Published: 2025-03-25

Yesterday I wrote on Mastodon about my experience at work this past week and how that ended up with me being kicked out of the project I was working on, it was a rough 8 days, but yesterday was actually great, working at that place for thirteen and a half months felt like going through hell and the thought of writing this article was on my mind during this whole past week, way before reaching the breaking point.

Anyway, I won't go into too much detail about yesterday, there's more context in the embedded Mastodon thread here, what I really want to talk about is my other personal hells and how I managed to escape.

Hell Level 1

You cannot go further back than the beginning, at least not without getting philosophical, so let's start with my beginning, a humble beginning that is, I'm the youngest of three children, my parents, both undereducated, working-class people said one day in 1993:

Parent 1: wait a minute, we're poor as hell and already have two children, what should we do?

Parent 2: have another kid?

Parent 1: oh, you know it, baby!

This probably wasn't exactly what happened but as an anti-natalist individual I cannot imagine the actual thought process of broke people having kids being much different than this, but hey, they told me I was the only planned child, so, hooray!?

Leaving third-rate jokes aside, these circumstances meant I lacked the competitive advantage that even the least privileged of people had, heck, I had limited access to basic needs like water, food, electric power, and information for most of my life! And although I always had a roof over my head thanks to my parents being diligent and building a house, as you can imagine, it was not located in the best part of town, in fact, I was born and raised in the poorest district of the city, in a third-world country...

Now, that didn't mean I lived in the worst neighborhood of the whole district, because I didn't, but I don't think that would have made much difference, my parents still couldn't provide for us, so me and my siblings had to work since a very early age, I for example started shinning shoes when I was only 10 years old, more than once the money I made was used to provide food for my mother and siblings, the old man left around that time, so things were rougher than ever. Of course, my big brother and sister stepped up, even more so than me, they worked like crazy and did all sort of things to put food on the table, and for that, I'm eternally grateful to them, but that's their story and it's up to them to tell it, or not, maybe one day we can all get together and let it out, cry, laugh, and hug, I doubt it, but maybe...

With the old man gone, and even the youngest kid — that'd be me — being able to carry their own weight, things weren't looking good, I was sent to work with him as some kind of twisted insurance policy, if I worked with him he would have to 1) at the very least provide for my food, and 2) be more involved with the family, plus he would be able to work faster thanks to the cheap labor I provided, which meant getting profits more often, which meant supporting the family more. Those years were probably the worst ones of my life, because among other things, let's just say the old bastard is not a very nice person.

Rice, Beans, And Public Education

"Son, you must study hard, so you don't end up like me."

This is one phrase I heard a lot growing up, in fact, I think any person born to working-class parents has heard this phrase a million times — that's assuming those parents have at least some sense of responsibility — but in the grand scheme of things I don't think this really helped me much. Don't get me wrong, I went to community college and got a degree in educational psychology, I even graduated as an honor student, but so what? I was never told I should get good grades so I could enter a good university, or apply for a scholarship, or go to study abroad, the real importance of education was something that was never taught to me, so I ended up going through school on autopilot and then finding myself with no plan after high school, what was I supposed to do? Stay in the hood, smoking — or selling — weed on a street corner, get a teenage girl pregnant, and maybe get a job at a cigar or shoe factory making tens of a cent per hour? Life, man, this cannot be it...

Fortunately, my love for computers brought me to Linux one day in 2014, an OS that'd let me do anything I wanted through one of those black little boxes hackers use in the movies — the terminal — it was a surreal experience, I'd tell the computer "Mr. computer, please do this" and what do you know? It would actually do it! That's when I realized I wanted to do more of that, I wanted to tell computers what to do, I couldn't get enough of that, I'd go to Linux forums and read about it all day long, learn simple commands like cp, use them and get blown away, spend hours customizing my desktop, and try any tool and/or command I'd see in the wild, just for fun, I was like a kid in a candy store! It was around this time I learned about two important concepts: open source and programming.

I remember being in utter disbelief after reading what open source was for the first time, how come such a concept really existed? Why would people put hundreds, even thousands of hours into some piece of software and then say "Here you go, go to town with the thing"? It seemed too good to be true, what was the catch? Well, there wasn't too much of a catch, but you did need technical knowledge to actually modify the software, you needed to know how to program, and what was this programming thing? Telling the computer what to do, so I said "sign me in!" With that in mind, I decided to grab a book on the C programming language, even if the book was in English and I could barely introduce myself in the language at that time, let alone the fact that I had zero experience with software engineering, I didn't care! I was going to modify the Linux kernel, baby!

Of course that didn't happen, I mean, how could you go from knowing zilch to modifying the Linux kernel by reading a book in a language you could not understand and with zero software engineering experience? But that didn't matter, because even if I didn't know it at the time, this programming thing would be my ticket out of hell, and by the end of 2015, after a year of constant experimentation with different languages, including C, Python, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP, I landed my first job as a software developer, all that after quitting my job repairing air conditioning units and secluding myself at home to binge-watch Video2Brain courses I torrented from the good old internet. Oh, and I was attending community college all day long on Saturdays, studying something that didn't have anything to do with telling computers what to do. Good times.

Beyond Hell

It's been more than 10 years since I first wrote a "Hello world!" and even though my understanding of computers has not gotten that much better in this past decade-plus, I could not imagine my life without programming, I love automating small and/or insignificant tasks and building applications for myself or the people around me, I even made programming my full-time job, take that, air conditioner repairing gig! I made a job out of my hobby, nothing could go wrong, right?

I've heard and/or read that if you turn something you love doing into your job then you wouldn't have to work a single day of your life, and that sounds wonderful! In theory... In practice, turning something you love into your full-time job it's the fastest way of getting to hate the guts out of that once much-beloved thing. Don't get me wrong, I love programming as I just said in the last paragraph, reading dozens of GBs of pipe-separated plain files, parsing them, and storing that data in a database? Not so freakin' much, and by the way that's exactly what I did for the past thirteen months at work, who said you couldn't have fun at work!?

To make matters worse, software development has gone from a very rare and desired skill to one companies can hire by the dozens in a minute, a lot of times at a very low cost, so working conditions have gotten tougher and extra benefits have become rarer, you can be replaced, you're not that special, get over yourself! I didn't envision this when I left my job repairing air conditioners and said to myself "From now on you're a software developer, and you will not accept any other job".

Despite all my ramblings, I do recognize I'm in a very privileged position, I'm not a rocket scientist, anyone could do what I do, and probably way better than me, I firmly believe that, plus I don't have a terminal illness or live in a war-zone, I'm very fortunate, I did escape hell, and I feel grateful, every single day, even if sometimes I struggle, and boy, I do struggle.

Even beyond hell, there's more road to walk, not moving can even mean having to go back to hell, and that's definitively something I'm not looking forward to. Maybe you've been through hell yourself, maybe you're going through hell right now, whatever the case I hope you make it, I've been through multiple hells, and I know it's hard, but I know you can get out.