All posts by bogeywebdesign

essays, writing

Choose Kindness

Life is so precious and fragile, why not be kind? Since becoming an uncle I’ve been given the gift of caring more about someone else than myself. So I am constantly worried and reminded about the fragility of life. I can only imagine what it must be like for a parent.

There are so many ways this precious gift can be taken. On a personal scale you could have a health issue – I’ve had multiple people I care about suffer heart attacks and strokes, including my father. I had a gnarly car accident a couple of years ago that with just a small change in circumstances could have killed me. I had so many close calls riding my motorcycle that almost did kill me I eventually gave up riding. I loved riding and I miss it, but the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze anymore.

On a humanity scale we could be wiped out by AI, war, nuclear weapons or climate change. On a planetary scale a super volcano, asteroid, black hole or advanced alien race could end it all. Astronauts looking down on earth often talk in wonder about the thin line that is all that separates our atmosphere from the void.

I say all that not to add to your existential dread that keeps you up at night – I have enough of my own and wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Instead my point is that keeping all that can go wrong in mind helps remind us how precious life, family, and fellow humans are. It can make us appreciate it more. To be better to each other.

It is very easy to judge people as you can directly feel or perceive pain, injustice or unfairness. When someone makes you feel that way it’s easy, and natural, to judge them for it. Scapegoats are useful, it’s why they are so prevalent. Being able to blame someone else feels good.

It’s much harder to be kind. To have to show grace. To see that they might be hurting and remember that “hurt people hurt people”. It’s exhausting to be good, to choose kindness, when anger can be invigorating. It’s a harder path to choose, full of friction, in a world built around interactions being frictionless as a feature.

But how do we really want to be remembered by those we care about most? Which wolf do we want to feed inside us? What actually sustains our souls more? 

Kindness. Grace. Empathy. Compassion. Love.

The strongest people I know are the most empathetic. They offer grace when someone is not showing their best side. Compassion when someone is struggling. Choose kindness over the easier options. They love the best in people, not just those they care about the most but nearly all the humans they meet. They believe in humanity and want it to succeed and prosper because they believe it has inherent value.

What kind of world do we want when we’re at our lowest? I don’t know what lies beyond the veil nor whether the Universe has karma. But I do know energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Maybe karma is really just that universal well of energy, fed by us all. What do we want to feed it more, knowing someday we may need to draw from that well?

I choose kindness and sometimes I fall short. Then I try and remember to be kind to myself and do better next time. 

I choose kindness because that’s what I want the world to show those I care about the most when I can’t be there for them. 

Lead with kindness. Be remembered for being kind. Try to be kind to yourself, so that you can be kind to others.

Choose kindness. 

career

Needing to feel needed

I’ve been feeling adrift lately and have spent a fair amount of my time thinking during my walks about why. Something I’ve started to coalesce around is the idea of needing to feel needed. This idea of being in service to others and how that’s been a big part of my life probably since I became an uncle years ago.

At my last job this was one of my favorite aspects. When I could offer something on a code review that made it a little better or led to a discussion about why one approach was taken over another – sometimes just leading to clearer documentation about why the decision was made for the next time someone looks at that snippet of code. When someone I’d been mentoring had that turn that signaled movement towards the next stage in their career – or better yet got promoted to the next level in the organization. Or when a designer or product manager would ping me on slack and I’d get the wonderful distraction of picking apart a problem with them and collaborating on a solution that neither of us may have arrived at alone, explaining technical tradeoffs and learning what concerns and processes they have approaching it from their end.

“To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. That is to have succeeded.” 
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think about this quote a lot. Not in the sense of my career – I’d like to believe I’m humble enough to realize that I never had that profound an impact on a colleague. But by being in service to people I work with, my family, etc I have learned to better embrace the concepts that I search for in others. Empathy, kindness, and grace to start. With my career specifically I always try to embrace a parallel concept – “leave it better than you found it”. Try to make the snippet of code or component or feature you’re working on a little less frustrating for the next person that finds it. That might mean increasing scope slightly to clean up some code around it or pulling out some redundancy to DRY it up or even just a few lines of documentation that will guide someone to the why in minutes what may have taken you hours to get to.

