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  "canonicalUrl": "https://www.jacky.wtf//essays/2024/regrets-with-tech",
  "path": "/essays/2024/regrets-with-tech",
  "publishedAt": "2024-06-29T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:e2ctbutx6kya6si4if5ngjmm/site.standard.publication/3mniussyp2d2g",
  "tags": "essay",
  "textContent": "<figure>\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-betamax.png\" \n         alt=\"A Betmax inflatable from the movie 'Big Hero 6' having one of its hands hugged by me.\" />\n    <figcaption>\n        How else to start off a post about regret and tech with a human hugging an anthropomorphic inflatable from\n        a industry movie that's based on a hybrid of San Francisco and Tokyo?\n    </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\nLevel setting\n\nI didn't imagine that I would have _a want_ to exit \"tech\". I used to know someone who's more of a technophobe that they'd\ncare to admit and with good reason, in this landscape. At times, it felt a bit over-the-top when they actively clumped \nanyone working in the more \"branded\" roles as equal collaborators to CEOs and board members, the direct enforcers of \nharm in the industry. If your good friends are all in it and are \"retire-at-40\" wealthy from it, as it was for them, \nI could see why some mixture of resentment and fear would grow. It's misplaced of a target, of course, but the \ndevelopment makes sense either way. The software engineering industry is quite complex in terms of how it handles \nhiring, pay and everything dealing with human management. Expanding this for _all workers in tech_ that hold positions \nof lower management and below, it's clear how that explicitly hierarchical systems can rarely _work_ in favor of \npeople at the bottom and operate to optimize profit and _perceived_ company health over everything else. \nI use \"_perceived_\" because companies can and have cumulatively laid off thousands of workers while parading \nin the tech press about [new products][28], [profits swelling][29] and [more ventures going forward][30] (where did that money \ncome from if a quarter ago things were dire?) We're told, those who are \"lucky\" to remain, that you are the \n_few chosen_ to power forward. However, this internal marketing line is beginning to wear and folks have begun \nlooking for other ways to define what it does mean to be a worker and finding direct means of securing \nstability at work.\n\nThis approach works when you're _at work_. Or have a place _of work_ to be at. Syndicalism is a fancy word to say \"ayo you work\nand produce value? hmm you don't own your output? hold it _back_ then!\" &mdash; wobbly wobbly in the house. A \nsemi-academic way to define it, thanks to Wikipedia, would be an approach adapted from the French to get workers \ntogether and push their objectives by withholding the one thing CEOs, boards and vice presidents have resigned\nthemselves from engaging in: doing the work themselves _at the pay_ of the workers below them. This concept is \nsomething I had to introduce to myself, through reading, talking to workers and interrogating what it is that we were building. \nAmerican education outlets aggressively refrain from any sort of direct literature that points to forms of direct action &mdash;\nthe closest I can think of was the Montgomery Bus boycott but even the exclusion of how community activism _kept_\npeople afloat would have been too inspirational for the youth to understand the State is the source of lack.\nBut before I get deeper into this, I need to explain my alignment in terms of activism and community engagement.\n\nCue the Sepia Filter of ... 2012?\n\nA decade ago, I involved myself as a volunteer with the [New York Justice League][1]. I had no concrete ideas of what it'd \ninvolve me in. I was _also_ using Ubuntu for the first time in my life. It grew from \"oh ha ha, I got Firefox working\"\nto the _legitimate_ idea of being able to work on something that you also used (and relied on). This was easy for me to grasp \nas a kid whose family couldn't afford a license from Microsoft for \"the permission\" to use the computer they paid \nfor already. This was even worse in the case of [Cupertino-designed, forcibly-in-China built][2] machines. These undertones \nare thinly ignored when you see a lot of anecdotes of peoples' reflection into the industry. The first machine my \nfamily got was a HP Compaq machine (with the cowprint and everything) running Windows 98 - around 2004. I managed to \nfigure out how to update it at the library and asked for blank CDs there. Fast forward back to the time \nwith NYJL, I ended up saving up from a contract job enough to get a Dell PC, ones I've read online that were \nserviceable since the ability to easily repair extended the lifespan of the device (and reduced the perceived \nswitching cost). There's some personal stuff that I'm refraining from getting into because it still has a\nlingering impact on my life but a calamity of sorts kept me inside. Being inside kept me on the computer &mdash; a lot.