How a Silicon Valley Engineer Found His Way as a Humor Writer

Creatives in Tech Interview Series, Issue #4: Irving Ruan

This interview series features creatives working in tech while keeping their passion projects alive. For anyone with a creative pursuit that may not align with their day job, I hope these profiles inspire you to keep going.

This week I talk to Irving Ruan, engineer at Box and humor writer. Irving’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Funny or Die, among others. In this conversation, we talk about how systematic, technical thinking can inform free-wheeling creative writing, the importance of finding your voice *and* the “house” voice, and more. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

By day, you are a senior technical consultant at Box; by night, a humor writer. You’ve been at Box from private company through IPO. Before that, you ran your own startup. How would you describe your relationship to the tech world?

It’s been very mixed. I got into tech when I was in college, in the early 2010s, around that era where the zeitgeist of startups and the promise of what technology could be was still very new and energetic. Over the…