Surviving Tech; When Your Perspective Makes You Both Outsider and Essential
When you are looking at tech through a lens that the majority of your peers don’t understand, it can be hard to thrive.
I don’t feel imposter syndrome much these days. Not because I am exceptionally brilliant, but because I have spent my career dealing with the incompetence of others.
That’s not to say I have not made mistakes. I have. But over time, you start to get over them; or at least not constantly flash back to them. You accept that they become part of the process and not a defining failure.
Besides. When you have seen how much people bluff their way through, and ‘succeed’ while doing so. You realise, leveraging the knowledge you have, is more powerful than encyclopaedic knowledge in its own right.
Surviving
It is my experience that a key difference between someone who thrives in tech, and someone who struggles, is the ability to keep going; despite everything.
Surviving seems markedly easier if you are part of a well represented group. But if you represent a minority group within the industry, you have to be confident, thick-skinned, or posses an unshakeable determination to keep pushing forward.
This can make for an exhausting career. Which can make you question if it’s all worth it.
It is no surprise that half of women exit the industry before the midpoint of their career, and we have a 16 billion dollar a year staff turnover problem in the USA alone.
The Importance of how you think & the power to drive change
However. If you represent a minority group in tech, it's not just what you know. It’s how you think that makes you essential.
We live in a time when we have had decades of homogenous teams, making products that are designed by a tiny fraction of the population, for the rest of the population. Because of the lack of regulation around tech, the products turned out are often complete with all the bias of the tiny human subset that created them.
Internet culture in of itself can be vile. The fact LLM’s trained on raw internet data, without appropriate guard rails, is overtly misogynistic and racist, says it all. However, when guard rails do exist, they are built by the same people that have come to define internet culture. There should be no surprise that they are often barely bolted down.
Right now, if you represent a diverse voice, how you think is precisely why you belong in tech.
Whether you shirk the responsibility, or accept it. The products we make profoundly affect other human beings. The attitudes and bias of the creators will always be prevalent in the products we create.
If you remain in industry, you can subversively affect that change through your very being.
I am not saying this is a reason alone to stay in the industry if you have been burnt out and torn down by it. But I have come to realise there is an intrinsic value of being in the industry, even if it never quite feels like it.