\nI worked on random projects, namely [a neural net project][9] and a [speech recognition training tool][10] using [PocketSphinx][31]\nfor Ubuntu. The latter project got pretty far and was usable, for a first-time C++ programmer. It wasn't easy and it\ndefinitely influenced how I looked at code for those first years. I didn't have the formal instruction others \nwere getting about networking and the like &mdash; I met folks online like [Paul][11] who put me onto the concepts of [MOTU][32] and \nhow packaging as a concept work for open source software, extremely different from the box-CD era of the such.\n\nThis allowed me to eventually apply and find a job at Shutterstock, my first \"serious\" tech job. \nI met a _lot_ of people, experienced the \"wow, you're not even 25!\" phases of being the space and got a chance to \nreally understand why people didn't like waterfall development. \n\nI grew more in touch with other Black people in the tech space - folks who had more formal training and \ndevelopment. A few people that remain embedded in my mind are [Kyle][3] and [Mary][4]. Kyle, I met through his \nproject, [Black Techies][5] and that enabled me to have way more fun with the things I was only beginning to play with.\nI learned and become obsessed with digital security thanks to a good friend, [Matt][6] who's both taught me and many\nothers what does it mean to be safe under government surveillance and from other malicious actors with his work at\n[CryptoHarlem][7] - a well known hub [in the heart of Harlem][8] consistently putting people of color onto game.\n\n<figure>\n    <video controls>\n        <source src=\"/files/videos/demo-of-mulkar.webm\">\n    </video>\n    <figcaption>\n        A decade ago, using the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_Motion\">LeapMotion</a>, \n        I tied together some info from Wikipedia to make a \"hands-free\" experience.\n    </figcaption>\n</figure>\n<figure>\n    <img src=\"/images/regrets-with-tech-tumblr.png\" alt=\"A Tumblr engineer and two Black folks sitting by a table\n    talking about code.\">\n    <figcaption>This wasn't staged but boy did I try not to look at the photographer (I think it was Kyle).</figcaption>\n</figure>\n\nThen came [the police murder][12]. The knowledge of the violence of New York City's local military is known to folks\nwho live under its constant surveillance. My neighborhood in Brooklyn and the others I frequent in East New York, Canarsie and\nFlatbush all know that if police are around, to act as invisible and \"cool\" as possible, as to not agitate the people\nwith the guns. Sadly, this is _never_ enough to stop the centuries-old American tradition of lynching (in all of the forms it\ntook). A protest took over New York City, from Harlem, across the Brooklyn Bridge to the edges of Brooklyn, into\nneighborhoods folks from out of town where suggested to not be out in at night. This was in protest of the grand jury's \ninability to indict the cowardice of Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer who killed Eric Garner with his \nown hands. We walked, marched and yelled for hours and for miles. We were in Times Square, clogging up stores, \non the bridge stopping traffic. All to have people understand that an injury to one is a blow to everyone.\n\n<figure>\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-protest.png\" alt=\"\" />\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-protest2.png\" alt=\"\" />\n    <figcaption>Fun fact: that officer to the far right ended up following up all the way to Brooklyn. Dude was working\n    to get his overtime.</figcaption>\n</figure>\n\nI was held by police in Brooklyn for \"obstructing traffic\", willing to be taken back to One Police Plaza \nand released thanks to a ACLU advocate. Unfortunately, I didn't report back in time for work as I was \nheld longer (I was old enough for them to not have to call my parents and I didn't take off time from work). \nIt didn't help that I also found it difficult at work to be taken more seriously on project proposals - advocacy \nof self wasn't something I had at 20. Wrangling that and hyper-local events made it extremely difficult for me to keep \nthings going. I was getting really sad given how much more this job helped out at home (and my mom's new \nconfidence in me being able to _do something_ with my life). Missing three days of work was the final\nnail to have my employment at Shutterstock terminated. It didn't matter to my manager's manager what was going on \njust below in the streets. And that began my life in the software industry - figuring how to balance being true to \nmyself, not having any of the certificates or clearances needed (at the time) to get through a door and \nwanting to use something I enjoyed a lot to push for advocacy. \n\n<figure>\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-sstk.png\" alt=\"\" />\n    <figcaption>\n        My termination notice from Shutterstock. This is what I opened my e-mail to after being released and\n        getting home. Should I have used PTO?