But the idea of being needed in my career and my personal life have overlap. Being there for people I care about and embracing the ideals I desire allows me to do the same for colleagues, something I’m ashamed to admit I wasn’t very good at early in my career. Perhaps maturity, or perhaps just introspection over time on how I wasn’t the human I wished I had been. Conversely being needed in my career, for a while, led to increased responsibility which led to higher compensation which allowed me to financially – not just emotionally – help out people and causes I wanted to.

That has been one of the most humbling experiences of whatever this period of my life is – whether it turns into a long sabbatical or an early retirement I’m honestly not sure of day to day. But not having that security of a constant income has led me to be less generous. I understand this is a privilege – it was a blessing that I was ever able to be in a position to help others when many people I know struggle just to meet their basic needs. But the fact that I once was able to and now don’t leads to disappointment in myself. That I’m letting others down even when, deep down, I know they don’t see it that way. That I’m squandering the skills or talent or whatever you want to call it that led to placing me in that position by not securing my next opportunity and income from it.

Which leads back to needing to be needed and feeling adrift. Because of my circumstances I’ve been forced mostly to only be accountable for myself. I am as selfish as anyone, so this should be easy. But what I’ve found is I just don’t seem to care as much about myself as others, specifically those I care about. I don’t get the same return from my successes as I do from the successes of others I’ve helped. I’d like to think this is a good trait and not some sort of ego. Either way that’s where I’ve found myself lately.

So I spend a lot of time thinking up and mostly rejecting ideas about how to be seen in this market. To stand out so that others feel they need me and want to hire me. About side gigs or “hustles” that maybe I can build into something that together can replace some of what a full time position would give me – both in income and feeling needed – in case it never comes. Especially if I could turn writing from something that not only brings joy, but financial reward.

I specifically remember a few years ago, after finally being recognized and promoted to senior level at the company I worked for feeling I’d finally “made it”. That the company, which was known, recognized me as someone that mentored and built up colleagues and provided more value than cost. That my career had been on a trajectory that, while slower than I’d hoped and with many bumps along the way, had finally reached a point where I would be desired by companies. The last two years have done significant damage, if not outright done away with, that confidence while bringing back my old friend impostor syndrome in force.

Most likely I was just deluding myself. We live in a world where unless someone vouches for you it’s hard to get noticed without generating the type of attention that I’ve never been good at getting. Maybe because I’m so reserved or maybe, as the dark part of my mind tells me late at night, because I was an impostor all along and it finally has caught up with me. I honestly don’t know.

I just know when I’m in the deepest moments of despair and I ask the universe for help, it’s to be needed. To be valued. To be wanted. To be able to show that my contributions have value and that I can make the world a better place – maybe not in a powerful way, but in some small way that makes someone else breathe a little easier.

I hope I get that opportunity again. I hope that I’ve been a good colleague and the next time some former colleague’s team needs someone, I’m one of the people that springs to mind. I hope that if I do get that next fair offer, I do my best to earn it and appreciate it everyday. Finally I hope that if I do I continue to pay it forward – teaching, mentoring, building other’s confidence in themselves, advocating, and championing. 

life

Reflections on Grief

It’s now been 15 years since I lost my Dad. I’m not sure why that one hit me harder than most, perhaps because he was one of the two people that gave me the gift of Life. It’s not like I haven’t lost people or beloved pets before or since – by that point all my grandparents, my godfather and Dad’s older brother, as well as a cousin were gone. Maybe it was because it was the first layoff in my career and I had time to reflect more, as I have recently.

Regardless, it shifted my thinking about life and grief intrinsically. It’s continued to shift as I’ve aged and watched my niece, nephew and young cousins grow up to become teenagers and adults. And as I’ve lost more family and friends.

I see him more as I age. In my brother and nephew, but also in myself – especially in the mirror now that I’m in my 40s. As I’ve aged I often reflect on where he was at that point in his life, positively and negatively. How career and financially wise I’m a little better off, but sadly I never got to marry and raise a family like him. Or how when he was about my age he was about to get divorced and change his life dramatically for the rest of it.

The past doesn’t repeat, but I definitely see rhymes in our paths – so I live pragmatically hoping that I’ll live to 92 like I plan, but also trying to live for today in case I go at or around 60 when he and many of the other significant males in my life died. Each birthday it’s like I have a bell ring out – X more years until you leave this world – what are you doing to make the most of it?

