I moved to Seattle for a high-paying tech job. It turned out to be the loneliest time of my life.::After accepting a job at Amazon, Alexander Nguyen moved to Seattle, where he experienced a period of intense loneliness.
So this guy just sounds like he had trouble adulting after college. Happens to many, regardless of industry.
TBH tech is its unique dark horse. Especially raw coding. I’m on the front end and still, juniors are expected to basically glue themselves to a screen 10h a day. I get into flow and after about 5h straight of nothing but a screen, and man, your brain is just loopy.
Sitting at a desk in front of a screen is an awful existence.
Men will literally write a Business Insider article instead of going to therapy. No really, I feel like this guy could benefit from some therapy.
It wasn’t until I met a few women on dating apps that I realized being a software engineer in a tech hub is far from special. Working at companies like Amazon or Microsoft just isn’t interesting; it’s the norm here.
It’s weird to expect that you’d get dates just for being an engineer. What? Like if someone did date you just because you are an engineer, that would be such a shallow relationship.
I think one big reason for that is software engineering doesn’t require socially demanding skills like in product management or UX design.
Strongly disagree, software engineering is mostly social skills. It’s all about communicating problems, learning your users pain points, explaining your solutions, and coordinating work. Coding the actual solutions is typically the easy part unless you are doing cutting edge computer science research.
Yeah what. In my experience you won’t get far as a software engineer without those skills unless maybe you’re very highly specialised at which point those skills become highly desirable rather than mandatory.
After work, I was often too tired to socialize, so from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. I ended up making dinner alone or doing house chores.
Yeah. It turns out when you do not socialize, you may feel lonely. There are tons of meet up groups that he could have looked into here. There are even ones specifically for transplants trying to get by in the city. One thing Seattleites won’t do for you is do all of the work. He is right that people here are good at small talk but if you are looking to befriend someone, it’s up to you to put in the effort because chances are that we already have a large group of friends.
His dating experience is a little cringe. People who are not in the tech industry probably don’t want to hear much about it so making it the main thing you talk about is not going to go over well with many people. Hell, even as someone who has worked in tech, I really could not care much that your current sprint is unrealistic. Your work should largely stay there. And who the fuck thinks taking a date to work is a good outing? The one exception that I could see is checking out Bezos’ balls.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Alexander Nguyen, a software engineer who moved from New York City to Seattle for a job at Amazon.
I was surprised by how much people in Seattle liked making small talk; they asked me how my days were going, which wasn’t something I normally experienced in New York City.
I then spent four or five hours either working on coding tasks or having more sit-in meetings, just to hear what other people’s designs or software thoughts were about.
I think that’s what really made me lonely: The only people I knew in Seattle were my coworkers, and I couldn’t relate with them — I had a hard time getting to know them on a personal level.
And on Blind, an anonymous forum where verified employees discuss issues mainly related to tech, I often come across stories from people sharing about how lonely they are.
I think one big reason for that is software engineering doesn’t require socially demanding skills like in product management or UX design.
The original article contains 1,459 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Lol
Some guy writes about how lonely he is, and a bot trims his writing by 88%.
