Why working at a Software Company is like living in a College Dorm

Working at a Software company is an almost perfect combination of the movie, Office Space, and living in a College Dorm.

Thankfully, I don't hate my job, the printers and computers are a lot smaller, and we now have Facebook and the interwebs...the holy grail of procrastination. Also, my manager is not a pain in the ass, and nobody keeps paper anymore, except for this one guy whose cube is a literal fire hazard, with piles and piles of manila file folders. Why do they even make those anymore?

Have you seen my stapler?

WAYS IT COMPARES TO A COLLEGE DORM


1. We all live in squares.

The office of a software company is a big college dormitory, except you won't see naked people in the bathrooms and people don't make out in the hallways. (Someone might blare horrible sounding music from his office in an effort to be cool, or get a guitar circle going outside at lunch, but that's a rare occasion.)

You also get less living space. When you graduate from college, and leave the concrete-walled dorm room, you are downgraded to 5x5 foot square (if we are lucky), with short cube walls that "encourage collaboration"...except everyone still Skype chats each other from 3 feet away, because it's the only way to have a private conversation. We are all also very well versed in the Hidden Skype emoticons:

Icon	Name	Shortcodes
	Drunk	(drunk)
	Punch	(punch)
	Smoking	(smoking) (smoke) (ci)
	Rock	(rock)
	Headbang	(headbang) (banghead)
	Bug	(bug)
	Poolparty	(poolparty)
	Talk to the hand	(talktothehand)
	Sheep	(sheep)
	Cat	(cat)  :3

The invention of skype eliminates the need for speaking, which means that most of the day is spent listening to dozens of people typing and the occasional sneeze or chuckle, unless someone from another department wanders over to R&D in search of answers (always a momentous occasion!). I do work in R&D (Research and Development...a.k.a the people who build and test the product) though, which is the equivalent of working in a dorm full of people bunkered up in their rooms, playing World of Warcraft. I'm mostly surrounded by programmers and QA folks that don't need to have human conversations to get their job done, unless it's a procrastination break! We all love those. I expect it would be a lot chattier over in Marketing or Sales, where being social is a job requirement, and people just seem to have more time on their hands.

2. You still need to witness people being gross and stupid

You won't have to see someone else's giant wad of hair in the communal showers, or hear people "making love" from the other side of the wall, or get awoken by a fire alarm in the middle of the night because someone set their Ramen on fire.

But people still make weird noises, and eat weird things.



There is this one person with a really annoying laugh that makes me want to claw my eardrums out whenever I hear it. And it carries, from behind closed doors and from one end of the building to the other. Like it is haunted. Jake's cube got moved nearer to this person once and he actually cried (I'm kidding...he only cried on the inside, where no one could hear, lol).

There was this guy who literally only drank Mountain Dew, and he'd keep all of the empty bottles lined up on his desk like trophies, until he brought them to the redemption center.

During lunch time, people heat up fish and really FRAGRANT Indian food in the microwave and then carry it back to their desk, wafting along the way. My boss likes to microwave egg beaters in the morning and eat them at her desk.

The K-cup coffee machine (see picture)
is, after 5+ years, a weird mash-up flavor of every single flavor ever made in it. This includes the disgusting egg-nog coffee that smells and tastes like throw up, which was ordered for the holiday season 4 years ago. It's so gross that it never got used up and they pull it out every year along with the gingerbread flavor and hot cocoa, and then some poor, sucker, new hire makes a cup of it with no idea of the coffee induced vomit-attack they are about to induce.

3. Like sticks with like

Remember in Butterfield when we all became best friends because we were all grouped into the same Creative Writing program and we had the same schedules and lived on the same 3rd floor of the same dorm? That's how you make friends at work too. All of my work friends are programmers, which means we have in-depth conversations about our software during lunch, complain about customers that find bugs on our software, and speak in pop-culture jokes involving things like Star Wars and what happened on The Walking Dead last night. And we dress up in Halloween costumes like this:

Those are modified HTTP error codes (like "Error 404: Costume not found"). You guys don't need to get it...but we won best group costume because at a software company, it's HILARIOUS.

I also don't work with many women, and those who are women are much older than me and only want to talk about their kids. It's a very strange environment...the only women my age who work at the company are in Marketing, which poses a problem because...

4. The people in the other dorm are so weird

R&D people hate Marketing. They are the source of many of our day-to-day complaints (aside from the Microsoft Windows software updates that shut down our computers without warning). They are constantly coming up with new names and buzzwords for existing products, and they don't understand how much work goes into updating that stuff. I'm pretty sure they go out drinking together to come up with new hashtags.

An annoying chunk of my time is spent making updates to existing documentation because marketing had a new brain fart, and hounding engineers to change the wording in the product user interface because it's either grammatically incorrect, or it's using an old marketing term. There are so many legacy names for our products written into the code that most of R&D goes by that name instead of the real name, and no one except for the documentation people (me) know what things are actually called.

That's not everything I do...I actually get to write a lot of new documentation and usually my job is pretty interesting...it just comes with drawbacks, lol.

5. Nobody has any idea what is going on

When you're in college, and living in a dorm, you get this really skewed sense of the world, because you get really focused on whatever you are studying and you barely ever leave campus. The same thing happens at a software company. For us, everything is about the "Internet of Things" (IoT), "Cloud Computing", and whether or not our software is going to be pre-installed into next-gen hardware. And even on a micro-level, R&D is already moving onto planning and developing the next feature, while the rest of the company JUST got the feature we just finished working on, and they're all excited about that while we are just so over it.

6. But sometimes you have an epiphany when your every-day-work collides with "real life" and its really cool

When I first started working here, our software seemed pretty insignificant..it was a niche product for monitoring machines (like the performance of MRI machines, or the temperature of freight coolers) that no average person had ever heard about unless they were in our particular field. Companies use our software to make their machines more efficient, to cut down on operating costs and waste, and to prevent downtime.

Fast forward almost five years, and "Cloud Computing" and "Internet of Things" are real, widespread ideas, and they could change the world! Connecting machines can make everything more efficient...making people's lives easier and safer, and on a grand scale, it can even help the environment (because for example, you don't need to use as many resources to accomplish things, and you could turn something off remotely when it's not in use...boring example, but true).

Sometimes it's cool to go to the doctor's office, because our software goes on a lot of medical devices that need to be heavily monitored (because if they break because of a hardware or software malfunction, people could die, or if a cooler storing donated blood gets too warm, well, then you've just wasted all that life-saving blood). When the doctor asks what I do or where I work, I can tell them that "I work at the company that writes the software you use to monitor that MRI machine", and they're like, "THAT'S SO COOL".



THE END.