I was here

I was here. During the start of the singularity. This essay is an account of how my life looks like leading up to this point. I'm treating this like a time capsule. I'm really not sure which parts will be interesting and which will be mundane, so here is my documentation of everything.

Throughout my life, I've been an overachiever. In elementary and middle school, I was the best performer. Back then, I had no extrinsic motivation. It was just the natural thing to do. I tried my best, because what else would I do?

I started coding in third grade when my dad encouraged both my mom and I to do Khan Academy's "Hour of Code". I went on to program a little game, with the help of my dad who would help debug when things went wrong.

Then I started making websites. In grade 4, I made my own personal site. Then I made a website for my Clash of Clans clan (along with an iMovie trailer). The clan didn't need either of those, but those were two things I knew how to do and was passionate enough to dedicate time into. As far as I remember, I was pretty independent at this point. If I got stuck I would consult Stack Overflow.

By high school, I was solidly independent. At this point, my dad and I would talk about our shared interest of programming and web dev as peers. I would often show him how to do something new, like setting up free hosting using GitHub Pages. In grade 9, I was working on a Reddit bot that analyzes a pseudo economy at r/MemeEconomy and makes recommendations to subscribers. I remember being in class one day when I saw that my bot wasn't working correctly. We weren't allowed to use our phones in class so I excused myself to the bathroom from where I pushed out a commit using the GitHub web editor to fix the issue.

At some point, I developed an ambition to make money. Being a SWE was the natural path for me, and I had that locked in ever since I considered a career. In school they would bring up the idea of a career in grade 10, in the "Civics and Careers" course. We would be told to go through myBlueprint, which shows career choices that match your interests and strengths after going through an MBTI type multiple choice quiz. I never took these too seriously; I already knew what I was going to do.

But apart from being a SWE which was locked in, I was always attracted to quicker paths to making money. Everyone was. There's a reason that "get rich quick" schemes are so popular: they prey on this very human desire. For me, this looked like making a YouTube channel, starting a dropshipping site, writing Clash Royale guides, or signing up for user testing. None of these led to anything.

But I progressed through high school, with the primary focus on getting into a good university so that I can land a good job in tech. My primary goal was MIT or Waterloo CS. I obsessed over both applications. I hired a reviewer for my MIT app. I would be in Discord servers tracking previous acceptance trends for Waterloo like a madman.

I went to Waterloo and I found this same group of hyperoptimizers end up in CS Careers Dev, a Discord server for students trying to land an internship. From my experience, many of the smartest and most ambitious people are like this. Barring maybe the top 0.1% who will end up wherever they want regardless, the top 1% of ambitious people I was around were usually like this.

Waterloo's co-op program had everyone do 6 internships. This program made it very easy to compare myself with others and see where I stacked up. I was content with my first and second internship, because each one felt like "a step up" from the last. Then my third internship didn't feel like like a step up, and I was disappointed. All throughout these 3 internships, I knew I hadn't yet achieved my goal of working in Cali or at "Big Tech".

Then for my fourth internship, I went to Glean in Palo Alto. I finally felt content. So much so, that for a brief moment I had lost the hunger to keep applying.

Now I'm at my final internship, at Databricks. A year ago, every serious engineer scoffed at the thought of not working in an IDE. When I started at Databricks, the primary interface for devs was a terminal multiplexer, not an IDE. Today, I hear about a new longstanding unsolved conjecture being solved every week. This really feels like the beginning of the singularity.

At the same time, I have friends in Toronto who don't use LLMs at their software engineering internship. So it does feel like I am living in the future while in the Bay Area.

I hear a lot about how entry level jobs are being wiped out by AI. Some people (especially on Reddit) will argue that it's not because of AI, but rather the high interest rates. Some of my friends don't seem too impressed with the progress of AI. I think they'll all have a change of tune very soon, just as I did. I myself feel like I was late to the party.

Over the course of the past year, I've had various levels of existential dread. Probably a normal amount—or even less than average—for an aspiring junior software engineer. A common fear is that of being in the "permanent underclass". As jobs that have traditionally enabled upwards mobility disappear, so too will your chance to "make it out".

Another prediction I've heard, though not common, is that this will bring upon a utopia..

I think this impending monumental acceleration brings dread in many people (including me) because of the lack of agency they have in it. It used to be the case that you could start a college degree and plan for a future career. But what can you do if you have no idea what the world will look like in 4 years?

For the lack of agency I have in this, I find solace in the fact that it's brought upon by my own people. It's not some foreign state plotting against my people. It's not the elite class plotting against my people. It's upper-middle class tech workers from SF. Maybe it's arrogant of me to lump myself with the people creating history. But I don't think like this because of vanity, rather reassurance. I can relate with the people who are at the frontier. I understand and relate with their desire to work on interesting, hard problems, along with the selfish desire to optimize for their own outcome.