For most of my life, I was pretty special, or so I thought.
Back in the 1980s, not a lot of people studied computer science because, quite simply, nobody really knew what computers were or understood that you could make a decent career out of working with them. The IBM PC had been released in 1981 already, but the version with 64K RAM, a floppy drive, and a display cost over $5,000 in 2025 dollars, so businesses were not embracing them in large volumes just yet. To the extent that companies had mini-computers or mainframes, these were safely hidden in air-conditioned rooms and attended to by a small number of wizards that mostly stayed out of sight. When I started contemplating studying computer science, I knew literally nobody who was working in that field…
But, times were changing; computers eventually became cheaper and started showing up in offices all through the land. Hand-in-hand with the rise of the desktop PC, the demand for people who could maintain, manage, and program computers was also rising. One problem though: There were not enough of them because supply usually trails demand, something the FAA is finding out when it comes to hiring new air-traffic controllers.
The 1980s were a depressing time in Holland. Old industries were going bankrupt and the first cracks in the generous welfare state were appearing. Unemployment was sky high and people were worried. In fact, there were active discussions going on about how we were going to give the people of my age who would never ever have a paying job, a satisfying life. But when I hit the job market, there were not only jobs, there were “job fairs” where employers were wooing scarce talent. My parents and their friends were deeply impressed. Job fairs! People lining up to hire kids right out of college! What was the world coming to? We were probably very, very special to deserve that treatment.
This appreciation for my special skills and knowledge landed on top of a dumb pre-existing self-imposed feeling of superiority, which I had grown in order to keep my fragile ego intact. Secondary school was not a great experience for me; I was obviously a nerd and nerds were not popular. On top of that I didn’t like popular music, did not excel in sports, and wasn’t especially handsome or socially suave. How to maintain your feeling of self-worth in these dire circumstances? Easy: Just imagine that you are special. Fortunately, I was able to get very good grades effortlessly and even to skip an entire year at some point, so it didn’t take too much effort to maintain a feeling of intellectual superiority.
I was able to maintain that feeling of being something special for quite a while, as I got my first job and was recognized as a “high potential” employee who was slated to rise through the floors in the salary building at a faster rate than one salary-year per year. After my second job, I co-founded a company and was able to bask in the glow of entrepreneurship because, at least at that time, most people did not start their own company and most people did not travel extensively to work with customers abroad (as I did).
With the benefit of hindsight I was able to maintain this unwarranted feeling of importance because I was everywhere, if not first, then at least early. I was one of the first people to study computer science. I was one of the first people in my group of colleagues and associates to start my own company. I was a very early employee at big tech; I was among the earlier employees in my division to get promoted to certain levels.
With the benefit of hindsight I can honestly say that I was never that special, I just had the incredible luck of running ahead of the pack a bit. It was all just timing.
And as Martin Eric Ain, the bass player of Celtic Frost and the host of the Zürich classic Karaoke From Hell used to say when someone was butchering a classic rock song: “Tai Ming is not a city in China”.
Time is of course the great equalizer, so much so that it eventually even erodes the advantages that time itself bestows upon you. As time moved on, I was overtaken in everything by the great wave of people who came after me, some of which were really something special, or at least just as talented, knowledgeable, and skilled as I am, erasing my uniqueness. Or, as I like to tell people: “Even if you are a one in a million kind of person, there are about 1,500 of you in India” (and another 1,400 or so in China).
My feelings of importance first started to wane when I realized that disastrous events that I predicted were I to leave a job or role, never materialized.
I have been in quite a few jobs where I had a pivotal role in the maintenance and running of some system. So pivotal in fact, that I used to predict all sorts of havoc were I to leave the company because, clearly and from direct observation, everyone else there was a muppet who did not know what they were doing. But here is the thing: Said havoc never materialized. For all my intellectual prowess and skill with WD-40 and duct tape, nothing catastrophic ever happened when I left. As I found out: Companies are amazing at inertia…
Side story: I once worked for a software company and one of our offerings was an application for the administration of small insurance brokers. It was a horrible mess of spaghetti, written in a terrible BASIC dialect. At some point, we really had only one colleague left who knew anything about that application. He rode his pivotal role to the max, demanding wage increases and a bigger company car. The owners of the company, three brothers who would not be out of place as characters in The Sopranos, hired another software engineer and told him to ramp up on the insurance application. After a few months they asked him if he thought he was sufficiently ramped up. The new colleague answered “yes”. They asked him twice more. When the answer was still “yes”, they terminated the employment of the other software engineer with extreme prejudice.
