Thread by @arbedout

Tell me what you do at $DAYJOB writing software, and I'll tell you what food service industry job you'd be comfortable working at.

Thread!

You work at a nameless Fortune 500 company, churning out updates to the internal homegrown CRM software. You desperately want to leave but you have student loans to pay and this was the first temp-to-hire gig you could find.

You're working at McDonalds, and you effing hate it.

You work at a seed funded startup, desperately churning out code to grab more and more total addressable market share. You declined the Fortune 500 gig cuz you're cooler than that.

You'd be at a "hip" fast-casual spot like QDoba. You think it's better than McDonalds. It's not.

You work at a marquee software shop, complete with a Charismatic Leader with Vision and software that, in private, you strongly caution friends and family members not to use. You try to write decent code in spite of the crazy.

Welcome to Flavortown, you work for Guy Fieri.

You work in a university, or a hospital. You got stuck here after doing a post-doc and they're paying for you to get a comp sci degree. You started out in biology but decided to switch careers.

You're working at Meals on Wheels as part of your court-mandated community service.

You work at a nameless infrastructure company - cloud
this or networking that. Your job is to build the shit that everyone else builds on. Everybody uses your stuff, nobody knows you exist; you like it that way.

Welcome to Cisco - er, sorry, I mean Sysco.

You work for yourself, taking on a handful of clients as a one-man-band consultant. You spend more time managing clients and sorting out taxes than coding. You tell yourself you prefer the stress to the drudgery of McDonalds.

You're the halal truck. Hot sauce, white sauce?

You wrote a Chrome plugin a few years ago that has a few hundred dedicated users with their own weird niche community. There's no sustainable business here but the money you make in tips helps make ends meet and you genuinely love your users.

You're the tamale lady! (RIP)

You give your software away for free. It's not about the money; it's about enjoying your life and sharing it with others. The only people who use your code are random weirdos, but they're the only ones you care about.

You work the grill at the neighborhood cookout, respect 🙏

You work at an indie game dev shop, making retro MetroidVania style games for download on Steam or an App Store.

You're the tiny corner bakery that's always a month from missing rent. You'll never be popular but your pastries will be a life-changing revelation to your fans.

You work at a AAA game studio on franchise titles, every one a multi-year effort. You often work 100 hour weeks and try to focus on why you took this job and the joy the product once made you feel.

You're a food scientist at Pepsi-Co. At least kids love sugar water, right?

You work at a security appliance vendor writing firmware and doing site installs. Half your clients are forced to use you to meet PCI requirements, the rest are recovering from a breach and should have used you from the start.

You're Pedialyte, which is technically food.

You post on UpWork and Fiverr for dev jobs but you barely know how to code. Your main ambition is to spend as much time smoking pot as possible. This is just another side gig to you.

You're the underground lobster roll guy, and I have so many questions. thrillist.com/eat/new-york/b…

You're a CPA that's learned Visual Basic because you wanted to get *really* good with Excel. Your macros are all tiny, magical wonders. Somehow the entire firm relies on your code for billing and payroll even though no one calls you a programmer.

You stock vending machines.

Straight out of college you landed a backend dev job three layers removed from interacting with end users. You pass your days honing your craft, tweaking text editor config settings and paring down your codebase to the bare essentials.

You're a sushi chef. Irasshaimase!

You're working your way through college on the night shift at the ResNet help desk. You desperately want to get your hands dirty with real work, but you're swamped with routine tickets. You'll look back on this as the best job you ever had.

You're the 99¢ pizza slice shop!

You learned COBOL as your first language because your local library in the middle of nowhere only had one programming book in stock. Turns out your skills are weirdly useful since everyone who knows COBOL is retiring or passed on.

You pickle vegetables for a living. Weirdo.

You're a junior QA dev at an SMB in charge of catching regressions. Your job is to ensure no one breaks the build and all tests stay green. You run through the same two dozen checklists over and over, every day.

You're a sandwich artist at Subway. Can I get extra meatballs?

And finally: Eons ago you built an open-source project that changed the world. People have strong opinions about you formed after a few seconds browsing the first page of Google Search. Somehow you managed to turn water into wine - er, code into money.

You know who you are.