I don’t belong in tech

Not belonging? Not at all. When I read that article, I see a kindred spirit who belongs doing either systems programming or maintenance programming. In the right place at the right time, that very mindset is worth a lot of money. I for one have made a career out of fixing awful code and awful systems.

Publicly, we praise companies and programmers that get a lot done very quickly. Do what doesn't scale. Move fast and break things. Those are great ideas for a while. But eventually, following that alone harms a company, and might even kill it. The quest for speed needs a whole set of people that are capable of keeping bad systems running and improve their stability and scalability while they keep going.

For instance, I currently work at Stripe, making a core piece of infrastructure that doesn't scale anywhere near as well as we need, and has been plagued with downtime issues. There's been plenty of attempts to rebuild and replace, which never had any success, but this year, we've had tremendous improvements, which are seen by our users every day. This improvements aren't really about someone getting lucky and rebuilding from scratch again. Instead, we spent time adding observability features, and understanding how the system works in practice: Pain points, causes for errors and all that. Only after we had a good understanding of the major problems we started making architectural changes to improve the system: Build better interfaces across components, then replacing the components that needed the most help. After enough time, Theseus's ship might still have the same name, but it is a far better ship than it ever was. Then other systems will need more help, and I'll move on to work on another fire.

There are companies out there that don't value this kind of skillset, and that's fine: They are either too small to need it, or they will be unable to keep building new things and fail. Instead, look for growing companies that realize that they can't just hire commandos, and need people to focus on lowering risks and maintenance costs.

You don't just belong in tech: You are a key part of tech, you just have to realize what your spot is.

I don't think the median software is used for months. I don't think that's true at all. That really needs some evidence behind it.

I reckon in most companies, software is written and maintained until the whole system it's a part of becomes obsolete. That typically takes years, sometimes decades if the system is really useful.

It's really risky to rewrite software, so it typically isn't done; it's similar with deletion of code. Most people shy away from it because they're making local changes and don't have enough global knowledge to be brave. So the code lives on.

Personally, in my professional career, nothing I've written has yet been retired or end of lifed, and I've been doing it for 15 years. Some things were experimental and never got released; some things were maintenance for a subsystem that got buried away; but no whole feature nor whole product has been discarded other than by gradual overwriting through maintenance.

Pretending omission in order to emphasize something is a core element of classical rhetoric dating back as far as ancient Athens. It is a parlor trick that has been taught to children for two millennia, and an inherently flawed line of argument.

If you punched someone in the face, and then specifically asked her not to pay attention to it, would you be shocked if she failed to carry on as if nothing had happened?

When someone falsely deems you, your family, and your children bigots by mere virtue of the color of their skin and the shape of their genitals, that is not any less radically offensive due to the author's own race and gender. This type of casual discrimination cheapens the experience of racism, engrains the very cultural atrocities it claims to combat, and alienates the very people who's minds we need to change.

To raise racial specters for personal gain and social gratification is extremely troubling, and I will not hesitate to speak out against it.

Also "Sometimes he says wrong things, and then I have to explain why those things are wrong.."

Sounds more like she just lectures him rather than having actual conversations.

'I'm not a white male!'

Seriously? This felt incredibly out of place in the article, it seems like its just pandering for clicks (lets talk about how women, minorities, and 'non-tech' people don't have a place in tech for the millionth time!). Not to mention the quote could have worked similarly with 'asian male' and 'indian male'. Why are you erasing the identities of other overrepresented people in tech?