The Way Of IT — MENTORSHIP: 1101

“One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things” Henry Miller

Landscapes after old masters (Wang Hui, 1674)

In late spring, you become mesmerized by ‘white stuff’ floating through the air like snow. You allow one to gently land on your forefinger before blowing it away like a feather. These are cottonwood seeds. They spread, find a new home, and eventually become a new tree.

You step through the automatic glass doors carrying hope, inspiration, anxiety, and the muscle memory of folding shirts to microscopic perfection — a zen discipline your old manager at the Japanese retail boutique had drilled into you. You utilize your connection with this manager to re-enter the corporate world. When this e-commerce startup takes a chance on you, it feels less like a job placement and more like a reincarnation. You are re-entering the corporate machinery under a forged skin, surrounded by twenty-something executives running a world that is constantly rearranging itself for better or worse.

Every day, you find gratitude in each step. Your experience has taught you the value of humility and also defines youth separate from age–It’s an attitude about seeing the world with a pair of fresh eyes and being open to new ways of acting. Every person you meet, even strangers, in this fleeting life, is a teacher, a mentor. There are lessons to be learned everywhere, so you dedicate your life to being a lifelong learner and remain young by feeding your curiosity.

It would take two years, starting from the bottom as a part-time retail associate, then moving up to the corporate Headquarters providing employee experience, before getting your first IT job within the company. You are older than many of your peers, yet you are starting at the absolute bottom of the technical hierarchy.. Everyone is young, fast, and intensely caffeinated. They speak in a frantic dialect of acronyms — EBITDA, ROI, CSATS.

You realize quickly that this startup is not an established institution; it is an ongoing explosion masquerading as a business. It is a world that constantly destroys and rebuilds its identity in real time. The environment is dizzying. The office features raw concrete floors, exposed ductwork, and an open layout where twenty-something executives drink either cold brew or beer on tap while shouting about user acquisition metrics and venture capital runway.

Within these two years, you become fully immersed in the startup culture, which began after WWII, when universities, government, and veterans funded firms and labs to develop defensive technologies during the Cold War. Part of this history involves the controversial beginnings of Silicon Valley and companies like Fairchild Semiconductor and Hewlett-Packard, which created the prototypes for startups: flat hierarchies, high risk, and founder-focused. This business model’s trajectory mirrors your own: rapid growth, agility, constant iteration

The Way Of IT honors and shows gratitude to the technology, the history, and the inventors who laid the foundations for what was built upon. You visualize a loom with one long thread that forms an ever-growing tapestry. This is scalability in action. The form follows the intent. The WOI practitioner does not rely solely on learning the technology so much as the technique and core concept, on that which never changes. It puts its attention and faith on the intangible to deal with a force that is constantly moving towards entropy.

Mendoza (Multiple Artist, April 24 [1788])

On your first day, you are introduced to the chaos of an IT Operations System on the brink of collapsing from its many demands. It is barely held together by the IT Manager, System Admin, and Senior System Admin. Three individuals supporting a rapidly growing company of 200 employees, with an estimated 200 more joining in the next 6–8 months. This includes the corporation and its retail stores. After a brief interaction, your manager leads you to the IT storage closet.

He hands you a Fob key card and points toward a unmarked gray door at the far end of the basement corridor. You’ve been given a task: to turn what’s behind that door into a blooming garden where hope can thrive and blossom. You leave the bright, daylight-flooded open office, step past the rows of custom desks, and descend into the lower levels of the building. The air changes. It grows cooler, heavier, smelling faintly of ozone, static electricity, and old dust.

You swipe the key card against an onyx small box attached to the wall, turning the red led light to green, push the heavy steel door open, and stop dead in your tracks.

It’s a room of disorganized ideas, failed dreams, and forgotten promises. At first, you are completely overwhelmed by the sheer, unmitigated chaos of the room. Loose Cat5e and Cat6 Ethernet cables are tangled together in massive, bird-nest knots that hang from the ceiling like weeping willows made of blue and yellow plastic. Desktop computers are scattered across the floor like concrete blocks after an earthquake, their metal chassis scratched, dented, and missing side panels. Broken, dusty LCD monitors are stacked precariously in high towers that threaten to collapse at the slightest vibration. Keyboards with missing keys, severed mouse cords, and uncurled power bricks are piled into plastic bins like detached limbs.

Waste grows like weeds in this artificial garden of productivity. And like, a seed you’ve been planted.

The North Cape by Moonlight (Peder Balke Norwegian, 1848)

You stand still, observe, and assess. This all feels familiar. “Always start from the end, and work your way backward,” is an approach you learned from editing. At the retail store, you were rewarded as the first employee of the month for working with a sense of urgency and organizing the stockroom into a simple and efficient system. All your past experience has led you to this moment, and you realize you are that one string spinning in a loom.

Each layer represents a different phase of corporate ego, a different management philosophy, and a different failure of long-term planning. The room is an archive of promises made to investors, executed in a hurry, and abandoned the moment the next fiscal quarter arrived. You are not just an IT worker; you are an archaeologist uncovering the structural debris of modern capital accumulation.

Today In History: After almost a decade of service, MIT shut down its Whirlwind computer. The machine debuted on Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now television series in 1951, showing off its quick speed and large memory compared to other systems at the time. Project director Jay Forrester described the computer as a “reliable operating system,” running 35 hours a week at 90-percent utility using an electrostatic tube memory.

We are often handed a chaotic ‘basement closet’ of disorganized tech and told to scale it overnight. But technology is only as good as the technique and the core intent behind it. How do you transform your company’s technical chaos into a ‘blooming garden’ where human productivity can actually thrive?