Softcore: How Nobody Knows What They're Doing In Tech
Part 1
Hello. Writer and apprentice horse-whisperer’s assistant, Joe Nada, here. Following a recent hypnotherapy session conducted by a qualified member of the Irish Traveller community, I have discovered that, in a previous life, I was once a software engineer!
This came as a shock, I tell you. Not least because, for religious reasons (Techno-Jainism—we’re new; you can find our holy scripture/user-manual on the dark [DARK] web and in some veterinary clinics), I have sworn a blood oath never to use computers for the solving of problems (or “bugs” as we call them—all life is sacred, even digital life that isn’t even alive or real). Instead, we believe the almighty CPU must be wielded only in the pursuit of knowledge and/or very high-quality animal pornography (but it’s not a sexual thing. OK, it’s not only a sexual thing).
If my horse-whisperer’s assistant training has taught me anything (other than to distrust horses-whisperers and, perhaps surprisingly, horses), it’s that understanding one’s past lives is a critical step in what our spiritual leader/majority shareholder, Brother-Father Buff Jezos, calls “Becoming” (not to be confused with “Bee-coming”, which is a different but equally important tenet according to Buff’s introductory pamphlet/manifesto, ‘If It Breathes, We Can Fuck It: The New New Testament’).
Being one who, by court order, is obliged to become something other than what I currently am (my lawyer advises me not to be too specific here), I have decided to chronicle a typical day in the life of my past-self in the combined hopes of:
proving to my parole officer that I am, in fact, safe to release back into the community, having done the necessary “shadow-work” that he and people like him unquestioningly accept as concrete evidence of emotional growth; and
procuring a new source of income from the HackerNews & /r/programming crowd (if that’s you, please subscribe and pre-order my upcoming 72-week HTML/CSS/MS Paint Coursera bootcamp); or
Ridding myself of these terrible nightmares and flashbacks.
From what I’ve been able to piece together in my sessions with “Dr” Darren O’Doyle, I spent roughly sixteen years at the coalface, as it were, working on just about every kind of product, service and tech stack. The poor sod (that is to say that previous iteration of my own soul or spirit or consciousness—whichever hand-wavy meta-bollocks best serves your misguided worldview) seemed to care deeply about his craft, even though his industry showed little to no regard for his efforts. While others profited from his (relatively easy) hard work, he and all those like him were essentially anonymous in their own time—the fruits of their labour plucked from the vine without so much as a thank you (modulo the eye-watering salaries, excellent work-life balance, and benefits packages), before ultimately turning the weapon on himself.
As for me, if the AI-generated web design course bombs, or my parole officer finds out about my burner phone, I’ve always got the horse-whisperer’s assistant gig to fall back on. Rich cunts will always own horses, and they will always need the services of a qualified charlatan to pretend to speak to their pets-cum-vehicles-cum-cummers (if horses could talk!).
And so I present to you the factually accurate adventures from a random day in the random life of the nameless, soul-less husk of a being that is the professional programmer. Enjoy (or if you’re here from Reddit, don’t enjoy…anything…ever).
— Rvd. “Professor” Joe Nada H.W.A, June 2025 (or Zoo-6 BC [Buffian Calendar]).
Let There Be Light (Duties)
The date is several billion years ago1. The time is exactly 11:01 AM. A pool of primordial soup2 froths and claps as the core of the nascent Earth accretes more and more interplanetary dust. Surely life cannot exist in these conditions? Oxygen levels are so low you’d be forgiven for thinking the solar system formed within the punctured lungs of a chronic vape enthusiast. Boiling rock flows to fill every nook and cranny and cock and fanny, melting any jumped-up gob of proto-slime that dares coalesce out of the maelstrom.
And yet, from out of nowhere, a creature forms. The first thing ever to be now is. This creature—a few cells glued together with nothing more than tenacity and whatever cells are made of—has defied the cosmic odds. And so it begins.
