Time flies

They say time flies when you are having fun.

"They" are wrong.

Time flies when you aren't writing.

Fruit flies like a banana | A flying banana with wings

...Don't get me wrong. Writing is fun. But without writing, time flies, because without writing, one isn't thinking on paper(/keyboard), and without thinking left behind on paper(/in a file), one can no longer differentiate what they were yesterday from what they are today. And that difference alone is what makes time perceptible to us.

Everything else is math and clocks and cycles that spin and spin, day and week and month and year; things which serve to point at time, but cannot, by themselves, fill it with a substance.

Without substance, time evaporates; wanders off; disappears without a trace... unless one takes the time to... well, write. Perhaps, a public blog post. A comment on an issue. A journal entry, starting with the trite "Dear diary". A scribble in a notebook. Traces left by a mind which has since changed, yet is almost still the same. Traces of the past that make it relevant to us.

About 3 months ago, I started a new job. I thought I'd struggle with the 8 hour days, and that full-time would break me down. I wanted to be fully professional: never mixing work and personal life, reflecting and identifying weak skills I should improve, using every company event to network with people across other teams,. meticulously documenting every system I touch, advocating for open-source within the company and without...

...how naive I was. 😂 And yet, it's good I had those thoughts penned down!

3 months is a good amount of time to sober down, and dispel the illusions I had. Company life isn't exactly what I imagined it. My involvement in it is different than what I set out to make it—just like everything else one tries to do in the wildly complex real world out there. And yet, I have the energy to keep going, so perhaps, I have found that work-life balance I've hoped to achieve for the past 2-3 years.

Working in a corporate team is different from working alone or even working as an open-source contributor.

When working alone, you are solely responsibility for what you achieve. This leads to no coordination with others; you can change the way you do things right away. Even if you have to take smaller steps to reach the goal, there's always ways to make gradual progress.

As an open-source contributor, you need to wait for others to review your work. Yet, you hold none of the responsibility for deciding where the project goes. Even if your contribution doesn't quite fit the maintainer's intent, they can later rework it to fit their vision. Coordination cost is again low.

In a corporate team, however, you share in the responsibility for the project, yet you also need to wait on others to understand your work. And when everyone is working on different parts of the same thing, there is a lot of coordination required between members of a team and between teams to get things working right away. Even if everyone's aligned on the goal, learnings propagate slowly, and reiterating on the same points over and over is the norm.

This alone has been the biggest difference between what I imagined work would be like and what it was in practice. The need to discuss and synchronize changes with others has easily cost a half of my productive time. This would seem like a waste at the individual level; but as a group it works out: in these three months, our team has developed more of the product than I could have achieved just on my own.

Another shock for me was having to use a proprietary operating system.
The company-provided laptop is a sleek MacBook with fancy hardware and everything...—— but, like, what's the point of fancy hardware if I can't configure it to my liking?! You can't remap the keyboard (...without third-party software that requires admin rights), or even change keyboard shortcuts (except a few select ones), you can't change animation durations (...), you can't configure the behavior of the default file manager and screenshot tool, and I bet you can't optimize hard disk access with a spare SSD.

You can, however, run a web browser, a few containers, and a VPN.

...

...But guess what else can run those things: my Linux box at home! Not only can it run them, it can run them a few times over! And I'd still trust the maintainers of Linux distributions more than I would trust Apple plus the host of third-party developers needed to sand down the edges of Apple's operating system!

I suppose the one thing the MacBook is good for is that it can be remotely attested. Linux can do so too, of course. I hear good things from other parts of the company. Hopefully I would be allowed to switch to managed Linux when the internal team working on that is ready. ✨

Meanwhile, free time... has been scarce. My blogging is down to a measly half-article-per-week, because I've tried to spice my evenings with long walks, cooking, and relaxing activities in general. Anything except sitting in front of a computer after a day of sitting in front of a computer, really.

Something new, I suppose, is that I've been experimenting with sound design with Carla and the wonderful, amazing Vaporizer2 VST; not much to show for it yet, but jam sessions are so fun!

Also, I snuck in a few tiny coding projects for the evenings after long design discussions—just to get a feel for finishing something.

Yet, time flies. 3 months is a good bit of time to get into routine. Now, I'll have to start adding back things on top of work. Perhaps studying, perhaps blogging; something. (:

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