About

Hi, I'm Richard, the One Eyed Dev. Based out of the Midwest, I've got a dog (Simone) and a cat (Spritz) and about 12 years in the software engineering industry, spanning everything from large companies with hundreds or thousands of engineers to a full engineering team of two. I've been a data scientist, I've been a software engineer, I've been a software engineering manager, and have put on the PM and the QA hat more than a few times here and there, to boot. I've survived a bunch of layoffs, I've been affected by one, and I've borne witness to the rot that takes competent, empowered engineering teams and turns them into rough collections of sullen and disengaged individual contributors.

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If you asked me what my competitive differential is, my answer would be "I know how to work with people." My background into software engineering is atypical even for non-traditional backgrounds. I started in what we know now as AI (and what we knew as machine learning before that and data science before that). Before that I left academia with a graduate degree in Public Policy (or, as I call it, how to study incentives). Before that, I lived in Japan as a translator.

I've spent years (well, at this point I can probably say decades 😊) drawing on my background and refining how I can apply what I've learned. If you ask me, working in Software Engineering is significantly more painful than it needs to be. It's a career (like most careers) where doing your job well does not prepare you to grow at your job. It rarely shields you from layoffs. It defies you to never do your time and be done for the day (through on-call rotations and checking in on Slack and incident response and, let's not even start on coding challenges and leetcode and you might even want to use your skills for personal projects! My experience is full of folks who are strong engineers constantly failing to get promoted, folks working 60+ hour weeks with just token recognition for their efforts, friction points with uninformed, misinformed, or technologically illiterate decisionmakers, and a general culture that actively excludes or is hostile to engineers of color, engineers who are female or female-presenting, engineers identifying as LGBTQ+, or engineers working outside of the Anglosphere. Obviously, this may not be everyone's experience, but it's mine, and I don't think it's unique.

According to Wikipedia, 2.5% of the US workforce is employed in some kind of software engineering role. I write here to ultimately try and answer two questions: 1) why does working in this world (read to whatever scale you like) feel so frustrating and 2) what could a world that doesn't do that look like?