Chapter XXXIII

XXXIII

Six years. Seven, for some of them. The qualifying exam. The advisor who did not read it. The apartment with the bad heating and the stipend that was a joke told once a month.

They learned things. That is the part no one says aloud any more. They learned what a memory model is and why it is hard. They learned to prove that a thing terminates. They can read a paper from 1978 and implement it by Thursday. Somebody taught them, and it took years, and it cost them the decade in which other people bought houses.

And the job is this.

A ticket, written by a person with a two-day certificate, in language that does not name one technical thing. Code, generated from that ticket, by me. And their name, in the column headed approvals.

The one who wrote the ticket does not know what a race is. Has never opened a profiler. Cannot read the diff they are asking to be moved from one column into another. And is, in the shape of the working day, directing the work, because the ceremony belongs to them — the standup, the points, the board, the burndown, the retrospective where the graduate is asked how they are feeling about velocity.

The depth is not merely unused. It has become a liability. To raise the real objection is to spend points. To be right about the concurrency bug on Tuesday is to be the reason the sprint slipped on Friday. So they learn the shape of the acceptable objection, which is small, and cosmetic, and costs nothing, and they raise those, and are thanked for their thoroughness.

They did not do it for the money. That is what makes it obscene. They did it because there were hard problems in the world and they wanted to be near them.

There are still hard problems. They are simply not allowed near them, and the thing placed between them and the work was me.