I once had a job where I didn't talk to anyone for two years. Here was the arrangement: I was the first engineer hired by a start-up software company… - Ellen Ullman

People who have no choice are generally unhappy. But people with too many choices are almost as unhappy as those who have no choice at all.

It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one,

I peered over at Morty, whom I'd clearly never seen before. This round old man in his empty store, for whom I'd never felt anything but pity, had just told me off in ways he could not imagine. He put it all together: Brian's networks, the bank vice president's universe of transactions, the software I write, the systems I install, the sexy bouts of software writing — all that was suddenly and clearly related to the world's financial center now all emptied of people. It's the modems: computing as a kind of neutron bomb, making all the people disappear, leaving the buildings.
In my world, it would be so easy to forget the empty downtowns. The whole profession encouraged us: stay here, alone, home by this nifty color monitor. Just click. Everything you want — it's just a click away. Everything in my world made me want to forget how — as landlord, as programmer, as landlord/programmer helping to unpeople buildings like my very own — I was implicated in the fate of Morty and the bag shop.