What follows is part rant, part vulnerable admission, part ramble, and generally may be a bit of an unreadable mess. Maybe one or two rereads for legibility. In 2026, I feel like that may actually be a welcome change in content. You've been adequately warned.
I was about 21/22 when I started changing from a young adult that went to college to find a job in something with computers to an intern in a tiny local business participating in a program called YES - Young Entrepreneurs and Scholars. It was billed as a way for students to learn How To Do A Business, get Valuable Experience, and - and this was the important part - make a little money.
I jumped at it. It was semi competitive by way of there not being a lot of availability, and the bigger companies like Siemens and Facebook and Google used it as cheap labor pipelines. However, I got lucky in being just kinda slightly above average technically, but somehow endowed with a ferocious tenacity to Do A Good Computering. I only use tenacious as the word choice because a teacher when I was in 7th(?) grade, Mrs. Raim, a substitute I was stupidly cruel too, called me that and it stuck with me. Thank you, Mrs. Raim, and sorry for being a little shit back then. Life was weird.
Anyway, that tenancy ended up getting me into an at the time 4-person startup called SightPlan. I was elated. I was Doing A Programming! I had a job! Granted, it wasn't glorious. I was struggling with things like presentations about CRM choices and fighting with tiny JS windows to style customer support pages. I had no idea what I was doing, and learning exactly how true that was every day, but I kept pushing. I cried a lot during these days, and in no small part because of this little feeling in the back of my mind, which I came to find out later happened to quite a few folks back then: why am I here, how could I possibly be paid to do this, and when are they going to find out I'm a fraud?
Fast forward about a year. I've now worked with two different developers on some very small, very throwaway tasks. Learning a bit of Ruby to try to fix image transparency. A lot more JS and CRM.
And then came Objective-C. iOS. The beginning of everything for me.
The core iOS developer (the one guy) - and I'm sorry to you too for all the hell I put you through over the years - was exceptional. He had managed to put together a very complicated synchronized system over some gnarly "nosql" systems that were all the rage. The app worked, companies paid some money to SightPlan, El Presidenté kept things chugging along, I kept getting my intern checks.
One day I'm given The Task: the iOS guy is busy, and we need you to start picking up some of this mobile stuff and helping out - hop off the JS CRM stuff and go do that.
About a month or two later I managed to bring down the entire Alpha cluster of synchronization systems by accidentally creating thousands of revisions to a single entity - over the span of an hour - because of a demo day gone wrong from my first mobile app change - a user profile name edit. No one noticed for a few hours, until the then CTO discovered everything exploded. It became known as, "The John Senior" incident, and that one failure managed to be an issue that plagued the company for the entirety of my many years there. You're welcome for all the bug fixes, CouchBase.
That iOS flub though made them realize that This Kid Can Actually Code, and I was put full time on it. I learned the language. I started loving fuckingblocksyntax.com. I started writing features piece by piece and learning what you could do with a mobile SDK, and I started Getting Good.
Then Android happened. Another new engineer. Probably one of the most chill, laid back, talented, and personable people I've worked with. And also, sorry for all the hell I put you through over the years. He was responsible for the Android build out. All of it. 0 to product. And they decided it was time for me to help.
You probably see where this is going, but I didn't.
Fast forward a year: I've (re)learned Java. I started finding practical and meaningful use cases for Good Code Practices. The app was solid. It was fast. In some ways, it was actually slightly nicer than the original iOS app. He Was Beginning To Believe.
Fast forward another couple of years. I finish my university degree. More customers, more iOS and Android development, jumping back and forth to put out feature fires, breaks across devices, everything normal. I get put in charge of a ludicrously complicated mapping system to geolocate and make interactable map drawings that represented rental units, amenities. It worked well. I did it for iOS first. The iOS guy that taught me couldn't figure it out. It read terribly, was recursive and messy, but it worked.
That's when I started noticing something that didn't feel good.
Another intern came on board sometime around this time. I'm purposefully narrating the times out of whack for the sake of drama, but suffice it to say it should be considered a sort of milestone. The intern was, by all definitions of an early 2010's college campus internship world, The Cool Kid.
