Wasn’t he this badass hacker that had people pay him for information?
Why have the desk job that he hates? Couldn’t he have made a living doing the hacker thing?
I can only guess that it was the healthcare. Even in the Matrix, healthcare is tough to obtain!
Couldn’t a first rate hacker find a way to make a lot of cash?
“… and other awkward questions proving that THE MATRIX really didn’t make much sense.”
To me, that makes sense. The Matrix is supposed to be “reality”. It’s supposed to keep people docile, but nobody said anywhere it fulfilled your every fantasy. And the Matrix is a shared world, so to have people doing office jobs would make more sense than everyone being ultra-perfect sex god superhero haxxor porn star millionaires.
Neo was doing what most people in this world do, a make-work job to pay the bills and feed himself, and on the weekends he did what he wanted, what made him happ (OMG Haxxor!)
Happ would equal happy, except I’m an idiot 
But wasn’t the Matrix supposed to be a reflection of reality? In reality, couldn’t a person with Neo’s skills make a sufficient living to avoid a job he hated?
Or was there something more? Did the Matrix recognize potential risks and burden them with distractions to keep them from causing a ruckus?
That sounds about right. The matrix seemed to be self-aware, so it’d make more sense to have it program Neo into a harmless cube job to keep him out of the way. The weekend haxxoring was the matrix’s concession to Neo’s wishes and fantasies.
I don’t know…it made sense to me. Having a steady job doesn’t involve a lot of risks. What Neo did as a hacker (or any type of hacker) is extremely risky. From what little I know of hacking, you pretty much sit around waiting for a program to run its course, the stronger the encryption, the longer the wait. Also, having a full-time job helps in the income department. Hacking freelance means establising a book of business, overhead, collecting payments, etc. Perhaps, Neo only really hacks on the side and is only now getting into the business side of it.
I always thought he had the job for tax purposes, health insurance, and to keep a low profile. I would assume that he wasn’t claiming the money he made by hacking to the government, so he had to show an income from somewhere. Sounds kind of silly when I write it out, but I never really thought about it before.
lightingtool gets it. Agent Smith comes right out and says it in the interrogation scene. Thomas Anderson pays his taxes and helps his landlady take out her garbage. Hacker alias Neo doesn’t have a past.
No connection, can’t get caught.
I saw things pretty much as lightningtool did. If nothing else, the office job would have given him a steady supply of stolen office supplies.
Or maybe he just likes casual dress Friday?
Nah, you’re just happless.
It’s conceivable that as Thomas A. Anderson, his job offered him legitimate access to and information about systems he would then hack as Neo for whatever contraband info he was selling to Choi.
What’s really odd is the bit about not liberating a mind after a certain age. Isn’t adulthood when one begins thoughtful examination of the nature of the world?
Or the donuts in the conference room. Sorry- watched to much OLN Tour de France coverage.
FWIW- I thought the first movie did make the most sense and was internally consistent for the most part. But mid-way through the second movie, the plot goes “kablowie”. By the end of the second movie- and the whole third movie, it is just headscratchly bad.
It’s one thing to thoughtfully examine the world. It’s quite another to have your entire sense of reality shattered in your late 20s/early 30s.
What do most “hackers” do for a living? They work mundane IT jobs.
We don’t know if he’s been deliberately misinformed (or programmed to lie), but Agent Smith explains to Morpheus that they (the Machines) had already tried this; that earlier versions of the Matrix were indeed perfect worlds, but they crashed because the Humans perceived them as some kind of “dream” that their primintive brains kept trying to wake up from. This apparently caused no end to the logistics of running the Matrix. “Whole crops were lost.”
That’s why the Matrix looks the way it does when Neo becomes aware. The Machines had discovered the Humans could (mostly) be kept content by presenting to them a world which is mostly boring, yet has the occasional perk.
He was probably just starting to make his name (and money) as a hacker and had not yet quit his day job.
Trust me, it’s not all it’s made out to be.
Haven’t a lot of notorious hackers also had normal (albeit computer-related) jobs?
Hackers make millions? Without commiting some type of fraud?
Please do dish, since the only example I can think of a hacker braking into the millionaire market (using his “hacking”/“cracking” skillz) is Vladmir Levin. And now look where he is (or isn’t).
Is that the spammer who now looks like spam?