Adolescent Googlers Corporate Blues

Multithreaded JavaScript has been published with O'Reilly!

Programmers of the 21st century are really just a bunch of Googlers. We spent our entire adolescence finding what we need on the internet. Every new technology we learned, every platform we experiemented with, was due to research we did on our own. And it was great, we could do it on our own time. It could be 2am and we would be trying to compile a package and we could look up an error. It could be Saturday and we wouldn't know how to make a database call from our framework and we could just Google it. With every new discovery came that giggle-inducing tingle of excitement, and that was all we needed.

Then, when we grew up, we're thrust into a corporate world, with all of their proprietary, costly, closed-source technologies we had never heard of. And all this Open Source and free stuff we had learned and all these years of research proficiency was suddenly not worth very much. We need to go to scheduled meetings. We need to call people up and ask them how to do things. We need to have meetings about meetings about research just to find out the other person couldn't make it that day or that another person had the information we sought.

This is why we burn out in the corporate world. This is why we cringe every time you give us another god damn acronym. This is why we look out the windows of our tall towers in the financial district and dream of the startup life just beyond the horizon.

Tags: #narrative
Thomas Hunter II Avatar

Thomas has contributed to dozens of enterprise Node.js services and has worked for a company dedicated to securing Node.js. He has spoken at several conferences on Node.js and JavaScript, is an O'Reilly published author, and is an organizer of NodeSchool SF.