Please, don’t take the bubble for granted

It’s clear and well known that 2020 and Covid threw a curveball to the world. People everywhere were (and continue to be) affected by it. And this is the first time during my lifetime that when we say “everywhere and everyone” it’s meant in a literal sense. Like, every single person in the world had to adapt and modify its lifestyle to help us all survive this invisible storm. Figure speech left the chat on December 31st, 2019. Not so long ago, and yet, the longest ago I remember.

Whole countries and industries were taken by surprise (we can debate later whose fault is that), and the world economy took one big hit, that 18 months later, still doesn’t know when the punches stop coming, and when the picking-up-the-pieces-and-rebuild phase will start.

And through this whole awful ordeal, companies and governments had to adapt to keep afloat whatever they could. Online became the standard. Online became the safe place. Online went from optional to mandatory in a blink.

I know, so far this hasn’t been the most original article anyone has written during this pandemic. You have already read about all of this, and know it from your own experience by now, after all, I’m the one that said that “everyone” meant literally “everyone” this time 2 paragraphs before, so what’s this article about? Let’s say for now that it’s about an industry that grew during the storm, that it is so versatile and ambitious at its core that it is used to get reinvented on a daily basis. That is so used to getting reinvented, that is admired by the Big Whatevers, those industries that rule for so long that they don’t know how to reinvent themselves, and now need the help from the New kid on the block to reinvent themselves (at a cost, obviously). I’m talking about IT, of course.

I’m aware that my main audience is the IT crowd here (besides my mom, Hi mom!), so before you take the pitchforks out and think I’m being offensive to the industry, let me share why I think my view and opinion might matter, and that it’s just that after all: an opinion, which I’m not trying to sell you or convince you of or convert you… I’m just sharing it. So, pitchforks away for 2 minutes… My name is Luqui, and I have been working on IT for the past 8 years or so. First as a WordPress freelancer (shoutout to my constantly bullied PHP peeps!), and then I joined an IT company as a visual designer. “Wait, what?”, yes I know, doesn’t make sense, but indulge me into letting my whole CV get thrown on the table: I started working as a graphic designer just before I turned 18 years old out of necessity. The year was 2001, CorelDraw 7 and QuarkXpress were my weapons of choice, and a weekly newspaper that my father started publishing was my victim while we were living abroad after an economic crisis took our former country economy into a ditch, so we jumped on a plane to live the American Dream (one can only hope so). So here I was, almost 18 and learning how to use designing software from two Cuban twin brothers in Miami.

I had always loved computers. Always. We got a Commodore 64 on Christmas 1988. I was 5 years old, and I used floppy disks (no cassettes, I was living the future!) and had to run commands to get the games loaded: “Load ‘*’, 8, 1”. Let happiness begin. I was 5. I was in love. We had the Commodore for a couple of years. By the time I got bored of the games I had played over and over, I started doing some Ascii art on it. By trial and error, I was able to find some new commands that let me paint, use symbols, and change colors on the screen. I felt like a hacker, even before knowing what a hacker was.

Some years later, one of my best friends got a 386. I was able to get my hands on an XT with a monitor that used an orange tint that I’m sure the “C:\” on the screen is still engraved in the back of my cornea. Other friends got a 486, a Pentium. I remember when one got a Graphics Accelerator card installed. The 3Dfx rotating before a game started felt like heaven on pixels. Not that many pixels, I know, but heaven nonetheless.

I was still abusing my XT. Graphic adventure games such as Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion made me an addict. Since the Commodore days, my family’s budget was not generous enough to provide us with the battlestation one had hoped for. The summer of 97 was spent on my aunt’s produce shop (verdulería) selling tomatoes and potatoes only to get enough money to buy a decent PC. Some months later, a Pentium MMX 166Mhz, 32MB of RAM, and a 6Gb HD became what I call my first PC. I bought it with my hard-earned savings. It was everything I ever wanted.

By now you must be tired of holding the pitchforks, but that was not my plan. Why do I tell this long and boring story? Because of all that time that I was “left out” for not being able to afford a PC, I was consuming magazines and reading and learning, and trying to take advantage of every single second that I spent sitting on my friend's computer. I became accustomed to being a watcher of a technology (and an industry) that always felt out of reach.

