Thread by @GeePawHill

The weirdest thing about being a teacher for young geek minds: I am teaching them things, like small steps, a walking skeleton, a making app, reliance on spikes, and even TDD itself, that their actual first jobs will most likely forbid them to do.

The young'uns I work with are actually nearly all hire-able as is, after 18 months of instruction, without any intervention from me. I mean, not exaggerating, these are good young geeks, clever and motivated and energetic and articulate.

No. The problem they're gonna face when they get to The Show isn't technical or intellectual at all. No language or framework or OS or library or algorithm is gonna daunt them, not for long. These kids are unquestionably well on their way to being professional geeks.

No, the problem they're gonna face is how to sustain their connection to the well of geek joy, in a trade that is systematically bent on simultaneously exploiting that connection while denying it exists and refusing any and all access to it.

It is possible, to stick it out, to acquire enough space and power, to re-assert one's path to the well. Many have done it, many are doing it today.

But it is very hard.

Very hard.

Far harder than learning the Visitor pattern, or docker, or dart or SQL or even Haskell.

How do you tell people you've watched *become* as they bathed in the cool clear water that, for some long time, five years or more, they must take navy showers, whore's baths, fleeting sips, as they navigate the horrors of extractive capitalist software development?

The best answer I have, so far, is to try and teach them how and where to find water outside of work.

It is a lousy answer.

I feel horrible giving it. But I'd feel even more horrible if I didn't tell them the truth.

The truth is that, today, most geeks have reasonably well-paid jobs in which they do mindless stupid variably-immoral work. They're regarded by their orgs as expensive fancy-typists. They're given ludicrous rulesets to obey. There are motivational posters featuring moutains.

I try to remind them: the pay is real, but it isn't the thing. If you look inside your heart, if you keep looking inside your heart, you know this.

The thing is the well of geek joy, the weird inexplicable-to-others brushing of your skill and your talent against the godhead.

Ya gotta feed your family. You gotta. That's not negotiable. But you don't gotta forget the well. To be any good at all you have to keep finding the well, keep reaching it, keep noticing it. Doesn't matter whether it's office hours or after hours. Matters whether you get to it.

The thing you gotta watch, when you become a professional geek, isn't the newest tech, and it sure as hell isn't the org's process.

You gotta watch whether/how you're getting to the well.

If you're getting to the well, in whatever way, you'll stay alive and change the world.

Motivational posters, featuring mountains.