Today I noticed weird things about how I make money
Working remotely in the bedroom as a software engineer at a tech company may be a norm but feels a bit unnatural to me.
Sleep Alarm beeps softly next to me. I pick up my phone and swipe up instinctively to dismiss the alarm. I know it's 8:00 am and roll out of bed.
Wife is sleeping and so is the kid, who needs to wake up now to get ready for kindergarten. But before waking her, I pour milk into a glass and warm it up in our needlessly noisy microwave with its high pitched beep! beep! on every button.
I wake my daughter up. We do our usual dance of 'get ready please' and 'otherwise we're going to be late!' She reminds me that time is absolutely a social construct. None of us were born with a clock and a schedule in our minds.
I walk a couple of minutes with her to kindergarten. We arrive, hug goodbye, and she walks through the door.
Because it's Monday, instead of going home, I go straight to the gym. Couple of minutes later, at 9:00 am sharp, I'm in shorts and t-shirt doing my first set of squats.
I finish up my upper body strength workout for the day and leave for home at 9:57 am. Shit. I realise I'd left a few minutes late squeezing that last set of calf raises in.
I worry about being late for my team's daily stand-up, but that worry quickly eases away when I join the call on my iPhone and hear small talk. My camera is off, so I figure I've got 5 minutes more to spare at least.
I arrive home at 10:03 am. I'm panting a little because I walked quickly nevertheless to try and be at my desk for stand-up.
We finally begin to talk about work at 10:05 am.
"I'm wrapping up the task for updating orders info in the database from the ops log."
We drop from the call at 10:40 am. Where did all the time go?
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The rest of the day went by like any other day in the life of a software engineer at a tech company. There's work to be done, organised as tickets on a digital board. I have my avatar on one of them and chipped away at it until 6:00 pm.
Today I worked on fixing some data consistency issues. It's a problem I've been trying to fix for over a week and today I managed to wrap it up.
I close my laptop, walk out of my bedroom – which is also my work room in the day – and go to the toilet. I see myself in the mirror and get a strange feeling.
Another workday over. I survived. No, even better, I made some money.
Huh.
I made some money. I'm looking at myself in the mirror and focus on my flexed eyebrows.
How exactly am I being paid to do this? Why? Who did I help?
My mind immediately conjures up the imagery of restaurant owner serving food to my table with a smile of satisfaction in his face.
For him, I imagined, earning money from a day's work is an intuitive matter. I serve people food, and they pay me for the food, plus tips for my friendliness. There's a direct relationship between what he did that day for people and what he took in as his keep from his customers.
There's no such feeling for me as a remote, full-time employee at a company. Because of this I feel a little lost sometimes about this line of work.
I practically never talk to customers. My customers sometimes aren't even users of our product but colleagues who use an internal tool that I help build.
And even if I did talk to customers, I never feel like I'm really helping them.
Well... okay, that's not entirely true. There was a period of 3.5 years in my life where I did technical customer support several days a week and I knew by the end of the day that I'd helped five or ten specific people resolve their work problem.
That job paid a lot less than my current job, though.
Isn't it a little weird that the jobs that require contact with the people who are actually paying you – ultimately, employers don't pay your salary, customers do – are the jobs that pay less? It's as though we have to pay a premium to have a genuine social aspect of "I helped you so you paid me and we're both happy today" in our job.
Also, I find it funny that I have to front-load some physical activity in the gym to keep my body functioning well. Some people's jobs – like the restaurant owner – actually have that baked into the work, spread throughout the day. Since I work from home and don't need to walk around an office, I have to hit the gym.
Well, anyways, that's what I noticed today. I write stuff to make computers do things for people whom I will only know in the abstract, and someone pays me for that. Part of the proceeds go to funding my membership to a place where I can lift weights for no benefit of anyone other than myself.