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?

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

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.

Subscribe to Nick's Notes

Don’t miss out on the latest issues. Sign up now to get access to the library of members-only issues.
jamie@example.com
Subscribe