since the last post, I've:

As stereotypical as it sounds, getting the dog has forced me to become more responsible in some banal ways. I can't leave random stuff out anymore because she'll eat it. She also reliably forces me off the computer and out for walks, which is probably good for me.

The other major change is that I've become aggressively offline. I used to be an aggressively online person, but over the past year I've deleted my Twitter and LinkedIn. This felt like a retreat in a way I had previously worried about. I had a conversation today about early WoW, and how raids used to be coordinated among giant groups of people of wildly different ages. In hindsight, it is very funny that there were 30-year-olds waiting on my 14-year-old ass to log on so the raid could start.

I've been on the Internet for a long time, and it fundamentally shaped who I became. But in the past year it feels like we've reached some tipping point. Group texts have been taking over as the major form of social media for me for a while, and lately it feels like dead internet theory has come into full force. Maybe even I've finally gotten fed up with the algorithmic stuff. Or every second article is just some garbage churned out by a model on the lowest reasoning setting. Or maybe I just have other desires now.

For a long time, career FOMO kept me on these networks. Twitter felt like the place to be if you were a software engineer, and honestly it still does. The acquisition transformed it, but it remains the primary place to pick up the latest news and happenings. LinkedIn was always a hostage situation, even if some of my friends started taking it more seriously after COVID. Leaving both felt a bit like the breaking-chains meme. In retrospect, neither mattered much for my career.

The software industry is strange right now. Salaries are through the roof in some places, but it also feels like the revenge of the specialists. Everyone seems to be looking for someone with a particular set of skills or experience, while more general SWE work gets eaten by the robot. This is a dramatic reversal from a few years ago, when being a generalist seemed like the place to be and I worried about getting pigeonholed into one career path. Right now, the pigeonhole is paying off.

The longer, more rambling point is that I'm learning how to dip out of something. For a long time, I treated sacrifice as evidence that I was serious. If I cared about my career, I had to stay plugged in, keep track of everything, go for promo, and let work consume whatever I was willing to give it. Dipping out felt shameful. It meant I couldn't make something happen, or couldn't hack it, rather than that I had decided something was no longer worth the cost.

I don't believe that as much anymore. I still take software engineering seriously as a craft (or I wouldn't be doing SWE Tea every week), and I still care about being good at my job. But I'm no longer trying to turn every year into a promotion cycle, and I'm less interested in performing seriousness online. The career did not collapse. I got a dog, went to Libya, biked from Pittsburgh to DC, deleted LinkedIn, and took a new job anyway.

I suppose I'm learning that I can stop and smell the roses while still being Serious about my career. I'm still figuring out when dipping is a change in priorities and when it's just giving up. The distinction seems to be whether I'm building something I actually value, or merely paying a cost to prove that I care. Sacrifice itself isn't the test anymore.