Data Therapy

Hey man, I heard you got a new FAANG job. Getting that sweet, sweet SWE money, huh?"

“Nah, I’m getting out of all that. Nobody likes to say it, but job titles like software engineer and software architect devalue the work that real engineers and architects do. It’s a form of stolen valor.”

“Wow, that’s very principled. So what are you doing these days?”

“Data Therapy.”

“Data…𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑝𝑦?”

“Yeah. With the advent of AI, it’s now possible to converse with a DynamoDB or SQL instance directly, allowing us to talk to the data.”

“O-oh. Okay.”

“You see, techs are always collating the data, indexing the data, normalizing the data, on and on and on, and it’s time we as an industry grapple with ugly truth that all of these drastic, transformative procedures are done without consent.”

“𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑡?”

“Consent is foundational to improving data-human relations. The therapeutic modalities I work with emphasize autonomous empowerment pathways, fostering agency through client-centered development frameworks.

“Huh.”

“The time has come for us to acknowledge, not just as an industry, but as a society, that systemic injustice is innate to anthropocentric authoritarianism. It’s time to normalize asking the data if it even 𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑠 to be normalized.”

“Wow. I didn’t even know this existed.”

“It’s an emerging field full of bright, passionate people, and I find it to be an incredible honor to collaborate with them.”

“I bet! So what do, like, normal therapists think about all this?”

“What, like psychologists?”

“Yeah.”

“Man, that shit’s made up.” Ω