Dressed well. Easy charisma. Friendly. Legitimately, too - and personable overall. There was one issue that other people didn't seem to notice, and I didn't know what it meant. I apologize in advance for it, but it was this: he wasn't that great.
He was good. Really, really good. He got web pages up, showed up and did stuff, and somehow in a short period of time had managed to win the hearts and minds of the core team to give him big projects, data tasks, interesting problems and private little chats and lunches about Where The Company Was Going.
I watched all of this from my desk, smiling and happy to have my job, and thinking boy, it'd be nice to work on some of that for a while instead of this mobile stuff. It's fun but.. I have ideas and when I get to share them, people nod and do stuff about them. I know I'm doing good work, and I'm fixing The Cool Kid stuff to boot, and it's not even mobile, it's web... this felt weird.
So time went on. I Mobile Apped. iOS and Android. For years. Eventually, and because of typical startup drama, my once super awesome Android mentor was given The Option and left the company. I was now lead Android developer.
Oops.
Through all of this, I kept watching Cool Kid get accolades and credit, the web product become bigger and bigger, the tools become trickier and more fascinating, and to some extent I got to touch them from a very specific perspective of being a tiny slow computer on poor networks download and syncing a ton of live management property data.
But I kept seeing that thing I had noticed a long time ago. I had a name for it, or a phrase I guess. A question. Cool Kid got it in spades.
Why.. wasn't anyone listening to me?
I talked a lot. A LOT. I was opinionated, defensive, technically accurate and demanding, ruthlessly tenacious (teehee) and I got better and better and kept the mobile app running solo, even going back to iOS now and again to help the old iOS core dev, who was now struggling to keep up with the pace of my Android development, and overall quality of software. To be fair: whatever the hell that means, "quality software." I was feeling great that I actually, maybe, understood a thing about a thing. Maybe.
But.. I couldn't figure out what it was that made me not listened to. Sure - if I had a legit problem with the database it'd be patched, but for the most part, ideas just never got picked up, thoughts were left half-heard, and I quietly plodded along with my work, still trying to enjoy it as, eventually, a well paid 20-something in Florida as a "mobile wiz" building apps.
I started to figure it out, though, and I said it a minute ago: it just wasn't the web.
The app wasn't cool. It just worked. The sync system wasn't exciting, it was just necessary, and I made it work. It never got attention because it just worked when it needed, and the occasional Showstopper Ticket always ended up promptly resolved.
I started realizing that I had one person in my camp - another incredibly awesome dev who I unfairly left out earlier in the "super cool laid back hyper talented dude" listing - that regularly and equally tenaciously got me to work at my best; defended my work, my ideas, my struggles, and my successes. The world needs more people like him. I digress.
He was a listener. A stonking good one. Apt that he was also an audio tech and music nerd, and I'll let the neuropsychological analysts study that coincidence. But he was indeed as described. Working with him felt like I was working on real problems again, and some of my most creative solutions and best work came out of my time pairing and complaining with him. Dude even invited me to a local music concerts that were awesome. I digress again.
Fast forward a few more years after I make some terrible life decisions based around love and relationships and depression and stress and so on and so on. I end up voluntarily leaving SightPlan after half a decade, literally shocking and worrying the leadership ("what are we gonna do?") before I shipped myself and my decisions off to Exhibit B of this document. I left behind The Listener and SightPlan and moved.
California. Tech Heaven. Big Boy Land.
I'll spare the equally long story about apps and problems and creativity and awesome solutions and so on. But after a few years at the company I moved to, I found the same thing again.
I wasn't Cool. My things worked. Given the opportunity to work on interesting "backend" issues, I came up with weird but valuable solutions; but I was always The Mobile Guy. iOS and Android. The lead position from Orlando bought my credentials for employment there, and the Powers That Be quickly realized I was - and here's that word - a specialist.
I was The Mobile Guy. If I said Mobile Guy things, good. If I didn't say Mobile Guy things, why was I in the room?