When I became a graphic designer, being able to work with a PC every day was enough. I didn’t really like my job, but at least I was sitting next to a computer. By the time I got fed up with working on something I hated (went from not liking my job to hating it in one sentence, #drama), I resigned and took one year off to learn more about stuff that I loved. Programming comes into play. Armed with Youtube, some obscure Blogspot sites, and Sublime 2, I learn how to do “stuff” on WordPress. Which eventually landed me a job as a freelancer “developer”, and by “developer” I mean someone who is really good at using Google. I was a Dev Jr, but a Google Searcher Sr Lvl Over 9000!, (but who isn’t it, right? Don’t worry, this will be our own little secret, I won’t tell anyone that you don’t remember how to do half of the things you said you can do on your technical interview).

A year later I did a quick course on mobile apps and ended up publishing my very own app to use the Parking System of my city. I showed that to my only friend that worked in IT, and he mentioned that I should apply at Globant. And here we are now.

So yeah, I created the app but applied for a visual designer position because I had more experience, but worry not! This time I used my hate for design as the motivation that pushed me to move to a dev position inside the company.

So even though the past few paragraphs just looked like an excuse to talk about myself, my point is that I was once a hobbyist, I was once an outsider, I was once a dreamer (let the #drama continue), and now I’m finally a part of it. I was not raised in the shadows like Bane, I merely adopted it like Batman. I don’t know what that had to do with anything, but I wanted to mention Batman and Bane in my article. And because of how I always spent my life around this industry but having to sit on different chairs, I’m grateful for where I’m “sitting” today, and come here to ask everyone at IT not to take this bubble for granted. So now that I have proved nothing about myself and expressed my completely unfunded demands, let’s jump back to 2021.

Let me tell you what I mean by “bubble”. First, I’m not using the term bubble as it’s usually used in financial situations where prices or market demands get over-priced and eventually explodes and creates a crisis. I’m using it in a way that is more related to what the pandemic bubbles have become. You have small groups of people that share space and activities and are distanced from the rest of the bubbles.

Right now, and based on how the IT industry has grown in the past decades, we became our very own bubble. There is a big demand for “us”, privileges and luxury are thrown at us like it’s nothing (Insert Oprah meme “you get a privilege, and you get a privilege, and you…”). Multiple companies playing nice, and trying to seduce us makes us forget what it is like to be in any other industry right now, or not having job security. And all of that is before we take into consideration what Covid did to the rest of the world, and what it meant for us.

So, at the beginning of the article, I mentioned that everyone had to adapt. But how much we had to adapt to continue working seems insignificant compared to most of the rest of the world. We were already ready for this scenario, even though we never thought of it. Nobody did. We had the infrastructure almost completely in place and were able to switch from on-site to from-home in a matter of days. We never stopped. Never.

Companies that were already our clients came crashing down (Hello travel industry!), while companies that were already our clients came soaring up, I’m talking to you, online learning platforms. And companies that never thought about offering online experiences, started asking how they could become our clients. But let’s admit it, there was a time before we understood what was happening that we thought that maybe, just maybe, IT might be going down like the rest. Those whole 10 minutes were scary AF.

The paradigm switched. Before 2020, IT had to prove to the Big Industries that it was worth their mighty budgets. After 2020, IT became a necessity. Everything happens Online. Online is the name of the game.

If there was a “stating the obvious contest”, I would have won 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place by now, but again, this is not an article about the pandemic, nor about my life, and neither about the economy and the industries that rule the world (#Illuminati).

This is about taking a moment to appreciate how lucky we are those who are part of the IT industry to be a part of it, before the Covid crisis, and more so during it. How lucky we are to be the force that helps reshape the experiences and bring new ones. How lucky we are to be the ones behind some of the most innovative ideas on how to bring joy or comfort to the world during one of its most challenging times. How lucky we are to have had that job security when most of the world doesn’t. How lucky we are to be in a field that touches so many aspects of the human experiences and needs that you can be a part of it by choosing how you wanna be a part of it (from ideas, to design, to development, to marketing, and even testing). How lucky we are to be in one of today’s best-paid industries. How lucky we are to be able to work remotely with people from all over the world and share with them and learn from them. We are lucky to be part of this bubble, and I ask that as a part of it, we try to be humble and generous to those who are not as lucky as us.

And now that I stop babbling about, you have two options: finish reading this article and nod in agreement like you just read something kinda interesting that left you thinking and evaluating your life decisions (#drama4Eva), or take your pitchforks and once and for all burst my bubble. *PLOP*