\n    </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\nLeaping into the Future\nThe \"thing\" people might recognize my name (if they do) is the situation that happened with Google Photos and [their\nworld-class image recognition system labelling a friend of mine as a gorilla][13]. I have many issues with how this went\ndown; from the number of people who kept assuming we were a couple, assuming that we _both_ were tagged or that it was\njust one photo. I don't know what happened with it, but when I was in California, some film crew working for Google\nhad me doing a bit of a conversation about it. Either way, people immediately became _less_ concerned on my\ntechnical ability and _more_ concerned on how this made me feel. I can't say I was mad at being flown out to Austin\nfor the first time [to attend a conference on the matter][33]. I had a lot of firsts, because of tech. My mother suggested \nI sue the multinational; said multinational interviewed me (and rejected me after the first screen). \n\n<figure>\n    <video autoplay loop poster=\"/images/regret-with-tech-clef.jpg\">\n        <source src=\"/files/videos/welcome-to-clef.mp4\" type=\"video/mp4\" />\n    </video>\n    <figcaption>\n        Getting surprised at the airport was amazing and unexpected.\n    </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\nOne fledging startup in California did [take a chance on me][34] and that continued the canonical time of my career in \ntech and my time in advocacy and community work.\n\n<figure>\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-sxsw.png\" alt=\"\" />\n    <figcaption>\n        Some guy in the answer at this moment was asking a semi-stupid (thinly racist) question and I \n        am routinely thankful that I had people on the panel who were more coy than me to answer those questions.\n        I would have hurt his feelings (outside of correcting them).\n    </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\nI'll zoom through the stuff I spent time with in the Bay, from initial interactions with [Peoples' Breakfast][15] in its early\nyears, [door knocking for Catt Brooks][14], joining and participating with the civic hacktivist group [OpenOakland][16],\nhelping random vendors at the Ashby flea market support mobile payments to reduce the on-hand cash handling as they\nserved food and other things that helped me embed myself into the community I saw a future in. \n\n<figure>\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-town.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n    <figcaption>This was one of the first serious talks with folks about tech advocacy and education I had!</figcaption>\n</figure>\n\nI _can't_ go without mentioning the project [Amèlie][35], [Catt][36] and I worked on being [GoodForPoC][37], an attempt to bring\nvisibility to a problem that tech is staunchly working to not correct: its obsession with \nimperialistic white supremacist patriarchy within the industry. We didn't use that phrase but it clicks now, \nafter [some study of bell hooks][38].\n\n<figure>\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-g4poc.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-g4poc2.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n</figure>\n\nI found ways, thanks to locals, how to let work support community advocacy, like taking days to \nvolunteer with the Oakland Unified School District for read-ins for Black History Month to expose kids to \nbooks I was fortunate to have in my classrooms and volunteering with folks to serve as a \njudge for coding competitions with the youth and give them a persistent line of mentorship that they could \nreach out to as they continued playing with software on the side, as I had when I was growing up.\n\n<figure>\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-bgc.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-school.png\" alt=\"\" />\n    <figcaption>I still have that book, Trickers, with me! I brought it from home to share with them.</figcaption>\n</figure>\n\nThere's a lot of _other_ things I was indirectly involved with. Things like [Interact][43] led me to meet more folks in the\nindustry and build different relationships, not even based on identity but around what our passions were aligned with.\nIt didn't have to identical or even symmetrical and folks were down for each other.\n\n<figure>\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-tahoe.png\" alt=\"\" />\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-tahoe2.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-tahoe3.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n    <figcaption>Pictured: a few venture capitalists, founders, executives, artists and senior engineers! And Jacky. By now, you've\n    noticed that I love me a good flat top, ha.</figcaption>\n</figure>\n\nI have to make one thing clear too: _none_ of this would have been possible without the people who took the time to hear me\nout, find common ground and look towards what can happen next. I'm consistently appreciative and a defender of people\nworking in community towards common goals: only from working from below can concrete change occur and I believe that\nI've worked and touched things that've contributed to the such.\n\nThe Bits and Bytes of Organizing\nBy the time I got to Glitch, the idea of organizing existed solely in the streets to me. It involved knocking on doors,\ndoing interviews with active listening, reporting back to folks about where things are headed, agitating folks around\nshared values and pushing folks towards action. I'm extremely happy to have spent time with them and CWA to help form a\nunion at Glitch, despite the uphill fucking battle it took.\n\n<figure>\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-glitch.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n    <figcaption>\n        If there's one thing about me: my t-shirts will not be a billboard for capitalism. <br />\n        Apple zealots: the phone was a loan!