The Twelve-Step Program for an IT Career
Description
The image presents a numbered list titled 'Life of an IT professional:' against a dark blue background. The list outlines twelve stages, starting with '1. Born', '2. Study', and '3. Job', and ending with '12. Death'. The bulk of the list, steps 4 through 10, consists of a series of repetitive phrases commonly heard in online meetings and corporate communication: 'Shall I share my screen?', 'R you able to see my screen?', 'Am I audible?', 'Correct me if I'm wrong?', 'Sorry, I was on mute', 'Ok. I m sending that email', and 'Did you receive my email?'. Step 11 is 'I am on sick leave'. The meme satirizes the perception that an IT professional's life, particularly the working years, is dominated by the mundane and often frustrating rituals of remote collaboration and digital correspondence, reducing a career to a checklist of technical difficulties and communication overhead
Comments
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The IT professional's lifecycle is the only script that runs from `init` to `exit(0)` where the most frequently called functions are `isMuted()` and `canSeeMyScreen()`
My whole career is basically a distributed state machine on Zoom: Init → ShareScreen → “Am I audible?” exponential backoff → “Sorry, on mute” rollback → Decommission(); SLA upheld, agenda long since garbage-collected
Twenty years ago we optimized for zero network latency. Now we've optimized our entire career for zero human latency - spending more cycles on connection handshakes than actual data transfer
After 20 years in the industry, I've realized my entire career can be summarized as a recursive function that infinitely loops through 'Can you hear me?' and 'Let me share my screen' with no base case - except death, which is really just a forced garbage collection by the universe
Twenty years in, I’ve accepted the enterprise runs on a human transport layer: liveness probe = “am I audible?”, readiness probe = “can you see my screen?”, and the idempotent write is “did you receive my email?”
IT lifecycle: a distributed system where mute achieves perfect partition tolerance, but availability craters on every 'Am I audible?' probe
Modern IT career: implementing distributed protocols with humans - TCP handshake (“Share?”/“See?”/“Audible?”), mute timeouts, email for eventual consistency, sick leave as the circuit breaker, and “Correct me if I’m wrong” as our DIY Raft