This year I got my first real job as an intern at a large, publicly traded company. The background of the other interns shocked me: one student had participated in model F1 and built a metal rocket that reached 10,000 feet the previous summer. They were all real engineers. The type of highly qualified people that I’d only ever heard about on the internet. My shock was undermined by the approachability of my fellow interns. The rocket guy was willing to swipe through his camera roll and try to explain the electronics side of his project to me. They were all normal people. You can just decide to build a rocket and do it.
In the summer leading up to college I spent some time reading the /g/ board of 4chan, which is supposed to be about technology. It’s really about a hyper-specific type of technology user: someone that uses Linux, resents modern software, and knows who Richard Stallman is. A lot of them are computer science students, and there are sometimes threads about their job hunt. On any given day, you can probably find a thread like it by Ctrl+F-ing for “job.” Today there’s one with 140 replies.
They’re always failing! To /g/, it’s impossible to get a job in technology. 50 or so replies deep into a thread like this, everyone freaks out and they call each other faggots. You log in the next day and do it all over again. It’s mutually-perpetuated learned helplessness.
A lot of these guys are probably capable of becoming intelligent, skilled programmers! They just convince themselves that they are not allowed into the modern tech industry — or to pursue anything worthwhile independently. Only soy JavaScript developers are allowed to experience happiness.
What if you just believed that you are actually capable of doing things yourself? What if you pretend that good things aren’t magically withheld from you? If you think that affirmative action makes it harder for you to get a job, you shouldn’t just give up. Stop seething. It’s bad for you.
What makes this so difficult to escape is that the community is about more than just chimping about jobs. There’s a broader identity around the type of software you use, a care for privacy, and old-school tech. These things could be fine alone, but /g/ rolls them up into an anchoritic rejection and paranoia of anything mainstream, including career success.
Get over it!
The above is taken from https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/94852278
The archive of the first thread shown is here: https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/95655018