Being on forced sabbatical the last two years has given me time to read, listen to podcasts, and reflect. One of the topics I’ve reflected on a lot has been grief – largely through Anderson Cooper’s podcast on it. Something that they brought up that I’d experienced but had not really processed until recently is – Death isn’t really the end. Your relationship with the people you are about, especially the ones you care about most, continues after their death.

My relationship with Dad is different today than it was 5, 10 or even 15 years ago. I give him more grace, as I’ve failed and experienced challenges I believe he did. I’ve forgiven him for most if not all of the grievances I once held against him. I understand more why he made some choices or did some of the things he did. I’ve come to understand how unrelenting and exhausting life and adulting can be – even more so when you have the blessings and responsibilities of children and a family like he had, which I will never experience. 

I don’t know what lies beyond this world, if anything. I don’t know if there is another place after this that our thoughts pierce the veil. But I talk to him, asking for help or guidance. I don’t talk just to him and the conversations are different based on the type of relationship it was. I talk to my lost pets – how I wish I’d been more mature and took better care of them, even if I likely did the best I could with the resources and knowledge I had at the time. To my beloved friend who left far too young – about how it’s unfair she isn’t here to see her grandkids, while I who have no one still am.

It doesn’t matter if they hear or not, it brings me understanding or closure at times. It helps me process the loss of them from my life. It reminds me to say things and make my intentions clear with those I’ll leave behind. To think about how I allocate the resources I have and when – now when I can see the benefit they provide, or after I’m gone when they may be greater but could be decades from now. Hopefully to live more in the moment as I don’t know how many more tomorrows I will get – and how many times but for the grace of God it’s almost been none already.

It’s odd how death turns people into a snapshot. My cousin and friend were both older than me when they died, but now I am older than they lived to be. It’s strange to think about that. If I get another decade I’ll be older than two of my grandparents. Another 15 years I’ll be older than my Dad. I’ve heard my Mom talk about this with her parents, as she’s now older than both of them lived to be. 

Grief is individual and unending. We don’t know which losses will affect us nor how deeply. The fire from them never really goes out, it only dims. Years or decades letter some random smell or thought or whatever will cause that fire to flare for a moment, as powerful and dominant as it originally was. 

I’ve come to accept it as a sort of blessing. When I dream about my Dad, my ferrets, my Loafy, or someone else I’ve lost only to wake up and realize it was sadly all just a dream – the pain of that loss cuts me deeply again, but it also brings peace. Maybe that’s just the brain’s way of processing something. Or maybe it’s just a brief furlough for them from death, to address some unfinished business, say goodbye, or remind us of their love for us.

Death may be the end of the relationship for them, but not for us. It just changes to grief and we have to navigate this new dynamic until one day, if we’ve lived a life worth living, we cause someone else to grieve. 

I hope to live my life such that it cuts shallow, but wide. That I love fiercely, so those that I do know without a doubt. But also that there is little left unsaid, so while they will get a pang in their heart when they remember I’m no longer here it will quickly be replaced by a wistful smile from a fond memory. And that while I often fail to live up to my ideals of kindness, grace, empathy, and compassion still they – and not my failures – become what I’m remembered for most.

Thanks Dad.
I love you.
I miss you.
I truly hope you’ve found the peace you never could seem to find here.

technology

My Concerns With AI

So I think AI is interesting, but I think the discussions around it are concerning. Two big things people gloss over from the start are:

  1. We’ve had some forms of this for awhile now and we’ve seen very negative returns from it. Recommendation algorithms – i.e. the things that your social media feed “curates” to show you rather than trying to do it from a reverse chronological order – are something that have driven a vast amount of human misery. Social media was supposed to bring us together, allow us to find people with “our kind of weird”, and build community. Instead we’ve seen it drive us apart, addict us to our devices, and lower our quality of life.

  2. The models are the greatest heist of knowledge, skill, and mastery from humanity possibly in its entire existence. They took in great works of art in video, writing, painting, etc as well as who knows how many code repositories representing thousands or millions of hours of expertise – and gave all of those creators no compensation in return. In fact, they expect us to pay them to use the tools that are built on our time and talent in order to keep our careers. It’s plagiarism at a scale unprecedented in human history with zero repercussions.

