It's not uncommon for people to frame history relative to their own experience, and I suppose I'm no different. US history isn't very well taught in school, let alone local or state history. Growing up in inner-city schools in Cleveland, especially during desegregation, exposed me to a lot of things I probably would not have learned in the suburbs, and I'm grateful for that foundation.
Being a Gen-X'er is interesting because our historical frame is so different from the generations before and after. Those before us knew war in a different way, and were witness to the civil rights movement. Those who came after didn't really know life before the Internet. We got to see top-40 radio at its best. We lived under the constant thread of nuclear annihilation, but also saw the Berlin wall come down. College education grew as a viable and meaningful way to transition to adulthood. The AIDS epidemic hit. We had a front row seat to the birth of the commercial Internet. Then 9/11 happened, just as we were figuring out adulthood. Years of war with little to no benefit ensued, but unlike wars that came before, this one had no draft, vague goals, and it cost more than all of our previous wars combined, adjusted for inflation. They were funded entirely by deficit spending. Meanwhile, a combination of private and public efforts made extraordinary advances in science and medicine. For awhile, we led the world in this way.
The preview for negative change started with the erosion of journalism, the fundamental means of keeping government accountable. The Internet broke local journalism entirely. Local newspapers, even if they did online right, struggled to survive. There wasn't much money online for the coverage of city council meetings and high school sports. At the national level, there was also a shift underway. I remember when the bombing began in Iraq, I was channel surfing through cable news channels. Fox News was showing a waving flag banner, which I read as taking a side, not reporting. People were dying, live on TV, and they were quite literally waving a flag. Suddenly the "news" that questioned the government was telling you not to question the government. I dismissed it as a fluke at the time. Surely the institution of the American press was not going to radically change.
But something changed specifically in 2008. It was subtle at first, and it had something to do with the election of a black man with a somewhat unusual name. Politics were always somewhat divisive, but the election of Barack Obama inspired a new divisiveness that we had not seen in our lifetime. People were already angry at the state of things, with the Great Recession, ongoing war and a housing crisis that persists today. The discontent among many Americans was rooted in the feeling of being unseen, of government not serving them. Fiscally, this was likely somewhat universal, but starting with the Tea Party folks, they saw an opportunity to leverage the discontent of a portion of that cohort through coded racism and culture wars. The same people that leaned into personal responsibility started acting as the victims, blaming people that were different for everything that ailed them.
So Americans decided they wanted change again, and you know how that went. The change came with a basic lack of decency and decorum, and the racism, antisemitism and xenophobia stopped being coded and started being blatant. We voted against our own self-interest again, and now, with a pointless war and inflation out of control, we have a government that tears down parts of the White House, obsesses about things that don't matter to regular folks, and we have a congress that let's it happen. Indeed, at this 250-year point, I wonder if we'll see 300. I don't recognize the country I live in. The vice president actually said that if Nixon were to commit his crimes today, it would be no big deal. That doesn't land the way he thinks it does.
Despite this, I remain optimistic. While the cult of personality suggests that embracing the contradictions in our history is unpatriotic, I argue the opposite. In fact, it's time to take patriotism back to mean something more than a campaign slogan. Many of our founding fathers were slave owners, yet the America that they wrote about celebrates its ability to improve. These were flawed men that sought a higher ideal. Continuous improvement was always the goal, because they knew that "all men created equal" didn't really mean "all men" at the time. The Constitution and the system that it lays out is meant to change, because the authors were self-aware enough to know that they couldn't get it right all at once.
We must also look to history to observe the causes of societal failure. Autocracies do not endure. Wealth inequality contributed to the end of the Roman Empire, third century China and the French monarchy. We are not infallible, and yet we seem willing to embrace these qualities for the moment. But again, our system allows for course correction, and there's evidence that we're headed in that direction.
Our nation was founded and built by immigrants. The vitriol pointed at the immigrants of today is misguided. Again, history shows that our greatest eras of prosperity happened during the heights of immigration. It has never come at the expense of those born here. They're historically less likely to commit crimes than those born here. And of course, more people mean a higher GDP that benefits everyone. It's just math.
We can't celebrate freedom without allowing for freedom of the press, health autonomy, the ability to vote without burden and the ability to move freely without fear of arrest for the color of our skin. These should not be controversial.
