alt Hacker NewsI'm addicted to being useful
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> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional
As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It bugs the hell out of me because I tend to need to solve All The Problems before I can do any self-care, but rather than seem heroic, I think this attitude can seem transactional or uncaring as though everyone is just a screw that needed a bit of tightening, etc.
Ever since Lowtax killed himself and I felt a lot of undeserved guilt over it [1] [2] I have developed a sort of "savior complex".
I always liked being helpful, but at this point I've sort of become "aggressively helpful", which ironically probably isn't helping. I feel a constant need to take care of people and help people, and I think it's in no small part because a tiny part of me is afraid they're going to do something horrible to themselves, or they're going to make some decision that I think is "wrong".
It's more than a little frustrating, because at some level I'm aware I'm doing it, and of course I have to ask myself "who made me the 'correct' decision-maker?", but I also can't really stop myself from doing it either, and at a certain level I'm considerably more willing to help other people than myself because I'm ultimately a coward and I'm really afraid of guilt. Many people have told me that it's not my job to assume responsibility for everyone, and they're objectively correct about this, but human psychology is stupid. Or at least mine is.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185822
[2] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/July-2023/Guilt-and-...
I was like the author of the article, then I realized that I was solving problems that were created by other peoples' incompetence. Sure they were challenging, fun but they didn't bring anything postive overall. The incompetent people are still there - causing more problems.
So I decided to find a worthwhile problem that deserved my talent. And I did. And I am now even more happy than before.
I feel the same way. I retired last summer, but that only means that I found a place that needs me, where I can work part time without worrying too much about money.
I remember, decades ago, reading an article about some African politician visiting the UK. He was given a tour, which included some of the social housing. The UK bragging about how they took care of their people. He saw people sitting around with with their housing and food paid for. His comment? "How horrible!".
He found it horrible, because - from his perspective - they had no role in society, nothing to do, no purpose to their existence.
It’s great to be useful as living for your purpose is the best way to achieve life satisfaction. But it’s important to establish boundaries and avoid developing codependency and not to define yourself through the perception of your acts towards others. Having a skill that helps others gives you a sense of mastery. The fact that you have this skill and apply it in good faith should be enough to establish a good sense of self without feedback from others.
I love being an engineer and solving problems that I’m good at, which are problems too complex for most people to approach. But not everyone feels that way, some or most people don’t care or don’t understand the motivation, as they may have different motivations of their own. Learning to accept that and be confident without validation from others is very tough but possible, as you apply yourself consistently with focus and clarity, you gain a stronger sense of purpose. You are never fulfilled, but continue to pursue anyway, that is the trick I learned for myself. The trait is called equanimity and is more of a sustainable attitude vs a feeling, that is transactional. It’s easier as you get older and comes with maturity.
I love every minute of my sysadmin job (different job, I know)..and it's not always easy. I enjoy the work. I enjoy educating the users. I even enjoy being on call. And it isn't necessarily the money. I enjoy researching and fixing issues that I might not have come across before, and improving on the current infrastructure and workflow. I even enjoy talking to the salespeople and vendors who call. I love putting projects together and seeing them work when finished.
Many people in my line of work do not share my attitude, and many of my coworkers are grouchy and complain they're overworked. They do just enough to get by, and are generally rude to the users (but, not always).
I am in my early fifties, and have been in the business most of my career. I have worked at only two different companies, and have had a great life, even the long days that turned into late nights/early mornings.
I would definitely say I am addicted to being useful.
I think my warning would be that prioritizing tasks you know you can do and do well may be satisfying, but may limit growth. I identify with the author's POV quite a bit, but sometimes I find that when I take a step back and put in less effort on the day-to-day tasks, the feedback on my performance goes _up_.
Perhaps it's because completing those tasks elicits a dependency on you, and stepping back from them allows others to step up and fill that gap. In the meantime, you might not _think_ you're doing more impactful work, but perhaps the mental cycles stepping back from those tasks frees you up to think about more important / higher value work.
So insightful! This idea that some people just like the puzzles and some people like the control struck me. I get why Factorio is addictive but I can't really stand to play it much. I'd rather be refactoring something useful. And the idea that the same mentality covers forum mods. This is incredibly helpful to understand some of my friends and colleagues a little better.
I'm kind of this way also. My work motto was always: "Be the best worker and you'll always have a job." This was easy, because I was always curious about how things worked and didn't mind helping others. In my thirties, while training for a new position, I thanked my trainer for his help and he told me: "You seem willing to work and now I won't have to do your job for you." That simple statement changed how I thought about coworkers. Gradually, I became less helpful to the ones who thought it was a good idea for me to do their job with/for them.
I get stuck on asking “why am I solving this problem” too much. I am surrounded by technical problems that it would give a dopamine hit to solve and I’d feel the pleasure of helping my fellow man, but 99% of them feel like they shouldn’t even exist and solving them doesn’t really lead to any meaningful progress beyond providing me job security and money. (How) do people deal with this?
I wonder if this sort of thing can lead to faster burnout or such. I've sorta over time leaned toward guarding my own space/time since somehow I get more tired out, and over time more burned out, if I don't.
Computers were never a job to me. They were curiosity, play, obsession. Until, quietly, they became work.
The problem of doing this now is that no company will care, they will be happy that you are doing more for less, so no salary increase, no job tittle change.
I used to love my job (DevOps, Platform, DevSecOps Engineer) but I learned the hard way to disappear after 4:59PM and never get online before 8:59
Also, no more e-mail, teams, slack, etc, on my personal phone. While working be in the office or WFH, I do my best but outside that, you won't find me.
