Software Developer

When I got selected by a multinational software company, I was on cloud nine and I thought I was more than ready to get into the corporate world. Not to brag but since this is important to the context, let me make something clear - I considered myself an above-average coder, I have released a few noob android apps, have won a couple of Hackathons, and have also contributed to some open source. I wasn’t really scared to face the new challenges of a professional environment; instead, I was looking forward to them.

The first day was exciting, I was amazed by everything, the facilities and every other luxury you could expect from a big software company. Later that day along with 50 other people I was given a presentation about the history of the company. It was a great presentation about how a single man created a whole legend around him from nothing.

I was curious about something - the employee count, so I did a quick google search, and the results were something I didn’t anticipate. I found out that the present strength of the company was 1,50,000+ out of which developers alone contribute to around 40,000 employees. They also recruit about 10,000 people every year.

When I let all that information sink in, that’s when a realization came to me, that I am just one of those 10,000 people that they recruit every year. I felt like I had no presence between the thousands of developers, and my work contributed next to nothing. I was insignificant. We all would’ve felt special in one way or another and, and to that point, I believed that I was a little special. When I started to think about it, all the coding I had done so far was just ‘Googling StackOverflow’.

Upon interacting with developers working in the company who studied mechanical, civil, and other streams of engineering in college and had no prior interest in coding, I realized that when they were left with the only option to code, to earn a living - they catch up with the rest of the ‘pro’ developers in no time.

When I started to think more about it, I realized that I couldn’t take pride in any single piece of code, everything I wrote till that point was either an API integration or a piece of code copy-pasted from Stack Overflow, and this fact started to weigh down on me. It was hard for me to accept that I was just 1 among those 40,000 developers. It was fascinating and depressing that they could even make humans into replaceable cogs in the big machine.

And once when I realized that, I understood that I was not different from the people in the Black Mirror’s Fifteen Million Merits episode - the one where they just keep running on the treadmill forever until they die.

I no longer consider myself special :)