It is now 500 million years later. The volcanic inferno has chilled the fuck out3. Oxygen is now freely available for breathing purposes4. There’s water somehow. And in that water—a little place we now call the Pacific Ocean5—there swims a new form of life. One that stalks the newly formed coastline.
An electrical storm has been bombarding what will eventually become San Francisco with mega lightning6. The local fauna has fled in search of cover, leaving an eerie silence that, were they currently extant, people who “believe” in the supernatural might describe as “a bit spooky”.
Fast-forward however long it takes to get to today7. Zoom in on the Bay Area. Enhance. What is that? It looks like a human only…different. Something wicked/dehydrated this way comes/dribbles. It is naked, but lacks the cognitive ability required to experience shame. It stops to catch its breath8. It twitches. A stray cat sniffs it and instantly regrets her decision.
Then suddenly, with no real conviction or passion, the creature drags itself to its feet. Stretch. Yawn. Pick curiously at what appears at first glance to be an umbilical cord but is actually just a mouse cable9.
The beast stumbles around aimlessly for a while until, by way of habit and sheer luck, it rocks up at its favourite type of hot beverage establishment: the boutique coffee emporium10, GHC11—a place so exclusive and up-market it doesn’t even have a Facebook page12.
The walls of GHC are lined with that paper that looks like bookcases, full of volumes so first-edition they have neither titles nor authors. Entry to the members-only café/pseudo-library is strictly controlled. Patrons who are unable to produce their access card13 will be escorted off the premises by the privately operated security detail14.
Today’s house blend is a cheeky little mix of Huehuetenango (Guatemala) and whatever shit the barista could find on sale at the local cash and carry (Beanz by Dre). Our proto-apeman (who, from this point on, shall be referred to as You) fumbles its/your way through the official GHC app’s appalling UX and finds their(?)15 membership card just in time to avoid the security guard’s wrath16.
You trundle inside, wiping the crust and the drool from your face. You’ve forgotten to wear your glasses again, but not to worry—yesterday’s yesterday’s17 contact lenses are still firmly in place, if not a little creamy by this piont18. The barista recognises you from every morning and evening and weekend for the past fourteen months and asks if you’d like your usual order. Having not yet acquired the capabilities necessary to form meaningful sentences, you howl and bark until she stops asking for clarification and just makes the fucking drink already.
Writing software for a living requires energy levels far in excess of what’s available to the kind of person typically drawn to the industry.
Physically, the job is about as undemanding as one could imagine19. Long periods of sitting in a chair, interspersed with brief episodes of pacing, faux-stretching, and the occasional fist-bump with your pair-programming buddy as you finally settle on what to name the file that contains the implementation of the screen that displays a user’s profile20.
But mentally21…well, imagine playing one long game of chess all day22, every day for years on end. Only instead of pawns, there are Design Patterns, and instead of a king, you inherit this from the last guy:
Programming for a living is a bit like that. End of metaphor23.
Most24 developers rely on some sort of substance (ab)use to get them out of bed and into The Zone25. Hard drugs are way too cool for your average code monkey, though. Their crippling fear of confrontation combined with the weird allergies that afflict many a true nerd mean the only white26 powder you’re likely to see in the office is the perpetual blizzard of dandruff drifting off of Eugene’s27 head. Caffeine, taurine, margarine and sugar—those are the drugs of choice for the chronically office-bound. Coffee or Redbull. Black gold or red…gold. As such, there are only two certainties in the life of a software developer:
Occasionally, you will encounter that rare beast who doesn’t “do” coffee. They’ll give you a long speech about some paper/HackerNews headline they “read” recently that claims to show a direct link between caffeine consumption and the onset of heart disease or diabetes or erectile disfunction (newsflash: it’s probably not the coffee, friendo), and how it ruins your skin, and makes you smell funny. And then they’ll finish their lunch of breakfast cereal and creatine before heading out to their car for a cigarette and a cry.
And so you gulp down the half-gallon of rocket fuel for which you just forked28 over more money than it would have cost to import the beans yourself29. The effect is almost immediate. The stimulating power of Colombia’s finest30 surges down your veins. You flex and find your biceps ballooning like a shit Popeye cosplayer31. Ah, that’s better, you think. Words form now, and there it is: language. By jove, it’s alive!
