During the early days of COVID, when I was still green enough to be dangerous and eager enough to be cheap, freelancing was less a vocation than a pleasant way to avoid confronting one's actual vocation. I would happen upon the occasional founder, breathless with disruption or an enthusiastic hobbyist in search of someone to execute their vision at a price that suggested more goodwill than good sense. And they would pay me. Pay me, one must understand, to learn. This struck me then and strikes me still as the civilised inversion of the university model.
I did make my genuflections toward convention. A startup internship here, another there. But they were, without exception, suffocatingly institutional; offices administered with the peculiar joylessness of people who had escaped corporate life only to immediately reconstruct it at one-tenth the salary. The hierarchy was intact. The performative busyness was ever present. One sat through the prescribed hours as one had once sat through the prescribed lessons, not quite present, not quite absent, in that specific stupor that only mandatory attendance can induce, and then went home, having exchanged time for the vague credential of having been there.
For almost half a decade, I have kept company with the freelance life, a tenure at one time exhilarating and of late, faintly melancholic, like a love affair that has quietly, without announcement, become a marriage.
My relationship with work has been resolutely polyamorous since then and I deploy that word with neither apology nor affectation. I believed at the time that I was constitutionally ill-suited to monogamy in the professional sense; the fidelity demanded by a single employer strikes me as rather like being asked to read only one author for the remainder of one's days. Tolerable for some, I suppose. Deeply suffocating for the rest of us. No. I prefer to flirt. To keep several problems in a state of agreeable suspense, like narrative threads one is not quite ready to resolve. And then, with the particular satisfaction of a well-timed dénouement, to take one, perhaps two, and bed them in a single evening. Whether I still love it is, I confess, a question I have begun to ask with somewhat greater frequency, and somewhat less certainty, than I once did.
With my hedonistic confession out of the way, I'd like to state that I did not cling to freelancing merely to distinguish myself from the generality of software engineers; that would be posturing, and posturing is the refuge of those with nothing else to offer. No, my grievances were rather more specific. The conventional hiring process, you see, had constructed for itself an obstacle course of such magnificent pointlessness that one could only marvel at its architects. I speak naturally, of LeetCode: the cathedral of artificial rigour, the monument to the proposition that one's fitness to write production code is best determined by one's ability to reverse a binary tree under timed examination conditions, like a pianist being asked to prove musical aptitude by tuning the instrument. I have sat with those problems. I have stared into their particular abyss and I can report, with some authority, that the abyss is not merely empty — it is aggressively, performatively empty. The frustration it engenders is of a singular variety: not the noble frustration of a problem worth solving, but the grinding despair of a man made to demonstrate, repeatedly, that he can jump through a hoop that exists for no reason except that it has always been there.
Over the years I have deployed considerable ingenuity in circumventing LeetCode entirely and I feel no shame in admitting it. The trouble, you understand, is not that it is difficult. Difficulty I respect. Difficulty, properly administered, is the whole point of an education. The trouble is that it is difficult in the way a crossword puzzle is difficult: there exists, always, a readymade solution, and the exercise reduces entirely to the retrieval of it. Consider the mango. A magnificent thing. Fragrant, complex, faintly obscene in its ripeness. Now extract from it every drop of juice, squeeze out the very essence of the thing, discard the flesh, the fibre, the experience of the fruit, and pour the remainder into a blender. Dilute generously. Repeat, daily, for a decade. You will have consumed, by any nutritional accounting, a quite extraordinary number of mangoes. More than most. And yet — would anyone, surveying your achievement, call you a connoisseur of mangoes? This is what LeetCode produces. People who have drunk the blender. Efficiently, obediently, in extraordinary quantities. And who have never, not once, tasted the fruit.