With the pace AI is moving these days, and not to mention how fast the software and IT industry keeps evolving, and on top of that, I’m currently working at a Malaysia-based company that leans hard toward China-corporation-style operations or whatever that is, 996 and all, it gives me a sense of fragmentation toward myself. I don’t even know what I actually do on a daily basis anymore. There’s a lot of stuff that’s pervasive, abundant, but still siloed. If you may ask what my role or position is right now, it’s stated as “SDET/QA Engineer.” But if I’m being real with myself, it’s far more than that. As far as I remember and as I reflect while writing this piece of scribbles, all I can do is let out a long sigh and think “what was I even doing, holy fuck… motherfucking cocksucking shit, please God help me out this goddamn mess”
During my tenure at my current workplace, for over 5 years and 4 months now, here are the so-called goddamn roles, or whatever bourgeoisie title got bestowed upon me, that I’ve actually been responsible for. None of these were short-lived or ad-hoc: they ran periodically and I ended up carrying them all at once, overlapping.
Product Manager — I’ve been managing and owning all the core features on the mobile apps team for over 2 years. Alongside my mobile apps technical lead and other senior engineers, we worked closely together: you name it, ideating, brainstorming, investigating, proposing, curating all the core functionality. With one primary objective in mind: make the app easier and more helpful for our users. Worth mentioning too: every improvement or new feature we launched also had to align with the company’s business objectives.1
Customer Operations — In my early years here, I didn’t work extensively with the operations team: most issues were handled directly by the CS team. That changed around 3 years ago when I got promoted to mid-level. We started doing on-call rotations to resolve user feedback, and somehow that “temporary” arrangement has just… continued until now. These days, whenever an issue comes in, I’m usually the one who ends up investigating and staying in the loop with the relevant teams. I’ve tried to hand it off, delegate it to someone else, but it always comes back to me.
Release Manager — I will forever curse my previous release manager for resigning from this position, because it gradually shifted onto me. Jokes aside, I’ve been primarily in charge of being Release Manager, especially for mobile app releases, mostly because the process is so exhausting, rigid, and long. Most of the time I’m preparing submissions, writing release notes, handling app versioning, and coordinating with relevant teams whenever something comes up. And this whole flow is end-to-end, my work isn’t “done” until it’s passed QA, deployed to production, and rolled out to at least 10% of our users.
Fullstack Developer — I won’t go too deep into this one, but there are at least 5 internal tools (web UI dashboards or similar) that I’m still actively maintaining. These tools are used mostly by QA and engineering teams at the company. I’d fairly say 3 of them are stable enough by now, but I’m still the one handling both the FE and BE for most of it.
Site Reliability Engineer — Same story as above. A huge chunk of my work overlaps with SRE-related stuff. When I got promoted to senior in 2025, my role shifted closer to the core product teams, which meant my responsibilities got even heavier: the scope leaned toward consistency, reliability and overall quality for the whole infrastructure. I wouldn’t call myself a “pure” SRE, but on any given day I’m doing load testing, early regression tests, isolated tests, replay traffic tests, digging through mountains of logs to verify something, data migration testing, backup/recovery testing and apparently, budget error tests too. Honestly, you name it, I probably don’t even remember everything at this point.
User Experience Researcher — Back in 2023 or 2024, I got the chance to sit down with the UXR team and conduct several user interviews. My main job was drafting and analyzing the qualitative or quantitative data we collected, then figuring out how to turn it into something practical and actionable features. Fast forward to now, I’m still doing this. Not as extensively, but I still do it. Especially when it comes to a new quarterly roadmap.
Research and Development — This one’s newer. I hadn’t touched R&D in 2-3 years, but over the past 6 months I’ve been in charge of researching internal tooling and AI adoption for the software testing lifecycle and for improving the overall quality of our products. I got the chance to join the R&D team briefly, and 1-2 of the artifacts we built there ended up discontinued. One was an ML system to detect potential DDoS attacks using the isolation forest algorithm, and another was an analyzer for user feedback pulled from Google Play and App Store reviews. That last one overlapped with the UX research work I mentioned above.
Upon finishing this piece of scribbles, I started to realize, this is kind of like the life of Sisyphus. Endless punishment. If I want to elaborate further: it’s just hopeless labor, mirroring every day of human life, at least for me. Repeating routines just to survive this small corner of the universe, until, maybe, at the end of the journey, my ideals fray like any other thread in this world woven by God. Or maybe I start reflecting the way Camus did, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” which could be boiled down to: accepting the struggle, rejecting the hope for a different outcome and finding our freedom, or even conquering our fate, in that.
Man, fuck that shit. Living fully, consciously and accepting that we exist and live in absurdity? Are you kidding me? Even though I’m fully aware that “kullu nafsin zaikatul maut” is the one truth we can all accept as human beings. And it’s, definitely, the final part of us. For the greater good, we become fully human. Through death itself. Which is it.
I’m not inclined to say that I’m quite pessimistic or nihilistic about my future, but I do notice that my life has been filled with other people’s objectives for a very long, long, long time now. And I started becoming exceptionally good at fulfilling those objectives.
I started to become an establishment at this company that I quite dislike and am prone to avoid: always become “Ryan knew this, ryan knew that, we should ask ryan, ryan can check this, ryan can help this” and such stuff like that. I don’t even know if I should be proud, acknowledge that I’m capable of handling all this shit, or should be grateful or be ashamed of myself. Hell, I don’t even know about all those. I don’t want to keep adding another layer to my current piece of “art of work” but my primitive self is kinda screaming beyond interesting self-identity-crisis or whatever that was and is starting to question, like “Then, what the fuck is my objective?”2
One says: “everything ends”
The other says: “what am I doing with the finite time before it ends?”
Probably the most contradictory part of all this: there’s a desire in humankind to find meaning, but the universe itself doesn’t guarantee us any except death
But, wait… what am I even talking about?
Footnotes
-
Where is your current PM? I don’t know. I don’t even know if we have one. I don’t even know if we need one. But, if I do, I think my PM is probably seekor kucing kecil. Miaw ↩
-
Welp, maybe I can start saying “Comrades! let us get to work. The family is already in the process of creation and the great family of the triumphant capitalist world is developing and growing stronger. Our persona becomes new identity and we should rebranded myself out there. Comrades! we are laying the foundation and generational run for the future” ↩