Against Arbitrariness

I’m shamelessly ripping off Inkhaven and doing my own challenge, Egghaven. This is the eighth post.

Ever since I was a child, I have been savagely tortured by arbitrariness. Kudos to my parents; they were good at explaining why I ought to do things. Alas, the same could not be said of my schooling. I loathed the concept of exams. I should work hard now so I could do well on this set of exams, so I could then take a second set of exams, after which I would go to a separate institution which would also force me to sit a gated sequence of exams, after which I would hopefully get offered a job based on the results of that final set of exams? What? What if I don’t enjoy the work I am doing now, or I don’t take an interest in the subject, or I don’t believe that learning this concept will have any practical utility in my life other than succeeding on this infernal test? Hmm?

You will have to forgive me, dear reader. Of course I understand that my teachers were trying their best. And that there might not be a better system of education available. And that schools are essentially kennels for children anyway, and I might as well accept that. But I was angry about it as a child, and I am still angry about it as an adult because it hasn’t got all that much better.

I used to work at a household-name tech company. For a year, the project I was on had tight deadlines, and my manager put a lot of pressure on us. He always explained that his manager was putting a lot of pressure on him, and so on and so forth. I was extremely stressed, so much so that it began significantly affecting not only my mental health but my physical health too. I persevered; I knew that this job was going to be stressful before I took it, and I wanted to see the project to completion. In part because it would look good on my CV, and maybe that would make all the stress worth it, but also in part because I would’ve felt like a failure if I’d given up on something I’d started. We made all our deadlines, after weeks of crunching.

Then the entire project got canned by an SVP. Hahaha. Hahahahahaha. HahaaHahAhaaHAHAHAhAhaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH.

Anyway. That’s my Joker origin story. I’ve long been fascinated with David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and commensurately scared that I have one. Software engineering is a field in which it is particularly easy to secure bullshit employment. Most software engineers don’t actually do anything, because most software doesn’t actually do anything, as the rise of agentic coding is making painfully clear. As my boy Fyodor said in The House of the Dead:

The idea has occurred to me that if one wanted to crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.

And yet, such punishment abounds! More confusing still, many willingly submit to it! I left my previous big tech job after the aforementioned incident, keen to work on something with even a modicum of consequence. But many of my former colleagues are still there, or at least still in big tech. They are still being afflicted by a compounding version of Goodhart’s Law; each layer in the management chain has picked their own poor proxy for what is important on their team. By the time this trickles down to rank-and-file software engineers, it is clearly utter bullshit to anyone with the capacity for reflection. I’m glad that AI coding is going to destroy this.

I feel very grateful to be in a position where I am rarely compelled to do something “just because”. But then again, it’s clear I hated this so much from an early age; perhaps it was inevitable that I’d force my way into this kind of life, sooner or later.