This picture keeps coming up in my photo widget and every time I see it I think, unbidden, “this is a guy who in 15 years will be paid for his ability to think vigorously.”

I did ok in STEM stuff in high school, but by the time I graduated there was a strong pull, assisted by music and drugs and my near-total lack of executive function, toward the arts and humanities. When double majoring in music and CS because logistically impossible, I chose music, because I liked music, and surely studying it would make me like it more. right?

A disastrous semester that saw me briefly join the Square Root Club (members have a GPA whose square root is greater than the GPA itself) and move back home in disgrace created an opportunity for a reset. I took web development and Java and Linux courses at the community college and prepared to transfer to a larger school to finally finish my CS degree. And then whoops, I discovered tarot cards and the emerald tablet of hermes tresmegistus and switched my major to religious studies at the last possible moment.

Then I worked a bunch of nontechnical jobs at technical companies, and I realized my skills were not valued very highly and easily replaced. plus a lot of service industry jobs sort of get super old after a while. a visit to an art museum in Baltimore triggered an inflection point of extreme dissatisfaction with my material conditions and a desire to grow again, and this coincided with my wife hearing a boot camp ad on the radio.

It’s a cool experience to wonder how things would have been different if you did x and then you just do x anyway. Like timelines converging. Only now that I’m here the long way around, I’m very glad that’s the way I came. It turns out that the humanities help you to be a human, something that people studying exclusively computers their entire lives can forget about. I discovered /r/cscareerquestions, a cursed place that has 2 main types of post: “How do I direct every aspect of my life toward maximizing total compensation at a big 5 tech firm” and “help I make 3/4 of a million a year at google straight out of school and my life fucking sucks.” It turns out that you need social skills and political savvy and a working knowledge of how business works to thrive here, a fact that makes hardcore engineers mad but really helps level the playing field for people like me.

I’m not good at this work. I still feel like a toddler playing with Duplo blocks any time I show my work to my peers with a decade of experience. But I’ve crossed the chasm. I am a wizard, speaking secret incantations to conjure SAAS products from thin air. it’s an amazing stroke of luck that i entered this field at the perfect time and i’ve accrued enough tricks and resume bullet points that getting laid off, a nightmare scenario in other fields, doesn’t feel too scary. Even in a shitty economy, everyone needs wizards.