You sit back down for a quick breather. And then it happens. The sweats, the stabbing pains, the racing pulse. I’m afraid your time has come, brother. Time to drop the kids at the pool. To send your parcel to Taiwan. To cop a squat and drop a log, baby!
Forty-five minutes and two full rolls of luxury GHC branded TP later, your evolution from single-celled amoeba to fully32 developed hominid is complete. You make for the parking lot, remember you don’t drive and call an Uber, remember Uber is an evil corporate slave-master and anyway this is a Lyft town, stop en-route for another triple espresso and a quick dump, and finally head for work.
Depending on when you read this.
Cream of Asparagus.
I’m neither a volcanologist nor a person who has so much free time on their hands as to be able to research and fact check every last phrase, alright? Some of us have lives to live/waste doing other things.
This remains true until the invention of the Taxman. Mother nature makes mistakes too, people. She’s only human.
I did study Oceanography in university. Or, you know, I sort of snuck into the library after dark so I could jerk off to pictures of dolphins (I’m not into beastiality or anything illegal, I just like smooth things. Stop kink shaming me, OK).
Like regular lightning, only more mega.
~4 billion years. Keep up!
For twelve minutes.
PS2, please. You can shove your USBs up your rear access port, thank you very much.
Or Starbucks once they lower their prices by so much it drives the boutique place out of business. And good riddance, I say. Freeloading parasites—coming around here, gentrifying our neighbourhoods like civilised people. These are our drug-addled, rat-infested streets. Get your own hell-hole!
Grand Hipster Central or Glasgow Haskell Compiler; functionally equivalent.
Although they can be found on Insta, Snap, Twitter/X and Gimpr¹.
¹ Gimpr is a micro-vlogging platform for BDSM practitioners and some of the more naive fans of E.L James’ “novels”.
Monthly subscription: $49. Save 2% with their annual Cheapskate Plus plan.
A disgraced (shark steroids) Bulgarian powerlifting champion called Yordanka.
Probably should have started with the whole second-person conceit out of the gate to be honest. Oh well, we are where we are. If we cared about the details, we would have chosen a different career¹.
¹ P.S. if you’re reading this and you’re not actually a programmer, a) why? But b) thanks for your service. The world probably needs you a lot more than it needs us (unless you’re one of the following: a politician, a blogger, a vlogger, a pimp, a horse-whisperer, or a wife/husband to any of the aforementioned “people”).
Yordanka has no time for lollygaggers, and she will kick your scrawny butt to the curb, Mister (or Ma’am, possibly—although extremely unlikely given the target audience).
Not a typo.
Typo.
Or as undemanding as one could imagine prompting an LLM to summarise the imagining of for…one.
UserProfileScreen it is!
Or, to be clearer, intellectually—although many software professionals are also quite mental.
Core hours: 11-3pm.
Also, the board is made of lego, and there are no queens.
All.
The Zone™ is a magical realm that coders claim to be able to access when conditions are just right¹. To the untrained/functioning eye, it may look like they’re just quietly doing their job. But make no mistake, they have entered the zone, and woe betide the fool/manager who interrupts their special time away from reality.
™ The Zone is a registered trademark of Pepsi Co.
¹ Everybody else shut up/left for the day, and the intern has refilled the coffee pot (before also leaving for the day).
Sickly, yellowy-white.
There’s always a Eugene, and he’s always flaky.
Or spooned with it being a liquid and all.
The subscription only gets you in the door, I’m afraid. Once inside, you’re as much a slave to the free-market as the rest of us (or them—I stopped drinking everything but coconut water when I found out the Mexican cartels were trafficking underage prostitutes across the border disguised as massive coffee bean shaped piñatas. Thank God for Truth Social).
OK, second finest. Chill out, Pablo.
Not to imply there are non-shit Popeye cosplayers. Or just non-shit cosplayers in general. Get a job, hippy.
Partially fully.
