On inhabiting a giant corporation

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15th July 2019 • Miscellaneous notes on working in tech in eC21st London. • Confidence: 90% • Topic importance: 4 / 10 You find yourself inside a machine the size of a city. It is slow, powerful, theoretically immortal, and contains thousands of cogs and hard-wired operators and inexplicably sealed bulkheads. It’s warm and well-watered. You could die in here. Which is to say that I worked a pleasant job at a multinational insurance corporation for 3 years. It wasn’t dreary, possibly because I was in the “data science” bit, the bit allowed to do new things without strangulating oversight and backwards-compatibility. They’re good jobs, as jobs go. Extremely flexible hours, challenging nonroutine tasks, unlimited remote work, very good pay per hour, massive amounts of autonomy (relative to managed manual work), friendly smart colleagues. And what Zed Shaw says about programming in nontech companies was true here - Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a

You find yourself inside a machine the size of a city. It is slow, powerful, theoretically immortal , and contains thousands of cogs and hard-wired operators and inexplicably sealed bulkheads. It’s warm and well-watered. You could die in here. Which is to say that I worked a pleasant job at a multinational insurance corporation for 3 years. It wasn’t dreary, possibly because I was in the “data science” bit, the bit allowed to do new things without strangulating oversight and backwards-compatibility. They’re good jobs, as jobs go. Extremely flexible hours, challenging nonroutine tasks, unlimite

On inhabiting a giant corporation

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