\n    </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\nAt this point, my stances on politics weren't hidden; I wasn't a fan of\ncapitalism and the tech industry being the brainchild of such an economic beast meant I either had to swallow my\nthoughts or yell them loud enough to push away those who were more ardent supporters of it. Today, this has led to a\ndramatic reconfiguration of the community of folks I have around me in tech. It used to be with folks you'd recognize,\nsome at Microsoft, from Twitter and many other places. When Dorsey became more open with his alignment with passive\nwhite supremacy - a now-common underbelly of most tech executives from [Sam Altman][18] to [Chris Best testing the bounds][17],\nI held to the same roots I came to nurture when I developed myself into this space: an anti-capitalist,\nanti-white-supremacist, anti-anything-that-reduces-the-movement-to-end-oppression (so anti-supremacism). I wasn't\nexpecting people to get it &mdash; as you can see now, my path into the space was marked with many actions that \nmade clear what I was about and who I was for. I admire folks I've come to know like [Idalin][19] who, in my eye, remains some of\nthe few in the industry who's _authentically connected to the struggle_ off-rip and refuses to compromise that for access to\nwhiteness (and in turn, alignment with white supremacy in a double-speak nature) in this industry. She's taken a more\npractical approach than I, which had inspired me to do more studying and research.\n\nLearning about the activist history of Oakland, where I used to live in the Lower Bottoms, how the West Oakland BART\nstation was created after [razing down dozens of homes in the area][39] that came from the migration period was a\nhumbling and stark experience. That led to a yo-yo when I went back to Brooklyn to visit family to learn about the\nhistory of the S.L.A.V.E theatres out there. Being able to tie the geographical plights inflicted by industry on\npeople across 2,700 miles was the final pin in my mind: people need to work together to get what they need and people have to be\naligned on objectives lest infighting and corruption destroy it all.\n\nI moved more towards labor organizing in research - only scraping the surface as I still had to focus on balancing work\nand staying engaged with community. Huey Newton made the point that political education is vital but education without\npractice is meaningless, in [\"Revolutionary Suicide\"][40]. I tie this with James Baldwin's notice of the professional managerial \nclass' inability to use what resources and access they have to work to help people, in [\"The Fire Next Time\"][41],\nand instead of holding rent parties, they throw dinner parties (or in its modern form, cruises or voyeuristic \ntrips to tourism-riddled territories). I spent more time trying to figure out how to help people reconfigure spaces in\ncompanies to build power. At Lyft, that was via employee resource group efforts. It was great at building\ncomrades but horrible at building power since it was purely at the whim of executives.\n\n<figure>\n    <img src=\"/images/regret-with-tech-lyft.jpg\" alt=\"\" />\n    <figcaption>\n       This mural got tons of traction! \n    </figcaption>\n</figure>\n\nToday-ish\n\nBy this point, there's less for me to say that you wouldn't know if you've been following my Mastodon account. In short,\nafter Glitch and some other stops (like Nava which honed an interest and discovery of a civic technologist as a viable career\npath), ended up at Code for America and that ended up ... [the way it did][20] with [a historic win][21]. I've been\nbringing myself to more spaces around labor to develop more praxis from all of the theory we've been conjuring\nup. But what does this mean in terms of a career in technology?\n\nI have no clue. You see, the biggest names in the industry are aggressively focusing on making it very difficult to\neither introduce or approach anything that would promote an open society. Apple's inability to support third-party app\nstores without legal pressure demonstrates what we see in industry and in history. The app store itself wasn't in the\nroadmap for Jobs' vision of the iPhone &mdash; and he initially thought it was a bad idea until people - internally and\nexternally - had to pressure him to yield. That effort could have been spent on making so much more, if it wasn't run \nby someone like Jobs or in a non-capital obsessed way (Jobs was a salesman at the end of the day; that's a core \ncomponent of what a CEO does), we could have seen a world where, perhaps, the iPhone wouldn't have been so expensive \n_and_ had support for progressive web applications out of the box. You can learn more about this \nin [Brian Merchant][22]'s [The One Device][23].