With two and a half centuries under our belt, we can be sure that we're only caretakers and stewards of this nation. We're ephemeral. The question is, what will people say about us when we're gone? Did we live up to the promise of America? It's not too late to make sure that we do.
I return to work on Monday, so today ends the unjobbed time. Technically, it's as long as the six-month lapses in 2001 and 2009, but those were a lot different, with recessions in play. This time, I didn't even spend much time looking for almost two months. I was ready for a little sabbatical. Then Diana's appendectomy and subsequent related issues came next. I would measure this more around four months, which is maybe a hair longer than normal. When I look back, gosh, it happens a lot in my line of work.
Time moved kind of slowly this time around, which is welcome for anyone middle-age and feeling like time is getting away from you. The absence of routine always slows things down. Psychologically, it was challenging for different reasons. The financial situation was better and worse than previous. With a fat severance, there was no hurry. I never applied for unemployment. On the other hand, I also started to game out what offboarding from my tech career really looked like. I solidified the idea that I don't want to wait for "retirement age," which is still so far away. I did the math, and I'm realistically in "FIRE" range by a year or two. Provided that Diana had health insurance for us, I could have possibly made it work today, but our investments aren't liquid enough. That, and the volatility caused by an unstable guy in the White House means the market is constantly up and down. So I was simultaneously in great shape, and not close enough to make a safe change.
I had no problem finding purpose. Building out TogetherLoop was super fun, and I really shored up all of my coding projects. I made the most of my $20 monthly Claude subscription, and I've never had more fun doing this sort of work. I wouldn't want to code full-time again for work, but AI makes it so that you can concentrate on technical design and architecture, which is the stuff I'm most interested in. I also spent a fair amount of time building LEGO, playing video games and hanging out with Diana and Simon. We had two cruises already on the books, so we did those, too.
My biggest source of angst and anxiousness came from the job hunting itself. The job market has technically been stable, and the reporting around "tech layoffs" tends to be more with the giants than medium or small companies. What has changed in the four years since I last had to look is the way recruiting and interviewing goes. It has not changed for the better. That alone is worth its own blog post. I'm certain I applied to 200 job listings, and scored zero calls from them. The action that I did get was all from referrals. Some of those interview loops were as broken as the rest of the process, and even though I knew it wasn't personal, it really wore on me. Combined with a very challenging parenting season, especially with me being the most accessible to Simon, and I got to be a hot mess at several points.
That's all behind me now, and for the first time in my life, I have an idea of where I expect to be in five years. People ask you about stuff like that all of the time, and I never have a very specific answer. This time, I do. And the job I landed has so much potential, and I'm already seeing it just in the onboarding and setup prior to starting. It's pretty exciting. I haven't looked this forward to starting a new job since Microsoft.
Like many software people, I often play the role of tech support at home. My experience means that I can generally imagine what went on at the company that made it, and why it sucks. And by the way, most of it sucks. I'm not sure why we tolerate it, other than there's little incentive to make it better if you're competing against more suck. It's infuriating.
Most recently, my wife got a new phone, and the credentials for the Ring app didn't transfer over. She's been trying for weeks, and the requirements to unlock her account were ridiculous. Even better, when you try to recover your account, it spawns a help page that tells you to enable recovery options. In the account that you can't enter. I can't make this stuff up. And don't even get me started on the trash in the academic world. Our school district does their best at integration, but much of it is garbage. That makes my kid rage. Speaking of rage, try making anything with Google's FamilyLink work right or in a predictable way across Google products. Total trash.
So I call upon my fellow software people... we must put an end to crappy software. Enough already. I keep seeing all of these hot takes about productivity and how everything is easier and faster to make (and somehow more expensive, too). The outcome least spoken about is making software better. No one cares if you can sling 20 agents at a time churning out code based on incorrect assumptions. Agent slinging is not an outcome or a functional requirement. It's not in your product requirements at all. It's not in your mission statement or business plan. No one ever said, or will ever say, "I love this software, they must have made it faster with AI!"
If your software does not delight, turn on the red light. Get it in front of people early and often. Feel the customer pain. Listen to what they have to say. If we're going to leverage this new found power of agentic coding, let's use it to make software better. That should be the goal.