My view on career has changed a lot since the past year. That was when I first started to really consider it.
My first gravitation was towards academia. Through reading around I found that, unsurprisingly, the academic life is tough, and really luck dependent. Slaving away is the norm, and even so there’s no guarantee of advancing to a tenured professorship, that being the only good part of the profession. But now, universities are talking about instituting tenure reviews, or even axing tenure altogether. I think much of the glam I saw in academia was the result of witnessing survivorship bias, in all my professors, who seemed so happy and carefree in their jobs. Key observation being, they were only the successful academics, who did manage to land tenure, at a really great school as well.
Next it was quant. Despite SWE being held in lower regard than research/trading, quant roles are still some of the most prestigious SWE roles, which tugged on my affinities. The biggest problem with quant is that it’s of the more morally repulsive jobs. You shuffle money just to make more money. Brilliant PhDs get sucked into money factories instead of research labs where they could change the world. On the other hand, quant SWE is one of those roles that will forever remain on the cutting edge of the field, because each missed innovation would lose money, which is all that matters there. The principles of complacency (i.e. enshittification) don’t really apply in that industry. At times this kept me driven towards quant.
I could always land a big tech role and coast, but it was academia and quant so far that inspired any real excitement in me, really. And recently I found out I absolutely did not want to land a big tech role and coast…
Not long ago at work (AWS internship this summer…) I had my first “real” meeting where my team demoed our project to our skip manager (the manager of the manager of my team). For context, our project was a internal tool whose goal was to enhance cloud tech support. Riveting… right. The demo concluded in less than an hour, but the meeting dragged on for an hour and a half. Why? Because people kept fucking talking! Sucking up to the skip manager, pondering the state of the corporate organization (yeah that’ll get you the promotion for sure), and proposing additions to this shoddily (vibe coded) engineered software. Like any of that actually matters to anyone in this world?
Through the blur of boredom I started seeing these people in the meeting room as complete robots. Tossing away 40 hours a week to work on uninteresting, poorly engineered software, whose only goal is to make big corpo chug faster. To save the big Jassy some money. Be frugal! Despite many years in the “industry” these peoples’ only notable talent was having gathered knowledge about AWS microservices in order to link them together with vibe coded slop. To put it nicely, what they’ve chosen as a career, in the scope of the rest of CS, is like what a laborer’s job is to an engineer, or an architect. Demeaning, dull, and virtually useless to the rest of the world. Actually, I take that back: even a laborer’s job is at least very useful.
I had a 1-on-1 with one of the senior engineers my team was close with. He said he didn’t like kids from prestigious CS schools such as mine because of their ego. I recently realized he was right, but not in the way he probably thought. It’s not an issue about arrogance, it’s an issue about the spirit of a wide eyed student being crushed upon realizing how trifling and lifeless a job at this place is like. The guy was on his high horse about how he went to a no-name liberal arts school and still “made it”. Yes, it was because you had zero ambition and passion for the field and accordingly, fit right into a job that also required neither. I’m not trying to be rude here, this was pretty much what he said about himself, while also adding that he was really just after the money.
Nevertheless you might say it’s fine to be a complete tool and take a job like this anyways. Indeed, the salary is nice, the expected big tech six figures. You could just do more interesting things on the side! I thought that too. Turns out, 40 hours a week is a long time. On weekdays, besides work, eating, exercise if any, and chores, I have zero time left. Sure there are the weekends, but the key point is I waste 5/7 days of my life on something I loathe and don’t give a damn about. So for those who think they’d be happy to take any big tech and coast: If you have any real passion towards CS, seriously reconsider.
At this point there are a bunch of factors that I now recognize in what kind of job I’d pursue.
It has to have real world impact. A positive one. I would absolutely not work for military tech, quant, or some internal facing team at any big tech. If it’s something I can’t genuinely be proud of, then forget it.
It has to be interesting, technically. This rules out a lot of SWE, where it’s just writing high level code. Sure, when you become more senior you get to design systems instead, but honestly that sounds even more boring. It’s just chaining together a bunch of existing services. Arguably even easier for AI to do than coding, since it lacks the exactness necessary for code. And if there’s a tough problem then there’s pretty much always a set of existing solutions made by people smarter than you, you only provide a glue for piecing them together.
Taking these into account I’d say my focus is pretty clear now. My taste of something technically complex is something low level, systems related (I loved 213, can you tell?), then and add on “consumer facing”. I’ve liked every example I’ve thought of.
Doing something OS related sounds cool especially. I want to try contributing to Linux after I finish my PSX emulator. I could possibly first program something on the PSX to refresh my C knowledge and go beyond what 213 taught me. Maybe programming the kernel myself, even.
Computer science is such a vibrant field, but it’s too bad it gets dulled over by big tech SWE roles where any bum who can think can take a six figure payroll. Seriously, they are just glorified office jobs that just happen to involve writing code. I have no intention of taking one. I want to do something cool with my career.