The breakout cycle of high school

A story of moulting.

If you’re reading this, odds are good you remember the social experience of high school. Most people have been there. It stands to good reason then that it has come to serve as a recurring allegory for a kind of arrested social dynamic that plays out in many theatres of life beyond high school proper – it’s a legible touchstone that allows someone to reach through the minutia of circumstance to communicate to you about what you already know without begging the specifics out of your mouth. Isn’t this such a clever and useful thing?

For me, I experienced two (or maybe three, depending on how you count it) cycles of ‘high school’ in high school proper, and several more beyond it. When I first enrolled, I had been out of the public school system for nearly three years; my main challenges were social reintegration and algebra. In one of everyone’s last hurrahs of childhood social serendipity, we all found friends together when everyone was new, and social cliques began to form. I found myself hanging out with a group of who you might call geeks and nerds. They enjoyed video games, writing, band, the works. Some of them were kind of autistic, but it didn’t bother us. Then I started to drift away.

I don’t know what, but there was something within me to answer for why I disassociated from those people. I remember walking the cathedral halls of our lavish public high school and thinking to myself about how immature these guys were. It became more and more clear to me how they embodied things I never wanted to be. In the second semester of my freshman year, I began attending JROTC, and tried to start anew at making friends there instead. I finished the year out, started my sophomore year, and learned an incredible volume about socialising once again. And once again, towards October and November, I started to drift away. I kept learning and learning about my commanders and peers, and soon discovered that they, too, embodied other things I never wanted to be: petty, vindictive, and even amoral. JROTC gave me a crash course in office politics and garden variety corruption. And after that I had to move out of the state, and I stopped caring about school altogether.

It sounds weird, but I experienced high school in the allegorical sense twice, in high school. By the time I began to attend community college in 2019, I was already married for a year and some change, and I knew what the game was very well and had every intention of playing it. Not to toot my own horn, but I like to think I very much knocked it out of the park – about one out of every five students in the school would socialise in the lunch hall, and everyone who frequented it knew who I was. I was friends with all of the most friendly and popular people there, making me a kind of paragon of the lunch hall. Considering I never got laid in high school and was always relinquished to the margins, I take a fair bit of pride in that. I got in, got out, and got the t-shirt. In the long run, my only fuckups downstream of that were less about the dynamic of high school and more about being too trusting of the closest friends I made back then, which is a story for another time.

I had experienced this breakout cycle coterminously with my high schooling in the ROM hacking scene and my time frequenting the (now dead) PokéCommunity forums. I started learning about ROM hacking and game design and I literally couldn’t stop for over a year. Pokémon Citrite was less of a game proper and more of an object through which I came to learn how everything about the Game Boy Advance worked. Sadly, once I had seen it all, I stopped, even though I never meant to. Citrite would be rechristened Project Trinity, explode in scope, get put into cryo, and the rest was history.

During and after college I experienced this breakout cycle again coterminously, but this time in my short career as a tech worker. I spent some time dabbling into various projects and trying to make sense of the world of computing, which would lead to the many treatises you see on this site regarding mechanicalism, John Backus, C* and so on. I also found Justine Tunney’s Cosmopolitan libc project, and became its first outside contributor for a very brief time before she blocked me out of GitHub and Twitter for ragging on university as a gatekeeper. Very odd and arbitrary reasons to be so violently antisocial, but it was brief enough that I didn’t dwell on it. I was on the clock waiting tables when it all happened.

After that I would try to get a job several times. I was by this point an incredibly skilled low-level engineer with a plenty large enough rep sheet on GitHub. How hard could it be, right? Well, I was misled by a certain Samuel Henly who worked at Facebook at the time, who was just throwing names into the Facebook resume shredder because he had no downside and a $2,000 upside, claiming he was “giving you a referral” to any warm body who asked on Twitter. After I was done getting my hopes up about that, I applied to work at Amazon, only to be blown off by the Indian recruiting lady who was assigned to me. My husband had a huge change of opinion about H-1B types since then which I have also come to adopt. After all those failures, I finally got a paying job from searching on Angel List, for a palpable sum of $10,000/year at some stupid startup that’s not worth naming. I had solicited tons of feedback from Twitter contacts I knew to make sure that it was going well, and the only person who told me this was a bad deal immediately retracted their criticism for no apparent reason. So after working it for a couple of months, I woke up one day and realised the CEO was fucking clueless, and stopped logging in entirely because I couldn’t deal with trying to explain any of this to him.

