oh my god what the hell is happening?!
me the past few weeks
Anywho. You know the meme. Donald Glover strolling into a room holding a pizza box while the whole place burns behind him, completely unbothered. That's me right now, except instead of pizza I'm holding a half-finished Python project and a LinkedIn profile that says "Retail Manager" in the most recent job title.
I spent years running a Trader Joe's. Before that, answering phones at a front desk. Somewhere in between I started a TikTok LIVE community that hit 50K followers, and I somehow ended up managing 16 moderators like it was a tiny unpaid ops team.
None of that says
"software engineer" on paper. And now I'm trying to walk into tech during the one stretch in its history where nobody — not recruiters, not senior engineers, not the guy who tweets confidently about everything, actually knows what the hell is happening.
Do I learn to "work with AI"?
Do I defiantly refuse and become some kind of artisanal hand-coded developer, like I'm churning butter?
Do I need to know whatever framework is trending this week, or will it be dead by the time I finish the tutorial? I don't know goddammit! Nobody knows!
We're all just standing in the burning room holding different pizzas.
Here's what I've landed on, minus the doom:
The stack is not the plot twist you think it is.
I built a whole Linux utility called KeyFlip, it disables your laptop's built-in keyboard so it stops trying to type things while an external keyboard is plugged in, which sounds small until you're the person whose palm has ruined a Google Doc for the fortieth time. I didn't build it in whatever's trending. I built it in Python and GTK4 because that's what solved the actual problem. Trends expire. "I can find out why something is broken and fix it" does not.
AI can be seen as a pair.
I use AI constantly while building.
What I don't do is ship code I can't explain, because that's not developing, that's just outsourcing the part where I learn anything. If you can't defend your own pull request in an interview, the fire's going to find you eventually.
Your weird background is not a liability, it's the whole pitch.
Moderating a Discord during a chaotic livestream raid is incident response. Running scheduling, payroll, and inventory at a grocery store during the holidays is systems thinking under pressure.
I used to think I had to hide the Trader Joe's job like it was evidence of a crime. Now I put it on the resume next to KeyFlip like they're obviously the same skill set, because they are.
Every room is on fire. Choose your fire.
There is no non-burning version of tech to wait for. AI-heavy, AI-skeptical, hot new stack, boring stable one, pick your poison. It’s still poison
So the real question was never "how do I avoid the chaos." It's "which chaos do I actually want to debug for the next five years." Mine involves whatever the hell is happening right now.
Anyway. Pizza's getting cold. See you inside.
Top comments (0)