While we are meandering: I was thinking about this story a few weeks ago when a LinkedIn post posited the problem that sudo is maintained by a single person and he apparently has had quite enough of it. Clearly, that person is extremely important! Or at least, that was the trend in the post and in many replies. What if he would quit? No more sudo for any of us! I begged to differ, to the ridicule of many people, some of whom took care to explain to me that sudo is really an important utility. No shit, Sherlock! I still begged to differ. Sure, Tod Miller, the sole maintainer of sudo, is a sterling guy who deserves all the praise we can give him for tirelessly giving up a lot of his free time to maintain this code. But then again, even Todd is not crucial for sudo, given that the code is open source and not so complicated that really only one person in the world can understand it. If Todd runs under the bus tomorrow, which I do not hope, but which given the state of public transport in the US is a slim chance anyway, I am certain that between the Linux distributors, the Open- and FreeBSD projects, and Big Tech we will find another hero to continue the development of this crucial tool.
One question I do have is what ongoing development we still need for sudo. As far as I am concerned, that tool already did everything I needed it to do back in 1999.
Also, if worst comes to worst there is always the brand new Rust version: sudo-rs <ducks and runs>...
Anyway, over time I have clearly become less and less important and I can happily report that these days I am an absolute nobody. Being at OpenAI and courtesy of my grey hairs, I regularly get accosted by vendors who want to strike up a relationship with me and invite me to dinners with private chefs, cocktail hours, or just generally free steak and wine in a leading steak house in Boston. I am never one to throw away an opportunity for free food, but in the spirit of transparency I always tell them that they are wasting their time because I am an absolute nobody with zero influence. Typically, they do not believe that and they probably chalk it down to me being humble.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
But please keep these invitations coming on the off-chance that I am actually trying to be humble. Better safe than sorry!
My unimportance grew over time because of two things: I kept running into more and more people who were actually awesome and I just realized that I was never that important in the first place.
I do suffer a bit from the Messiah complex, the mistaken belief held by some people of questionable mental health that they are Jesus Christ the savior. A good way to get me to do something is to tell me: “Jos, please help us, you are the only person who can do this!” That is of course total bullshit, but for a long time I would think: “Yeah, well, sure, this is really difficult and I am probably one of the very few people on the planet who can do this.” Everyone loves a sucker and giving in to these requests leads to getting more of them, increasing the unwarranted feeling of importance.
In these days of my post-career I am actively enjoying being unimportant. I am not a manager, not a tech lead, not a principal engineer, not anybody really. I am just another member of technical staff, tasked with various hands-on responsibilities and feeding cookies to the GPU when it needs some. I do not do strategy or any management of any kind (with the possible exception of self-management, every now and then). It is lovely…
Let’s face it, most people are unimportant and, like me, have always been unimportant. That is not a problem, as it is clear to me that importance does not result in overall happiness. Unfortunately, that is not how our society generally seems to look at these things.
At this point, I would like to directly quote one of my favorite authors on the Internet: Freddie DeBoer, who recently wrote: “We live in an era in which the range of lives publicly regarded as worthy of living has contracted almost to nothing. Our culture confers esteem on a vanishingly small number of roles, and those roles are largely defined by being visible - that is to say, by attracting public attention, of which there is a necessarily finite supply. Success, as it is marketed to young people, means being a pop star on the order of a Sabrina Carpenter, a director with the cultural cachet of a Greta Gerwig, or at minimum a micro-celebrity “creator” whose daily routines are packaged for the algorithm. A contented life requires building a brand, cultivating a following, being legible to the feed. Everything else - teacher! paralegal! office manager! dental hygienist! retail supervisor! random white collar office email job that’s basically fine! - is flattened into an undifferentiated gray. These are necessary roles, some of them pay well, but they certainly aren’t glamorous ones, and young Americans seem increasingly convinced that a life that doesn’t inspire envy among others - when broadcast online, naturally - isn’t one worth living.”
My recent comfort with my unimportance comes from the fact that I fully realized that happiness is the result of a life well-lived, or as some might say: “An ordinary life, well lived”. So, I do not have a lot of patents to my name, did not author a world famous piece of open source software, did not get a lifetime award for my efforts (at least, not yet 🙂), and am not widely revered for my wisdom, or talents, or charitable acts. But that’s fine. Because I am unimportant, I can walk around freely without fear of abduction or attack. Because I am unimportant, I can meet people who do not have preconceived notions of me. Because I am unimportant, my family and friends do not have to apologize for me all the time. My family loves me (at least that is what they convincingly tell me) and sometimes random people thank me because I did something that helped them.
That is more than enough.