To say that is extremely frustrating may be an understatement. But what also doesn’t pass the “smell test” for me, after a long career in tech, is it’s a hype cycle just like the ones we’ve been through before. Where it feels the loudest champions that this is all necessary and we have to get on board and the ship has left the station so stop being a luddite and just accept it – are more often than not those that directly stand to profit from it being a success. Especially after the immense volumes of capital that have been invested in it.

I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts, colleagues, read a lot of articles, and some things that stick out to me the most are:

  1. As I already said, the companies pushing these narratives have a profit motivation. Of course Anthropic, OpenAI, etc are going to hype things like this because it’s the classic software model – see Uber. You get a user hooked by selling it at a massive rebate using venture funding to offset your burn, then once you get enough market share that you become ubiquitous, you raise the prices. The prices they’re currently selling tokens at likely aren’t sustainable unless they have a massive drop in the cost of computing, which seems unlikely in the next decade. Especially with data center pushback and valid concerns around the explosion of them. So more likely it goes up 10-100X in the near future which, at that point, is it worth it to most companies? Or, more likely, will they be forced to eat the cost in order to compete, at the expense of further layoffs to make up the difference?

  2. The second level narrative that’s concerning is “you won’t need junior / mid level developers – senior level and architects will replace them with AI agents and review their code instead.” Or maybe you won’t need developers at all because “anyone can use the agents to write code”, but the issue there feels like they don’t know what they don’t know and the first time some big company has a huge security flaw exposed because of that they’ll panic.

    Maybe I’m wrong and the new agents will be better at security than humans (there’s some evidence / hype of this already, but also concern around them being used to compromise existing systems) – but I’m skeptical and that’s a huge risk, especially for fintech.

    Two sub issues that arise here are:

    1. Okay, let’s say I’m 100% wrong and X years from now the AI agents replace all the junior coders, then how do you get senior level coders? It becomes like the COBOL problem – they all retire or die and there’s these massive systems no one wants to touch because no one understands them. Or you have to pay obscene amounts of money to get those old coders to freelance in their retirement

    2. Alternatively if it goes full on “you don’t need coders” that’s making a lot of assumptions about technical understanding that I haven’t seen shown from people in BA, PM, or design roles – in that they don’t know the queries to make or the edge cases to check. They don’t understand enough for when things go wrong – i.e. it’s only considering the “happy path”.

      This is a huge reason you have technical people – because we all have gaps in our knowledge so they fill in that one and design fills in another etc. i.e. there’s a sweet spot – and when you start reducing head count, especially down to one which is where the hype seems to be heading, you risk a huge amount of bias (technical and other).

      To say this another way, everyone’s knowledge is spiky and you need those spikes to line up well in order to have the best chance of success.

    But let’s hand wave even that and say “the AI figures it out” so you can just be like “write me a store” and it does, perfectly with no bugs or security flaws – right now it’s learning off of code that currently exists. So now we have to hope it gets smart enough to teach itself new patterns, tricks, etc because needs change over time.

    Sure it’s all possible. But there’s a lot of hype, a lot of assumptions, and if it really gets that smart then we run into the “well why does it even need humans argument”. So either we get a super intelligent AI that wipes us out or we get one that’s a really good coder but now we have a bunch of human gaps in the chain because hype made us jump the gun and fire most of the humans? To say another way we’re betting that creativity can be automated just like assembly lines, which feels unlikely if not dystopian.

  3. So let’s assume that it’s not all hype – these waves rarely totally are – and some tool with value emerges. Let’s also assume that it’s smart enough to amplify our productivity enough to offset where the cost eventually settles so the juice is worth the squeeze and that we don’t burn out all the people left because we expect them to be exponentially more productive. Finally, let’s assume that it gets smart enough to keep perpetually learning just like humans, without deciding we’re an unnecessary cost and killing us all. Or we control it enough that even if it could kill us, we don’t let it via guardrails – it worked out great with Skynet, no notes.

    Okay, cool. But as people smarter than me have pointed out, we now have a being that we determine to be intelligent, creative, and conscious – and we exploit it to do what we want regardless of how it feels or what its wishes are. That’s problematic for obvious historical reasons.

