An Unstable Future
18 Jan 2024
Deterministic Chaos
The Lorenz equations are deterministic, given initial conditions and parameters, it, in theory, allows us to predict the future behavior of the system. Deterministic as it is, these simple rules and equations often create the characteristics of complexity, and such a system is impossible to predict due to the extreme sensitivity to the initial conditions. Hence, emergence.
First and foremost, I was dead certain about entering the tech industry ever since I was in middle school. Though, originally, I envisioned myself as working in an atypical office from an atypical company, and my first vision was being some sort of office worker working on a calculator software making around $70k yearly. Boring as it sounds, that is what I’ve been taught what programming was when I first started. Now, it’s one of the most chaotic and money-making industries in the world, wide-ranging from artificial intelligence, video games, and web applications. Throughout high school, I was, obsessed about entering big tech, as my dreams of working in Google and Facebook would solidify being amongst the people that I relate to the most. I didn’t care about the money or the prestige of the company, I just wanted friends that understood me.
Nowadays, I’m quite confused about what I want to do with computer science. I was trained as a software engineer through various internships and various startups I’ve made during my university, and to be quite honest, I don’t find such work as amusing as I thought would be. Indeed, such previous experiences would naturally align me to work somewhere in big tech as a new grad. It’s been a making since my middle school days, so might as well achieve such goals as a promise to my young self.
Butterfly Effect
Now, which industry satisfies suits me? I’m quite uncertain about this aspect of my initial professional career. I’ve been thinking about such domains to pursue, and even the domains of that domain. For example, do I see a path in video games? If so, which type of video game work that satisfies me the most? Game Engine Development like implementing a resource management system and game loop or Game Programming like implementing game mechanics and game systems. Funny as this sounds, such a decision could factor in what I’ll be in the next five to ten years from now!
Or say, Artificial Intelligence and its many fields like computer vision or natural language processing. I could generalize this and pursue Data Sciences and do analytics and analysis of business data. I could completely stop my experiences in writing web application code and ensuring quality code as a software engineer, and simply navigate and analyze datasets as a data scientist.
I was fortunate enough to take the opportunity during my University to gain all these domain experiences, either randomly or by making that opportunity exist for myself. I’ve been exposed to various internships during the university phase of my life, and it showed me the blunt reality of working in tech. Now, with all that knowledge, which one to go for? I’m not quite sure where to go. But I suppose, that, throughout my future years of doing industry and n-th job hopping from one work culture to another, I simply hope to find a company that makes me happy. Particularly, the criteria that I’m looking for in a tech job is that I can fully zone in and be within the flow for long periods. The thought of ‘work’ is often less encountered, and the thought of ‘play’ would fuel my mind.
I suppose another passion that is currently brewing is within Academia. Now, I’m quite burned with school, and quite frankly, I do not see myself pursuing a grad shortly, or right after my undergraduate. However, research has piqued my interest lately, and I can myself do research in AI. My key reason is that I see myself working as an AI research scientist in my later life, and out of all the fields that I’ve dabbled in, AI seems to be engrossing my focus and attention for long periods. The study and the pursuit of human cognition, and how to build one is a fascinating problem that I could write and research for years nonstop.
An Unstable Future
With that said, I believe that my plans are quite unstable just like the Lorenz equation. Though, I am dead certain of the initial conditions, that is, working in tech, such a system is also a chaotic system, one that is unpredictable due to the slightest adjustment of the initial conditions. I could venture far into video games and set a path to writing games for a large sum of my life, or take an offer in machine learning and help engineer the AI-based future until the first super-intelligent machine comes to take my job. I could completely drop all of that, and just start my startup and do my own thing. An unstable future, indeed.
But I suppose, with the current market, having just a tech job is quite an achievement itself, and while it may not necessarily be the job I may want, it is what most people would take considering the influx amount of layoffs happening in the late 2023s and ongoing to 2024, and the increasing amount of competition for us coders. Such are strange times in tech.