"I’m part of this class now. I didn’t storm the gates. I learned the passwords."
I want to say something that might cost me some social capital, but I think it needs to be said by someone on the inside.
The job market isn’t fair. And I don’t mean that in the way we usually say it—the platitude that lets us shrug and move on. I mean it structurally. Architecturally. By design, even when no one intended the design.
I’m sorry. Not in the way that absolves me. In the way that sits with it.
I’m inside. Not rich. Not powerful. But protected.
I know how to sound in the
"We do what AI does. We are symbolic systems calling tools."
I work at an AI company, and most of my colleagues don't talk about how these systems actually work. Not really. We know the rulebook—the prompts that behave, the edge cases that break, the workarounds that ship. But why those edges exist? That's deeper than most of us go. We're fluent in the grammar without understanding the tongue.
Here's what I've come to understand: AI is a toddler learning in reverse.
It started as an academic superhuman. It read everything. It can summarize legal briefs, generate sonnets, explain quantum mechanics to a fifth grader. And then you ask it
"Here's what I've learned: internal tools die in a very specific way."
The message wasn't from my lead. It was from someone in engineering I'd never spoken to.
Three words. Posted in a public channel at 7:43 AM on a Tuesday.
"I listen daily."
I stared at it longer than I should have. I don't remember what I said back. Something casual, probably. Something that hid the fact that I'd been refreshing Slack to see if there were any new reactions or comments more times that month than I will ever admit out loud.
Here's what happened: I was drowning.
Too many Slack channels. Too much context scattered everywhere. I kept
"Then he stopped me. 'You don't agree with a fact,' he said. 'You understand a fact.' In front of everyone."
Several years ago, I was an employee at a company during a turbulent stretch—both for them and for me. The economy was uncertain, my family situation demanded stability, and I'd taken a leap of faith on a role that had plenty of reasons to say no to.
During the interview process, they told me directly: "Are you fine with being yelled at here? Insulted personally? If not, this might not be the right place for you. You have to be tough—even if you're screamed at not only for unmet expectations, but for things about you personally."
I said
"I'm autistic. I don't always mention it—it's not the first thing I lead with in professional contexts. But it's relevant here because it explains something that might otherwise seem like a stylistic choice."
A few weeks into a new job, I tried to explain something to a colleague.
He'd asked about pricing tiers—how they work, when charges kick in. Standard stuff. I used an analogy about water and buckets. Structured it so the concept would click on first read. Edited it once for clarity before hitting send.
My lead flagged it as potentially AI-generated.
Not because it was wrong. (It was, partially—I'd conflated two tier models.) But before the accuracy issue even came up, the concern was: this seems like it was written by a machine.
It wasn't.
I'd just... thought
"When you zoom out, this starts to sound like a philosophical problem more than a technical one."
The first time I noticed it, I was half-asleep and looking for a phone case.
Not even a special one. I wasn’t on some minimalist Japanese leather blog with curated photos of concrete and moss. I was on Google, typing with one thumb in bed:
“iphone case, modern, functional, premium”
I clicked a couple of things. Scrolled. Decided I was too tired to make a decision about drop protection and fake leather. Closed the tab. Opened YouTube, because obviously my brain needed a 27-minute video essay about a game I will never actually play.
And there it was.
Mous.