\n\nI'm looking for work (which is part of the reason why I'm giving my life story above to give folks a clearer image about\nme) and [raising money][42] to stay housed as I do that. I probably wouldn't be in this situation if I didn't donate thousands\nto the organizations I worked with over the years, or didn't have debt that restricts my ability to borrow and get back\non my feet. There's very little I can do about that now and I rarely regret that. My deeper regrets come from a sense of\nfeeling of not having done enough in the time I've spent. I could have fought harder for the discrimination case I\nhad on two former Facebook workers at Lyft (which was textbook but Lyft does not like talking about\nrace). If anything, each of these moments gave me more pointed stances on the concept of work and has taught me to \nexpect nearly nothing from executives since their direct reports and _their_ managers have no focus \non well-being of workers (outside of trying to prevent them from quitting and even _that_ is extremely thin). The goal\nis to make money and nothing else. Fuck the [planet][24], [women][26], [children][25] &mdash; get more of it in [the bombs][27]. \nAnd that's just focusing on multinational companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon; of which most of the tech leaders\nobsessively form their organization (or fiefdom) around.\n\nI don't know how much longer I can comfortably call myself a \"technologist\" when this is _what_ being a technologist is\ntoday. And to play on an idea of separation of the \"art from the artwork\" while actively defending their organizations\n(failing that, their outputs and indirectly their contributions) works to be a free agent of marketing for them. It's\nsimilar to a private company opening up a non-profit to launder the _notion_ of doing good to build a moat of social\ncapital. How does one comfortably reconcile that?\n\nWith money. Enough of it to numb your heart and soul. The starting price is around $175,000 USD currently, it seems; around\n$250,000 USD if you're an executive. But money will never be _enough_. We see how it turns people to demand more and more\n(and more). It converts them into subversions of their stances (if they had any) and makes clear the role of celebrities\n(even in our industry). Ideally, I'll land something that's enough to get me back on my feet. That's all\nI need right now. Because the rest of my energy is going to be spent working on the same things that brought me in. So I\ndon't think I have regret for being a software engineer. But I do regret not working enough to pull more folks along in \na productive way. But I can fix that now. 🤭\n\n[1]: https://www.gatheringforjustice.org/justiceleaguenyc/\n[2]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/jackyalcine\n[3]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylewanamaker\n[4]: https://www.instagram.com/iammarypryor/\n[5]: https://www.blackenterprise.com/black-techies-mlk-dream-code-hackathon/\n[6]: https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/people/matt-mitchell/\n[7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoHarlem\n[8]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/59kq75/crypto-harlem-video-surveillance-of-black-community\n[9]: https://launchpad.net/wintermute\n[10]: https://launchpad.net/speechcontrol\n[11]: https://pault.ag/\n[12]: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/eric-garner-dies-nypd-chokehold\n[13]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/google-dev-apologizes-after-photos-app-tags-black-people-as-gorillas/\n[14]: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/meet-cat-brooks-the-anti-police-brutality-activist-running-for-oakland-mayor\n[15]: https://www.peoplesprograms.com/pbo\n[16]: https://openoakland.org/\n[17]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-extremism-nazi-white-supremacy-newsletters/676156/\n[18]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny\n[19]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/idalinbobe\n[20]: https://cfaworkersunited.com/stories/2023/08/31/code-for-america-lays-off-35-colleagues\n[21]: https://cfaworkersunited.com/stories/2023/10/30/first-union-contract-ratified-at-code-for-america\n[22]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Merchant\n[23]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-one-device-the-secret-history-of-the-iphone-brian-merchant/114264\n[24]: https://earth.org/the-green-dilemma-can-ai-fulfil-its-potential-without-harming-the-environment/\n[25]: https://www.wired.com/story/generative-ai-images-child-sexual-abuse/\n[26]: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000387483\n[27]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01029-0\n[28]: https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-io-2024-100-announcements/\n[29]: https://www.geekwire.com/2024/microsoft-results-beat-expectations-as-quarterly-profits-rise-20-to-nearly-22b/\n[30]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/amazon-ces-2024-announcements\n[31]: https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx\n[32]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU\n[33]: https://schedule.sxsw.com/2016/events/event_PP53497\n[34]: https://medium.com/@jackyalcine/new-job-who-dis-leaving-home-for-a-new-one-50c2c6255cef\n[35]: https://www.amelie.is/\n[36]: https://cattsmall.com/\n[37]: https://github.com/GoodForPoC/GoodForPoC\n[38]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUpY8PZlgV8\n[39]: https://localwiki.org/oakland/Lower_Bottoms\n[40]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Suicide\n[41]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fire_Next_Time\n[42]: https://www.gofundme.com/f/stay-housed-while-i-look-for-work\n[43]: https://joininteract.com/",
  "title": "Do I Regret Focusing on 'Just Being' A Software Engineer?"
}