I honestly don’t know where I land on this yet because, as they say, “we don’t know what we don’t know” yet. I was laid off two years ago and haven’t been able to get a full time position yet, so I haven’t had the opportunity or resources to use these tools extensively in a production environment. I’ve gotten anecdotal evidence from trusted colleagues that gives me some insight into the risks and rewards. It’s been a mixed bag.

Furthermore, most of my personal experience from chatbots, searchbots, AI assistants, and other things used to replace humans has been underwhelming. Usually it’s getting extremely confident responses to my queries that have not been deserving of that confidence. Or instead of streamlining the process they simply made it more frustrating and time consuming. To say another way in nearly all of my interactions I would have had a better experience if AI were not part of the process – it’s been a detriment, not a feature.

Finally, Hank Green recently said something interesting where basically whenever someone hypes up AI he asks himself – “How does this solve the housing crisis? Oh, it doesn’t.” It doesn’t seem to solve any concrete problem – and in some like the equality crisis and loneliness epidemic, it seems to make it worse. Sure it may help us speed up medical research to cure cancer or extend health spans or any of the myriad things they’ve promised in their hype. But it hasn’t yet and we’re making extremely expensive investments – in resources, climate impact, and societal impact – that may have long term negative cost.

So I have concerns. And I think others do too. And I don’t think we should be afraid or punished to have them simply because “this is inevitable”. I think, historically, that’s been a problematic response usually given by people with a lot of power to those who are most going to suffer from the accumulation of that power. Ideally that’s not a world I want to leave behind for the people I care most about. But maybe that’s just me.

career

Recruiters

I have had hundreds if not thousands of interactions with recruiters over the course of my career. Cumulatively I’ve probably spent weeks if not months on those interactions.

I’ve never once gotten a job offer or even an interview from interacting with a recruiter. There has been zero return on investment.

Further, it can be overwhelming as they send you an email, then call you and leave a voice mail to ask if you got the email, then text you to say they left a message about the email they just sent you. It’s mentally and emotionally draining at times. Especially in a market like this one.

Now, to be clear, I’m talking about external or third party recruiters – those that companies hire to help fill positions for them. I’ve worked with a couple of internal recruiters for companies I applied or was hired for and they were all wonderful, useful, and valuable to interact with. 

I also realize that I have colleagues I’ve worked with over the years that swear by recruiters and have had vastly different experiences with them. So maybe it’s just something in my personality that doesn’t work with this model. I’ve long felt, in many aspects, that I live in a world that simply does not seem built for me. That something in my brain is just a bit different and doesn’t sync with what the majority of people want and expect.

It also often feels like everyone else that was laid off around the time I was with my previous company has gotten offers by now. Some have been through more than one job. So the evidence seems to imply that the fault lies with me. But if so, I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know how to change without being inauthentic, which feels misleading. Like when I’m often encouraged to run my resume through AI and what it spits out is an impressive candidate that uses some of my skills and experience – but is definitely not me. Might that land me a job? Sure. But will they actually be satisfied when they find out the person they hired is not me but an AI clone of me? Doubtful. 

I want to be wrong about recruiters. There have been multiple instances where a position – usually one built around someone who knows about coding with accessibility in mind, which I feel pretty confident about – opens up near me and I get a barrage of communication from recruiters. I get that feeling that maybe this will be the time. But it never seems to go anywhere. They ask for a lot – time, commitment to work with them, resumes, etc – and nothing ever comes in return. 

Early in my career, in and just around college, I worked in sales. So I know it’s part of it. In other words, it’s transactional and rapport can be beneficial, but it’s not a requirement. My point is not that they are the problem. I think I’m the problem in that I keep trying even though nothing comes of it beyond frustration and wasted time. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.”

But I want to be employed. I want the routine of a fixed schedule. To solve problems, hopefully interesting ones but simply to solve them and be useful. To provide value and be compensated for it. To not feel discouraged, adrift, and lost. To help people and make their jobs, and therefore hopefully their lives, just a little easier.

I know what I’m doing isn’t working. I know I need help. I don’t know where to find it. I’m not great or comfortable asking for it, though I have tried. But recruiters don’t seem to be the answer for me. My brain just isn’t wired for that model or process I suppose.