[...] DevWeek, as everyone called it, was basically a weeklong recruitment fair sprinkled with slideshows and panel talks. It was jarring to see employers desperate to hire, not the other way around. In 2010s America, the only place that was always hiring, apart from Silicon Valley, was the local U.S. Army recruiting center. Hundreds upon hundreds of people had flocked here to look for a better job and still there were not enough applicants to fill all the openings for “Java Legends, Python Badasses, Hadoop Heroes,” and other gratingly childish classifications describing various programming specialties. As exciting as it was to plunge into the bustle of a boomtown hiring hall, something about the ridiculous job titles got under my skin. The West Coast techies were alienated from their neighbors, the natives, not only by habit and custom but also by language. Techies would call themselves just about anything to avoid the stigmatizing label of “worker.” They could only face themselves in the mirror if their business card proved that they were rock stars or ninjas or something romantic and brave and individualistic—anything but the truth, anything but a drone.