A Convo at a Coffee Shop
A couple months ago I went on an adventure frequenting coffee shops in New York City, staking out there for a few hours so I could study for the AWS Solutions Architect exam. Each coffee shop has it’s own feel and vibe to it, and one especially fun activity I liked to occupy myself with during breaks was people watching & overhearing other people’s conversations.
One fine Saturday night at Variety Coffee Roasters, I was sitting at my table trying to make sense of VPCs when two boys in their mid/late twenties sat at the table beside me. One of them had a suitcase and walked in first, the other joined him later and greeted him with a huge smile and a hug. I’d like to think the traveler freshly arrived from his journey (since Variety was on 26th and Penn Station on 33rd) and the other was a New York local who cleared his schedule to catch up with an old friend.
“So, how’s it been going, dude!” the local says enthusiastically.
“I been well man, how ‘bout you?” replies the traveler.
“I’ve been good too. I just quit my job a few months ago, I’ve been wanting to switch industries for awhile now so now I carved out the time and I’m doing a coding bootcamp”
“That’s awesome, dude! Yeah I feel you, sometimes I wonder if finance is really my calling”
I chuckled a bit overhearing this. There really are a lot of finance people in New York City. I’m no stranger to the finance bro jokes, so hearing the local talk about wanting to quit finance for the tech industry made me feel like I made the right decisions in life. Suddenly I wasn’t dreading studying for the AWS exam so much anymore.
They proceeded to laugh about their experiences working as traders and some of the challenges it brought them. I got the impression they were college friends, as they were connecting about their work experiences post-grad and how it differed from their experiences at school. They shared a few laughs when talking about coworkers, and the struggles with explaining what they actually do to friends and family.
“Dude lowkey I understand why when I explain my job to other people, they don’t understand,” said the local.
“You’d have to get into the history of investing to explain why we make trades the way we do” replied the traveler.
“Yeah, it’s hard to explain what exactly we work on. I make bets but what exactly are we betting??”
“It’s an intangible thing that we ascribed value to at some point and now it just keeps going. When someone asked me why I make the trades I do I explained correlation, but when they asked what exactly that was I struggled to answer”
“There is nothing about my job that’s real, it’s all made up. When I say product, I literally mean PDF”
Immediately I burst out laughing and tried to stifle it so my eavesdropping wasn’t as apparent. At this point I had wholly given up on studying for the exam for the night.
I could relate to their struggles explaining their career though. Once during a road trip my grandmother asked me how computers work, and I found it quite hard to explain that a computer is just a rock that we tricked into thinking. So many layers of abstractions go into our jobs.
From here the conversation took a more insightful turn, as the traveler began to ask the local about his experience being unemployed.
“Since leaving your job, how have you been managing your time and what have you learned?” inquired the traveler.
“Honestly, I have two key takeaways,” he responds.
“I’ve learned how to structure my boredom.
and secondly,
Over-optimization is another form of procrastination.”
He goes on to talk about how elaborate morning routines inhibit you in this way, and that real knowledge comes from necessity so sometimes you need to just put yourself out there and experience things. That’s why he quit his job. If he hadn’t done so, he wouldn’t have begun the process of switching industries.
So to the traveler and the local: Thank you for teaching me a few life lessons. As a new graduate I’ve felt myself asking the same questions and experiencing the same things, so knowing that you’re going through the same thing 5-6 years down the road was quite reassuring. Nobody knows what they’re destined for; we’re all just trying to figure it out.
While I do I wish I set my bashfulness aside and joined your conversation, I walked home that night thinking we were not really strangers after all.