I created “pajamaboin” as a shitpost account on twitter in September 2019 as an attempt to isolate my work-specific identity where I mocked right wingers and posted communist talking points on my works internal network, with my non-work identity, where I did all of the same but also posted cumtown bits and pictures of my nude body.
Clearly, this didn’t work out. The crumbs of clout are tasty but they are in fact crumbs. As stated, I decided to take some time off and “post more”. This is me posting more.
As I implied, I have been running “dual identities” and what I have learned is that you cant really hide who you are. Tech posting bled into “pajamaboin” that my own professional site has languashed, my github dead, and im telling people who want to fuck me about how cool godot is.
It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s scary. One of the happiness propaganda points in my pre-covid job was being “authentic” but some of us are just authentically bad and that’s ok providing you can keep yourself fed and you can keep the pain you cause people to a minimum.
I’ve come to believe that there is no such thing as authenticity. We are a mix of our experiences, a reflection of our class, and a bruise of mortal fears.
One of my big nervous points right now, having been in the industry a double-digit amount of years, is that a bunch of new changes in the industry are successfuly turning programming labour into lower paying commodity.
This includes AI-aided programming, generated on the backs of “free” labour of software developers hosting code on public source code hosting platforms like Github, but also on the non-AI necessities of large software corporations: “better” tooling, “more” education,
We invent better tooling and languages to lower the barrier of entry for building “scalable software”, then instead of 20 experienced programmers hammering a codebase you can have 5 experienced programmers, 10 junior programmers, and 5 unpaid volunteers trying to better their online resume.
You’ve cut costs by 50% and you have people thanking you for it!
We also push for technology and programming education to younger and younger students so, like reading/writing/math efforts in the early 1900s, high school graduates will compete with and replace their more professionally trained and experienced forebearers.
The cost of labour goes down and we all feel a little more precarious, more scared of rocking the boat, while dropping education which would make us all more critical thinkers. Why learn philosophy when you can learn SQL?
I purposefully call this “recommodification” as the talking point has been that programming was a task originally “unskilled, secretarial work” but this claim is dubious. It makes well-paid industry tech nerds not feel like petty-bourgeoisie, PMCs, “liberal coastal elites”. Instead, we can cosplay as labourers because typing hurts our hands.
However, this framing mirrors my own career… as a self tought underpaid programmer in my late-teens, early 20s to a well sought after professional, to now kind of burned out and watching the industry commodify me out. I was a tool for inter-industry commodification and now, well, I’m feeling the pressure.
For these reasons, I’ve decided I will not be publishing source code for free while I take this time off. I’ll be publishing content on my site, much of which will be code snippets (example) or guides on how software is built or, like this post, impotent rants.
I want to help people in the industry, I want to be a force for good any way I can with the skills and experiences I’ve cobbled together. I do NOT want to contribute to the enshittification of life.
The challenge is that I have a responsibility to my politics and perspective. I don’t want to labour for free, I do not want to contribute to the state of the industry. Additionally, I have a responsility to my career. I have to eat, I have to labour and build my resume and not alienate the recruitment pipelines for the various tech companies.
If you want to work with me, pay me money, etc; feel free to each out on one of the social media links on my site or my email (b0in at proton.me) .