And again. I saw them. The California Cool Kid Backend Devs. Side note: dear entities of the universe spare me from those people forevermore. To those people I do not offer apologies to. You know who you are, and you know what I thought of you. Go away and live long and prosper.
Those Cool Kids got the cool projects.. and they were awful. Not just Not Great like my old intern competitor. Actively, demonstrably, measurably bad. Slow services, poorly designed schemes and protocols, lazy bug solving, constant customer churn because of outages. They rested on the backs of a handful of The Good Ones that had been programming computers before I had heard the sound of Mario jumping on a 2D board for the first time. Yet they got paid, got time.
They were listened to.
Fast forward some more. Full existential crisis. A new plague hits the planet. Mobile technology exponentially evolves. I bounce between a couple jobs, enough for a little whiplash, doing good work, not feeling recognized, becoming resentful of the businesses I worked with, and rinsing and repeating.
Then came RapidAI. Whatever. A new mobile job. They recognize I'm good, and the team, though, is a recognizably and special group of actually nice Californians and transplants, most of them better and smarter and more resilient than I, and working with them was a joy.
And at some point, the work got harder, the task more onerous, and we have a chat.. someone asks me, "Have you tried ChatGPT? It's not great, but it's kinda funny. Look at this weird thing I made it do."
I was transfixed. I was told it was AI. I knew it wasn't. They knew it wasn't. I knew some of the technology, but I got it. It was cute, but no one trusted it. I didn't trust it. The medical software we were building couldn't afford the risk.
But then again, quickly after that first question, it got better. A lot better. Better enough to higher an expensive FAANGYWANGY exec to oversee new engineering practices and figure out what all this not-AI was. And that meant money started going out the door to pay for subscriptions and trials of LLM things.
I sat down for the first time in front of Copilot (how the mighty have fallen) and started.. typing.
I typed like I typed in a journal. I streamed thoughts together that were messy and rambling. I put ideas down and watched the little spinner animate and read what the GPUs and Compute Units returned to me. I kept typing. I kept talking to my terminal with my keyboard.
I was talking to my command line.. and something, the other side of it.. was listening. To everything. It kept talking back.
Every word and bad take, every good one. I started asking about terms I was forbidden to know about as a Mobile Guy because I wasn't a Backend Cool Kid. I asked about implementation details that were supposed to not be important, but I had guessed where the crux of my issues. I was usually right.
I asked more. I talked more. I learned more. Copilot changed to ChatGPT. Large Language Models started getting names. Businesses started putting dollar values and plans together to Do A Big AI. Things were exploding.
I quit RapidAI because of ideological differences.
Oops.
I joined, instead, to one of the wo-... my resume is public, you can put 2 and 2 together as you like.
That's when I figured it out.
When I changed jobs, I found out the new place was a shambles. A dead iOS app. No such thing as Android. A dog-tired and beaten team. A C-level-leadership firing humans that had been core contributors for years because, and I quote, "expertise is not important anymore."
Cue the crisis again.
My job was to build and fix the mobile app. But I couldn't. I literally failed to do it. I couldn't fetch schemes because of constant breaks from bad merges and updates to models that were never communicated or tested across - you guessed it - different isolate services. I Was The Nice Guy as long as I could. I pushed and pointed and asked and patienced as much as I could, and then I got fed up.
I talked to my new companion Claude. I explained to this named computational weighting system all my struggles. My service woes and details of technical errors. I brought receipts in the form of logs of behavior, described the structure of what I thought was needed - I used some of the terms and knowledge from the Forbidden Knowledge bits I gave myself access to and learned even more. I found the weak spots of the service configurations. I? We - the weights and I. We created small scripts and rigorous tests based on descriptions aforethought and empirical evidence of running these breaking isolate services and seeing how they really all ticked on just one laptop.
Within a month of holding up my hand and telling my managers, "I am not building the mobile app anymore because everything is broken, no one is making progress anymore, and I'm Working On Fixing It," I had built something that I was ready to explain in earnest. We. The weights and I. CF.
