May 1, 2024
[song: Chamber of Reflection by Mac DeMarco]
I was a born engineer since a young age… and I fully recognize that to be a mindset/identity thing. I had the identity of "I am an engineer" given to me from an early age forward, and this affected the way I grew up. I was always challenged through school to find new ways to improve and optimize things. When met with a challenge I could not surmount through my own wit, I would research and reach out to those more knowledgable than myself, asking questions and asking for help in making things "work better". This way of growing up was very beneficial for me, as it has lead to a lot of success academically as well as in project management or leadership positions. On the flip side of this, my engineering mindset has opened opportunities for depression and anxiety to overwhelm me in novel ways.
In my youth, the "problems" I worked to optimize were simple ones like how to make things work in Minecraft, how to make certain mechanisms out of paper or LEGO, or how to solve certain (basic) programming problems using novel skills I was picking up. "Engineering" was just fun puzzle-solving which gave me gratification, often through a physical medium where my work was measurable and displayable.
In my current age of freshly-22, I am freshly-graduated from my B.S. in Computer Science. While in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at my school, my school does not recognize me as an engineer -- they just needed a place to put all of those CS kids back in the day where it was a budding field! However, I am still very much an engineer by personal identity. This is not a thing, in my opinion, which appears or disappears with professional title, but rather a mindset dedicated to public service through separation of emotions from facts, and solving problems in ethical and effective ways. (It is important to recognize that a core part of engineering is focusing on the math and science rather than something like politics, hence the "separation from emotions" mention. It is equally important to connect this to staying ethical, because if we don't do that, then we can run into issues like eugenics or other acts of public "disservice", to put it lightly). In the corporate world, I am a Software Engineer. I work to optimize complex issues in a field much larger than comprehensible in one lifespan. My accomplishments are physically nonexistant. None of what I "create" professionally can be held, touched, or weighed by someone, other than through some transitory medium like printing it on paper or rendering it on a screen. Value in a plastic toy is inherent to the novelty of the design as well as the usage of material, craftsmanship of production, et cetera. Value in my digital work is completely a mind game, and requires stoking your personal flame of "motivation" with reasoning behind why what you are doing matters.
For me, it is not hard to stoke my flames with talk of why my code matters or why my work holds value. The products I work on help people, and are important to the benefit of greater humanity. Even if my impact is minimal, I see value in my work in the way it touches others in a positive light. I see my professional work as a programmer to be an extension of my work in the rest of my life: I am a follower of Jesus Christ, who lived and died to help save others. In my aim to stay true as one person (叫 Michael) living one life (instead of multiple, such as at work, at home, at church, etc.), I apply the conventions taught by God when considering what work I am doing (in present and in future). Thus, I hold myself strict in never working in the defense or greater military-industrial fields, so I know my work is of lesser ethical dilemma than most God-loving engineers would face.
Enough about myself. As an engineer, I want to make things better. As I grow up, I start realizing that things can already be the best, but they are purposefully stifled from achieving these truths. Take, for instance, ion-hardened glass, something invented in the 60s, which was never sold on a large scale because companies don't want to only sell glassware to customers one time! It makes much more sense, capitalistically, to sell inferior glassware which must be replaced more often. It's why companies like Pyrex or Corelle have slowly made thier products less long-lasting in recent years… when people only buy your product once, and never require maintenance or updates, then you're not going to make as much money as a delicate alternative. No companies will ever bust out onto the scene with amazing shatterproof glasses like the East Germans did, and definitely no existing companies will switch to this morally-superior product to sell, because there is no profit incentive to do so. Why raise the bar when everyone else displays wonderful success with such a low bar of quality? We see the same issues of lowering quality and planned obselecence everywhere in our physical world, and as an engineer this presents a dilemma in my head: I'm going to toil my life away in a solved market, where the optimals have been known for decades and they won't be greenlit by companies because they don't serve the notion of "making the most money possible."
Planned obselesence is the worst in the tech sector. You can't buy a cheap laptop (называется netbook) nowadays without receiving some instant-e-waste shitbook which performs worse at surfing the web than the business laptops of equal price point from 8 years ago. The problems that exist to fix online right now suck, and shouldn't exist in the first place, but we simply messed up and birthed these issues in the first place. We gave birth to the bot and spam problems we have today, and now we sell products to "mitigate" these issues when they will never go away, because we have built an infrastructure which allows them instead of one which works in a more morally-effective manner. We gave birth to the doomscrolling and attention-destroying mechanisms of short-form video, to the Pavlovian self-conditioning of the "notification bell", to the anti-privacy reality we live in under the "people-as-a-product" advertising market we have… and today we folley away trying to turn back from the horrors we've created, pass legislation to limit its damaging reach, et cetera. Truly, I tell you, the damage has already been done. We have lost the battle, because we created the battle within ourselves. The ones with the most money have already won the battle, the moment these issues were birthed.
[song: Out On a Limb by Teena Marie]