Why I Love Working In Tech

How does tech help us communicate?

Recently, whilst in the mountains of the Italian Dolomites, I stayed at a working cattle farm where the owner spoke no English, and I somehow spoke even less Italian.

After silently showing my partner and I to our room, I expected to wheel out the one Italian word I know to express my gratitude and a bemused stare from the owner at best.

However, he pulled out his phone and began speaking long Italian prose directly, to which his phone immediately replied with perfect English that breakfast was served at 7am the next day, there was a coffee machine down the hall and to have a pleasant stay.

That translation app had managed to bridge a seemingly insurmountable gap. It created a feeling of camaraderie between an awkward 27 year old tech worker with subpar social skills and a 65-ish Italian mountain beef farmer, something that usually would only be achievable by 4 bottles of wine and an unspoken agreement to not talk about the 2021 Euro Cup final.

Why do I love working in tech?

At that moment, I was transported back to my days first learning to code in 2018, with my roommate's dog helping me work on my multitasking skills by thwacking a tennis ball against my leg with a suspicious level of accuracy.

Leafing through my Coding for Dummies book and creating my first “hello world” projects, I felt like I was tapping into another world, seeing through the veil and discovering what I was truly passionate about: building digital experiences. 

The analytic mindset coding cultivates enabled me to see inefficiencies in the way I was doing everyday things like budgeting my money, inefficiencies that code could fix. 

I started building things that helped me, like a budgeting app and a to-do list app. And I realised that tech held the power to improve the way we do, well, just about anything.

After that, I began to use my skills to try and help teammates at the marketing agency I worked for, desperately grasping for any chance to utilise my new skills.

I wrote a series of scripts for our Google Ads accounts that stopped campaigns from overspending, and upon leaving my position to join a tech company, one of my teammates reached out to thank me for building something that made her working life easier. 

I still have the screenshot of that message saved on my phone, and I look at it whenever I get sad or demotivated.

How does tech make our lives easier?

The ability to build a digital product, be it lines of spaghetti Apps Script code or a fully fledged translation application, that makes someone's life easier or unlocks their potential to achieve more, is the reason I love tech.

Tech gets a bad rap at the moment, rightfully so, including by me. 

A lot of products and innovations on the market serve to increase the power and control of a few select people, and actively or passively deteriorate the users mental health.

But that potential to build something great still exists today. 

There are countless engineers and entrepreneurs out there, working insanely hard to produce products that will make the human experience easier, more fulfilling or even just more interesting (quick personal shoutout to anyone who worked on the Skyrim game, that should be in the Louvre).

Troubles arise when focus from these pioneers turns inwards. How can I get rich? How can I increase the stock price of my company? How can I attract more investment?

But at the core of it, tech can be about doing things better, faster and more efficiently than we could ever before.

I often quote movies when trying to make points, which is not a thing that people ever get annoyed by or something I should speak to a medical professional about. 

My point can be best summarised by Michael Fassbender playing a laughably jacked version of Steve Jobs when he said:

“The most efficient animal on the planet is the condor. The most inefficient animals on the planet are humans. But a human with a bicycle BECOMES the most efficient animal.”

That ethos, distilled in its purest form, is what I love about tech.

I hope to play my part in building the digital bicycles of the future. I also hope the phrase “digital bicycle” didn’t completely ruin the sincerity of that moment we were having, but you can’t win them all eh?