Anu looked at her laptop. Fully drenched in sweat, with stinky clothes on her, the heavy burden on her shoulders that didn’t let her bring her eyes up, and the glow from her screen lit the apartment like a stage set left in the dark. The bug (computer term for an issue) was persistent; it kept her from fixing it, like the dreams of a man or a woman after marriage with their significant other, “let me fix her”, never would that happen.
She was getting frustrated, could see her legs constantly rocking the floor, typing faster and harder as the frustration was rising like a tide.
Angrily, she grabbed her phone. It was not only anger, a small kind of escape as well, but she opened Twitter and typed: “Working unpaid on a Sunday again, Love that for me, love that for the tech I work for.”
A sarcasm or a defeat? Who knows, she could care less. She tossed the phone aside and got back to her laptop. The product owner had to be satisfied, the bugs had to be fixed, and the virtual algorithms demanded constant physical sacrifices.
She buried herself in her work, line after line, commit after commit, seconds turned to minutes which then turned to hours.
When she got it back together, she was already 5 hours in. She felt like she could eat a Big Mac, and already some bit of sun was escaping through the clouds.
She casually took her phone.
Woah!! Notifications, DMs, swirls of messages : some angry, some mocking. But the DMs, they felt personal.
-
- Aarav – The Fresh Graduate
“Hi Anu.”
“I am just starting out in tech. I dream of working at places like Google too.”
“But I am scared now… Everyone says it’s normal to work 15 hours a day.”
“Tonight I am helping migrate from one database to another. We were supposed to go out for Mom’s birthday. She had to cut the cake without me.”
- Aarav – The Fresh Graduate
Meanwhile, in a dim hostel room, Aarav’s face glowed under the flickering tube light. A long list of server errors that lit red covered his screen. Empty coffee cups, half-eaten fried rice scattered and placed everywhere on his tiny desk. Outside, cars honked, little murmurs and laughs from friend groups could be heard. Inside, he pushed back tears, tears of not making it to his mom’s birthday, trying not to resent the future he once prayed for.
-
- Pooja – The Manager
“Hey!”
“Saw your post and I totally get it.”
“Today, I missed my daughter’s first school play.”
“But we did close a huge ticket (computer term for an issue that is well documented) and it was a big win, right? Haha.”
- Pooja – The Manager
Pooja sat alone in her car in her underground parking lot, head on the steering wheel, exhausted.
Her phone screen on the nearby seat with her daughter’s blurry photos and videos sent by her husband. Her daughter grinning on stage and waving into a crowd where she wasn’t present.
She could still hear the applause and cheer from the crowds, but it was not from her.
The office light from the building’s 13th floor still burned like an endless morning.
-
- Rahul – The Founder
“Anu, don’t let them gaslight you.”
“I used to work for a big tech company too.”
“Now I am coding alone in a coworking space, praying for an investor to call back.”
“Impact from this? Yes, maybe to some… but work-life balance? Nope.”
- Rahul – The Founder
Rahul adjusted his casuals. The coworking space was silent except for the cleaning crew vacuuming near him.
Five failed pitches this week and zero runway (money) left with him. Still, he had his laptop open, hoping for a change, hoping for something to click.
Hope is a strong and stubborn habit.
-
- Vikram – The Veteran
“Hi Anu.”
“Hope you don’t mind me reaching out.”
“Your tweet brought back memories.”
“Sixteen years ago, I deployed patches manually at 2 AM, sitting cross-legged in dusty server rooms.”
“Nine years ago, I missed my father’s funeral because we had a product launch.”
“Today, I’m a director. Big title. Big team. Big meetings.”
“But sometimes, I wonder if I climbed a ladder that leaned against the wrong wall.”
“Take care of yourself. The industry won’t do it for you.”
- Vikram – The Veteran
In his luxurious apartment overlooking the city’s sleeping skyline, Vikram leaned back in his over-comfortable chair.
His calendar for Monday was already packed with performance reviews, budget approvals, and crisis meetings.
He closed his eyes, letting the exhaustion settle like dust in his lungs.
Even in his dreams, he could only see his younger self debugging code in candlelight.
Anu placed her phone down gently. For a long time, she just sat there with the screen glowing beside her.
So many lives around her. So many battles fought in silence and under the same stars. She was not alone, but they all fought their battles once alone.
She saved those messages, opened her code editor again. This time knowing that somewhere out there in the night, other tired hearts were also beating the same rhythm as her own.
Events that led to me writing this completely fictional story:
https://ajayan.substack.com/p/tech-workers-are-also-humans