Gainfully employed friends in tech: let us talk. Heart-to-heart.
You’re working from home full-time now. Maybe you were doing that from time to time anyways, so the quarantine hasn’t disrupted your work too much. You’re feeling the same perilous anxieties and mortal frustrations as everyone else, but when it’s all said and done: your job is safe and stable (for now). You’re still pulling in six figures. Your paycheck hasn’t changed.
You, my dear friend in tech – the programmer, the designer, the product manager – you are the beneficiary of some of the mightiest privilege on earth right now. You already had it pretty good, as far as jobs in America go. Paid time off, a dubious collection of “options”, health insurance, cute little vegan snacks in the office kitchen. Now, you don’t have to go outside to earn your living. You are among the least exposed people to the disease, and this change demanded nothing permanent from your way of life.
Your community needs your help. Whatever that community is, there are people in it that are struggling. They lost their jobs and they’ve only got enough savings to last through the next month or two. The government is not going to help. Those paltry $1200 checks? Fuck knows when they’ll arrive. The unemployment office is a shitshow; people are calling thousands of times a day and can’t get through. 17 million people are calling at the same time. America has no safety net.
You need to be giving. You need to be giving generously and repeatedly. A few bucks here and there is not going to cut it. People need to fucking eat. Think about how much it costs to eat for a day and multiply that by 30. Find the people and the causes you care about and make their fucking day.