The Smell of Sweat in the Computer Mines

[makz]

So, what's been happening with me?

I'm once again on a work trip. A fancy city. A lot of my extended coworkers are here — the ones I usually only see during brief windows of setup before the events for which my closer coworkers have prepared assets. I'm an "extended coworker" in the making, perhaps.

I have no idea what I'm doing.

That's not exactly true. I'm being hard on myself. You can't be good at something you haven't done before, unless you're a Newtype or something. I'm only really good at computers, but I "smell too much of sweat" to be a Newtype. I work hard. Nothing has come of that hard work as of yet.

I'll get there. I have that much faith in myself.

My industry is pretty forgiving in a lot of ways. Really, the main thing is to be able to hang. I don't know that I'm the world's best "culture fit," (in any setting, really), but I'm good enough at being personable and hardworking. I'm doing my best not to complain, even if I get cold and sore and hungry.

I'm making this all sound miserable, but it isn't. There's a reason I got into this line of work; I love seeing the machines make stuff happen. I love thinking of all the little ways we can improve a process and implementing those little things in the background. I love seeing people have an easier time this time than they did last time.

I do like what I do.

But I can't help but wonder if I'm here because of something like "fate" or "inevitability."

Sometimes you'll see, in interviews with technologists or creatives — the ones who do sort of weird, not particularly lauded work in niches that aren't high-brow, whose actual paychecks aren't particularly fat — comments that they "work this job because it's the only thing [they] could do." They had no other choice. They ended up in the only place they could have, because of who they were, fundamentally, as human beings.

That's kind of how I feel about what I'm doing right now.

If I could have joined an industry that had broader citizenship in the world, perhaps I would have. As it stands, I'm suited to this industry in a bunch of ways, both good and ill.

Sometimes that makes me feel a little lonely in ways that I can't explain. There are other people who want to do similar work to this, who are very smart and capable, but because of a myriad of factors, I'm here. In order hold my head up in front of all of those other people, I want to perform well at my job. The fact that I'm not good at it (yet) makes me frustrated not just for myself, but for all the coworkers who might be here if I wasn't.

I don't want to be window-dressing. I feel like I have to prove something.

And ultimately, a lot is being expected of me, down the road.

…To be honest, I poured a lot of these feelings into the fanfic I've been writing. Usually I get nowhere near close to completing anything I write. I just write meta-fiction and daydream and the words don't end up making it to the paper. This time, it was almost like the dialogue just poured out of me, and every edit pass on the narration was easier than the last.

Maybe that, too, is a kind of "fate."

It takes a long time to learn how to communicate ideas to other people. Computers are also just communication methods, reliant on math, built on flashes of electricity. As a human, who tries hard to communicate in a world of physics, with a body of chemicals and synapses, I appreciate the similarities in the grammars of natural language and computer programming. I'm getting to a place where suddenly, things that were difficult for me aren't as difficult.

I know the same thing will be true for my nine-to-five job, as well. I'm just not there yet.

I'm never going to compare human cognition and whatever is happening with LLMs. I'm never going to say there's no point in me being here, looking for ways to improve processes for other humans, implementing those little things in the background, and enjoying seeing others have an easier time for my efforts. Rather, there's a lot of point in it! It's so pointedly pointful that I feel I have to become exceptional for the sake of all the other humans who would happily be cold and sore and hungry in my place.

My coworkers, both extended and close, are a great asset to one another, to my company, and to the landscape of this industry. I'm happy to be part of this fabric. Electrical impulses, chemical interactions, and all.

Writing in the science fiction genre is all about thinking through your own body and its relationship to the ordinary. In order to describe something extraordinary, you have to know how to describe the mundane. What makes it up? What defines it? What parts of it, when changed very slightly, would make something fantastical happen? How do all the chemicals and synapses in your own body react to those mundanities, and how would they react to the extraordinary?

I know parts of my industry, but I won't get to a point where I can imagine divergent paths into the future until I know it better, more holistically.

One day, it'll be like words flowing out of me; a bunch of derivative observations based on the work my coworkers did before me, to be built up by my coworkers who come after me.

I know the meme is that we "don't dream of labor," but I do! I dream of labor. I dream of the labor of hundreds of hands, coming together to create something and to build up processes and techniques that we can keep iterating on for generations.

I hope more equitable worlds come, for all those coworkers I've met, those I will meet one day, and ones I'll never be fortunate enough to know. For now, I need to become excellent.