The End of My Career as a Glass Eater

I’ve spent part of my summer chipping away at a large essay about my experience working with startups for the last three years. I wanted to explain how they work, how I tried to work within them, and why I think trying to apply startup operating principles to regular life is a profoundly bad idea. I thought it might be useful for curious bystanders to know what the startup world is like and, in the process, sum up what that experience was like for me. I returned to the piece today, my time in tech now ended (“Unfortunately, the business needs have evolved etc. etc.”), thinking that I might finally have an ending for the essay.

This is not that essay.

I have not talked about my day jobs here, and this is as close as I’m going to get. I experienced many memorable things in my tech career, but those things were ultimately boring. Possibly even meaningless. The unremarkable quality of the average tech job belies the glamour and purpose people are sold when they’re recruited into them. For every splashy swag box and staff beer fridge there are thousands of hours spent wondering why the hell it takes 6 meetings to pick a task tracker or endlessly renegotiate a deadline. Having worked in both worlds, I can confirm that there is very little difference in the level of banality between a public service job and a tech job; one of them does come with a government-backed pension and the other with a limitless supply of hoodies. I’ll leave you to guess which is which.

I have been a pitch deck proofer, executive wrangler, stump speech maker, recruiter, accidental social media manager, ad hoc financial controller, copywriter, and on-call corporate firefighter for years now. I have nursed several people through nervous breakdowns over Zoom. I have seen dumb people make dumb choices and be richly rewarded for their failures. I’ve been told: “You just need to eat a little more glass, put in the time, and one day you’ll make it big.” Today I put my LinkedIn into hibernation mode because if I see one more story about someone claiming they solo bootstrapped a vibe-coded accounting platform to $2 million in ARR I will do something regrettable. My tech career, such as it was, is over and I’m out.

Here’s what I’m working on instead:

1. I’m writing a novel
2. I’m writing a pile of short stories
3. I’m interested in academic ventures related to literature and technology, and the way those two worlds intersect and conflict with each other
4. I’m planning to write a lot more for this fine website, elzyg.com
5. I’m looking for work where I do not have to simulate excitement about pointless AI integrations or manage anyone’s calendar for them. I’m especially good at research and bullshit detection
6. I am getting out of the apartment and watching the ocean instead of Slack notifications

If you are interested in me, my work, and my unrelenting skepticism of big tech, I ask that you share my writing and reach out on Bluesky.

I look forward to the future.