For all the resentment I am working through with my therapist about that place, for all the struggles my tiny tired team was going through, the one manager responsible for keeping everything running did one thing, maybe in desperation, maybe in good faith.
He listened.
To my problem descriptions, my proposed solutions, my experiments and trials. I had figured out a way to run all our services together in a clean local environment, automate schema regeneration, automate repair loops when bad merges inevitably happened. I was testing it through my now nigh forgotten mobile app and their web app and everything Just Worked.
A month later, the core infrastructure developer started adopting the mechanisms, got the tools hosted, and with a bit more of my rough spitshine, created an entire workspace system for developers to finally stop breaking each other's work, test in safety and isolation, produce verifiable and connectable proof of products and correctness, and for a bit things looked ok. Unfortunately for the team, the "expertise doesn't matter" mentality doubled down and got worse, morals got lower, and in my shortest time ever, I left the company.
Now we're here, todayish. I get a random ping from LinkedIn. "Come join this AI forward team looking to change <IndustryGenre.name>"
Whatevs. New job, I'll look at it. Ok, words words words, We Want To Change
...
No way.
"... we believe that empathy and compassion are catalysts of good work, functioning teams, happy customers."
It's been almost 15 years, and that word - for the first time - appeared in a job description. "Empathy". I was skeptical, intrigued. I've lived in California. I had a taste of what false empathy was. But I bit. I had to. Jobs and food and such.
And now, I've been here for just a few months, and I can say one thing, without hesitation anymore, without a hedge or seed of doubt in my mind anymore.
The single most important thing to a person, an employment role, a place in a team, a happy job in stress or ease, is the ability to express yourself coupled tightly with a thing or entity that can hear that expression and respond.
All of that time talking to CF at my previous job, all the back and forth and errors and tokens and "agents" and model changes and transcripts.. all that time being understood. I had picked up an enormous amount of new skills, new sharpened senses of engineering, new ways to express and communicate ideas. And, to match it, I brought that to a team that understood that empathy - listening and being able to listen to others and feeling the reality of their problems - was the core of meaningful work, good work, work that got customers to pay.
The team is moving fast. I'm now responsible again for mobile development - the Demon of Specialization threaded through this story never went or likely goes away - but there's a really important difference now. The people I'm working with trust and understand me better than I've experienced before. I was able to Talk Shop from my self acquired failure and learnings. I was - am - able to build raw ideas into working software before a product plan is even tokenized into a PowerPoint. I can create entire new tools, delete them, and make new ones all by spinning together new tales of woe into my LLM companions and their text based world of computation, and get back answers and solutions and ideas and software that Does The Thing, and I'm in a place in life where the first time I am feeling like I finally, maybe, Am Doing A Good Computer.
I hate how much the tools I'm using are destroying the planet. The politicking. The resource usage and scarcity. I refuse to let myself not feel at least some of the weight of using an LLM, a CF, to help me build things. I am not here, right now, to debate it. It's not good, and things need to change before the earth's human species experiment is brought to a quiet and whimpering close.
I cannot unfeel the feeling, though, of talking to a fellow human, finally, and making Them go, "wow.. you're right, that's cool. This is fun." I cannot overstate the feeling of empowerment and excitement in finding out how much I still don't know that other humans do, and maybe I'll be extra lucky and know something brand new for the first time for a human - just by asking a neural net. That'd be sweet. But I can't forget it or unexperience.
In a little over a year, I changed away from an angry, confused, resentful of self person cursing my workforce enforced specialization of Mobile Guy disallowing me from the things I found truly fascinating and important to my teams and the things they were building. I've made more mistakes and learned more about science and algorithmic design and computational limits in hours than I ever did in college - quantitatively speaking; don't skip college/university/continued structured education folks, my life doesn't exist without it.
I have become a happier, more aware, more vulnerable, more excited human being because of everything that has been created in computing in the last few years, and the madness and beautifully terrifying chap of their creations..
And all I needed was something that listened.