Topic: general

I. The Arithmetic of a Life Sold Short

Do the math people don’t want to do.

Forty hours a week at your “cushy” job. Add fifteen more because “we’re counting on you” and reliability is never free. Ten hours grinding LeetCode, chewing over…

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High Pay, Low Agency

In the past, white-collar workers enjoyed both money and autonomy. A strong job market and steady demand for engineers meant they could negotiate for remote work, flexible hours, or simply walk away and land another role.…

By Alwyn (Draft for RTC-zined)

I. Introduction: From Golden Ticket to Golden Cage

For years, the H-1B visa program was portrayed as a golden ticket into the heart of the American dream. The story was simple: come to the United States, work…

AWS has recently popularized the idea of a “Renaissance developer”—a modern builder who moves fluidly across domains, draws connections between fields, and operates with the kind of intellectual independence that once defined figures like Leonardo da…

If I asked to borrow $100, you’d probably hesitate. You might ask when I’ll pay it back. But if your employer borrows ten hours of your life every week, you don’t flinch — because in big tech, that’s been metabolized as a cost of doing business.

Here’s…