Diary of a Bay Area tech worker, Part 2

Wednesday, 9:30am
Head off for work. As you get into your car, you realize the window that was replaced yesterday is way cleaner than the others. You contemplate getting a car wash, but we’re in a drought so you feel too guilty to go through with it.

Wednesday, 10:12am
Traffic was light. Right as you arrive at work, someone frantically pulls out of a spot in the first row of spaces next to the building. Maybe they forgot their laptop? You take their spot and walk into the building.

Wednesday, 10:45am
Two of your PRs got merged, you merge a few others. You write a few hundred lines of code and it compiles and passes regression tests on the first try. You assume something must be wrong. After spending 15 minutes proving to yourself that everything is working correctly, you think to yourself that today is going to be a good day.

Wednesday, 12:22pm
Since you snagged a great parking spot, you decide to eat lunch in the cafeteria. Some of the options you remember gave you explosive diarrhea before, so you opt for the “Indian Fare” station, even though you know it will be disappointing. You find a table and dig in to a bowl of Paneer Makhani. They used tofu instead of paneer. You try some naan and realize it’s leftover pita bread from yesterday’s Greek gyros. You miss home. Even though you know she’s sleeping, you send Mom a picture of the “Paneer” Makhani with pita bread, knowing she’ll laugh.

Wednesday, 3:57pm
An email pops up from HR. Mandatory harassment training. You click the link and there’s a long set of videos with quiz questions you need to pass. You inspect the source to see if there’s some shortcut. As you poke around, an alert appears that tampering has been detected and the incident has been reported to HR. You look for the source of the pop up and find the following comment: “no-op 🤣”. You breathe a sigh of relief. You play all the videos in the background as you work and guess on all the quiz questions.

Wednesday, 5:30pm
Team Zoom call, but you decide to take it while driving home since you rarely have to talk in this meeting. Why do we have this damn meeting anyway?

Wednesday, 5:47pm
A car tries to cut in from the exit only lane. You decide not to let him in, because you’re tired of people cutting in the queue and hope it will teach him a lesson. He lays on the horn as he gets in behind you. You curse under your breath. It’s at this moment you realize the Zoom call is silent. You’re not on mute and the entire team heard.

Wednesday, 7:44pm
A few friends come to your place to hang out. One of them starts talking about how he’s so much more productive since starting microdosing. Despite your reluctance, he leaves behind a pack of gummies for you to try.

Wednesday, 11:28pm
You plan to work from home tomorrow, so you stay up late to play video games.

Thursday, 9:12am
Wake up and walk 10 feet to your desk to begin your work day. You will spend the rest of the day in your pajamas.

Thursday, 11:28am
You’re curious about the gummies. Can it really make me more productive? Creative? Since you’re working from home, you decide to try it. You eat one gummy. Nothing happens.

Thursday, 11:35am
Still nothing happening. It’s getting close to lunch time so you’re hungry. You eat the rest of the packet of gummies.

Thursday, ??:??
The apartment is spinning. You feel as if gravity has increased twofold and your cheeks feel heavy. You worry that they might droop to the floor and remain that way permanently.

Thursday, ??:??
You want to get unhigh so you somehow make your way to the coffee maker and start making a pot. You immediately forget about the coffee.

Thursday, ??:??
You decide it would be good to take a cold shower. You dizzily walk to the bathroom and get in the shower. You close the shower curtain. After some unknown amount of time passes, you start to fear that there is pure nothingness on the other side of the shower curtain. You gather the courage to open the shower curtain and find your bathroom, just as you left it.

Thursday, ??:??
You crawl into bed and enter a deep sleep.

Thursday, 8:12pm
You wake up and wonder why your apartment smells like coffee, look at the clock, then drift off back to sleep.

Friday, 6:55am
You wake up early and hungrier than you’ve ever felt. You eat 3 bowls of cereal.

Friday, 7:08am
You look at your phone and see missed calls and texts from your boss wondering why you missed your Thursday meetings. Embarrassed, you reply explaining that you got a severe case of food poisoning and spent the afternoon between the bathroom and the bed. You don’t feel too guilty because it’s not actually far from the truth. He replies and tells you to just work from home today.

Friday, 8:22am
You missed calls from Mom last night so you call her back to reassure her that you’re still alive. She often worries that you might some day be caught up in a mass shooting. Relieved, she recounts some gossip about your cousin. You feel lucky that you don’t have any aunties in the US who could find about what really happened to you last night and gossip to the family.

Friday, 9am
You realize you are scheduled to interview a candidate at 9 and you haven’t prepared anything. His resume says he works at Amazon. Quickly, you check Leetcode and find a question categorized as Hard.

Friday, 9:05am
You start the Zoom call with the candidate 5 minutes late. Apologizing for the delay, you paste the question into Coderpad and read him the problem. Even over Zoom, you can see he is visibly sweating. While you read through the discussion posts, he comes up with a sensible naive approach but doesn’t see how to make it optimal. He asks you for a hint, but you make up some vague statement since you still don’t understand the problem yourself.

Friday, 9:47am
Leaning no hire. You realize how tough interviewing is so you spend the rest of the morning practicing Leetcode. It’s been a while so you start off with some easy questions.

Friday, 12:20pm
You realize you’re so out of practice, you can’t solve easy problems without failing on corner cases. Thankfully they didn’t ask LC when you were first hired here. But you worry that you might be stuck here forever.

Friday, 1:12pm
You open Blind and see a post from someone at Amazon who says they just had a terrible interview experience at your company. Before opening it, you just know it’s the guy you just interviewed. You open it, and your suspicion is confirmed. You become suddenly afraid of what karma has in store for you.

Friday, 1:18pm
Make prestige and meme posts to make yourself feel better.

Part 3: https://us.teamblind.com/s/bzt6U3QP

#swe #tech #life

Diary of a Bay Area tech worker, Part 3 (End) Blind