All the while these things are in the works, I got a real job working unarmed security which I really enjoyed, despite it paying next to nothing. Admittedly my years are probably running together at this point, but at some point David Holz stumbled onto one of my old Twitter accounts and reached out to tell me he likes how I post. We kept talking and he found out about how I needed work – he seemed quite confident he could help me find something, so he set me up with an interview at his old company, UltraLeap. David said if it wasn’t a go he could probably work me in to help out at a lab he was starting for at least $60K/year, which you’ve probably heard of by now. Initial interviews went great, I was a perfect cultural fit. But in the last interview they whiteboard scammed me, probably because they weren’t actually interested in hiring a new person what with them having recently been bought out by some no-name firm that amounts to a gravy train whose days are numbered. My employment probably necessarily meant less money or time for everyone else. Never heard a thing of substance from any of them since.

Another nine months or so of security work later, including 74-hour weeks out in the elements guarding a fence post for Satan himself, and I’m back in the spirit again of trying to get a real job doing something I’m good at. I had enough breaking my back trying to suck up overtime like a vacuum only to bring home checks that are dwarfed by what I could make if I was half the programmer I am. After some complaining and getting a big signal boost from a guy named Lewis, another guy named Maxim took notice and gave me an interview. We clicked pretty okay, he liked my story a lot, and the team was unanimously in support about the quality of my code. He offered me $58K/year on a probationary independent contract position. Towards the end of the first month, I started running into serious architectural issues with the codebase they were running, like basic shit about what is where and the overall model of the system I was tasked to deal with. The official prescription for these issues was for me to bug my handler for everything. I told them this wasn’t going to work due to me running into issues destroying my coding stints all the time, and that we needed to regroup and reevaluate our goals to make this code more workable for people besides the guy who wrote it. When they insisted that I do it anyway, and bug him at 1 in the morning if I must, I told them in a group video call that it was morally wrong for me to develop software like that. I was fired with the remainder of my contract’s pay as severance. I haven’t heard much of anything about them since, other than a recent rebranding. I haven’t attempted to get a job in tech since, and have since once again drifted away from the Twitter people I once associated with, discovering them to be very illiterate and unnecessarily cold when I would try to reach out and talk to them about things as a friend. And coterminous with all of this was my friendship with Charles, which I’ve already covered extensively on this blog and won’t reiterate here.

I don’t know why things were so much more painful for me in tech, but I still think by and large it was the same kind of arbitrary failures I experienced in JROTC. It was so easy to mess one thing up and then you’re disqualified from promotion boards for the next three months. I was angrier at myself about that than I had thought possible. But when I look back on it all, it was all bullshit. Why?

These measures are all too arbitrary to be good. Is there any better clue-in that it’s all bullshit than having someone spend a month and a half sizing me up and feeling me out as the great computer scientist I am, only to offer me $58K/year probationally? It’s not axiomatically different from the alcoholic PhD I let crash on my couch who was dangerously infatuated with me, only to crash my mother’s car, flee from justice, and be sending me shitty hatemail on some new account months after I kicked him out because I like RFK Jr. This is all so existentially fake. It’s high school. It’s not fucking real. No great computer scientist is consigned to do janitorial work for a semi-retired game programmer without gross mismanagement or undisclosed contempt. And I don’t really care what it is or why. I just got out of it.

I learned a lot about the tech industry over the past few years. Just like I learned so much about office politics in JROTC, and the Game Boy Advance internals in ROM hacking. In a sense, I did succeed if you measure my success like community college: I got in, got out, got the t-shirt. You never saw me there moping around campus, waiting and wondering on everybody else.

I guess I just don’t want to stumble so much about it like I did, you know? Community college worked so well because I stumbled so badly through high school (which could have been worse). Now that I’ve stumbled so much through the world of tech and business, I’m probably not going to to be blindsided by any of it moving forward.

It was hard for me to come to appreciate just how fucked in the head tech is – I promise you it is so much worse than the excesses you see in crypto or web or programming socks or whatever – but appreciate it I have now.

I moulted.