I am addicted to being useful culture died in early 2000s.... I am seeing projects where the goal is to have AI Teams managing AI Teams without human intervention, so enjoy your life and take workplace less seriously, we are gonna be replaced and you will regret spending more time working than living!!
I find it kinda amazing how these vaporware equivalent nullprose keep on hitting the front page.
Can definitely relate to this. But I have found that, when running a team, it can be very counter productive.
If you constantly solve all the problems that come it can be stifling for the people you manage.
Many of the problems are self inflicted or don’t deserve solving in the first place. In fact solving Facebook’s ad targeting “problem” is actively working against The Good.
Unfortunately, my career has been solving such things; and once I realized that, there was no going back and no job satisfaction.
I also take offense at the belief of “being the only one who can solve the problem”. This is an arrogant self serving justification to blind oneself of the harm the solutions cause.
I’ve never felt useful in any of the big tech companies I’ve worked at. It always feels pointless. Is it just the projects I’ve been assigned never being worth anything or whether it is my perspective on those projects, I have no idea
The article’s title is awkward. In it, he says he is addicted to being useful to his management queue. He avoids “time predators” and dismisses Jira ticket jockeys.
That is the author’s real intention is to assert engineers should deliver what their bosses ask.
This internal compulsion is just learned behavior. The society conditions you to work instead of play.
Nothing wrong with that, I have that compulsion as well.
Having a compulsion to play, purely for the sake of playing is a much healthier view. Useful, not useful, hard problem, easy problem, should not matter, you're playing.
Sometimes you can't be useful, yet you can always play.
All stems from inability to have systems without labor. Work, work.
I like how Pope John Paul II flipped the narrative and said work exist for the person, as a way for person to express itself. Made me realize how even communism stays trapped in labor mentality.
I can relate to this and in my journey, I was able to maintain feeding my need to be useful to the world around me and do well money-wise. The latter was my desire to be there for my family so they can focus on their health.
The best part about HackerNews, is that you get a very good sense of the envious and jealous nature of people. A lot of the "hate" or "angry" comments, are basically people who hate their relationship with "work".
To the author, I think you'll continue that process of being useful, but you'll see that in this new world, you're usefulness now scales..
I was this way for a long time at work. A re-org and management change broke me. It's been very hard to get motivated these days. I want it to be like it was, but I'm starting to think there is no going back.
If this resonates with you, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Tracy Kidder's 1981 novel The Soul of a New Machine. You'll be hooked by the end of the introduction.
I have something similar to this need to be useful but perhaps a different twist that is causing me problems. It's not so much a sense that I want to be useful but a feeling that I HAVE to be or bad things will happen. Lately it's a constantly running internal narrative that everyone around me is useless. Which breeds an anxiety that if I don't do everything then something important will slip through the cracks. That yields a sense of dispair and eventually anger because of this constant weight that I expect I'll have to carry indefinitely.
I've been in therapy off and on through the years and I think this stems from a childhood with neglectful parents. I need to start seeing someone again. Thanks for the reminder!
> some people in tech companies will identify people like me and wring us out in ways that only benefit them
Absolutely. They inevitably get promoted to managers, because they are able to parasitically get things done.
Anyone who finds this relatable (like me) might benefit from learning more about the last couple of decades of research on emotional regulation, trauma, and the nervous system. I have a great “trauma informed” therapist and over time this tendency of mine feels much less compulsive and more like a choice I can make because I know I’m good at something. At least for me having a calmer internal life has made it way easier to pick my battles and it usually means I end up feeding my desire to be useful on more satisfying and impactful things than I would have chased in more obsessive times in my life.
Being useful can often be a curse without strong boundaries - in work and relationships, I personally have ended up becoming overly extracted... Which later seems to lead on to resentment and in the worst case, contempt.
The working dog analogy really resonated. I've noticed this same trait in teachers, nurses, even parents; that intrinsic satisfaction from being needed. The tricky part is knowing when it tips from fulfilling to self-depleting.
Nietzsche would approve that you are seeking power through usefulness. Even if he disdained money, he is a bit idealistic/outdated here. Hobbes says riches is a form of power.
Aka, identity-affirming obsessive-compulsive personality disorder with compulsive mastery as defense mechanism. Welcome to the club, we have cookies (and they're Michelin-rated but it takes us three weeks to make them).
I can very much relate to the OP in this. I enjoy writing code, figuring out problems, finding solutions and in general helping other people with things that require some kind of software to be created or updated. And until year or two ago I thought I'd be able to continue to do what I love while getting paid decent money for it. With the advent of vibe coding and AI I'm starting to feel less sure in the future.
This is a fantastic intro to the article I wanted to read, which was Sean's advice on how to best leverage this trait.
I'm similar, but make sure you're addicted to being useful, and not addicted to being needed - the latter can come about by being useful enough. Sometimes it comes from a feeling of wanting control, but opens the door wide open to abusive relationships (both ways).
This concept comes up a lot, especially on this site. I am sometimes surprised how seldomly it is mentioned by this name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai
And I have a fear of rejection
One of thing I have noticed of good software engineers is while they are trying to solve problems, they also communicate with clarity to upper management chain. The clarity they bring to the table was always appreciated and also puts them in the career growth path easily.
I identify very strongly with this. More than once in my career I have gotten feedback along the lines of:
> We really like your work! How can you help other engineers be more like you?
The thing I think (but usually don't say) is:
> You realize I'm like this because I often work directly against your instruction in order to satisfy my personal sense of professional pride and responsibility?
Just a word of warning to not take this to the max. Do not define your personal self worth over how useful (you think) you are.
There’s a famous billionaire founder in Germany that attempted suicide just recently, because … he didn’t feel useful anymore.
https://7news.com.au/news/ex-boss-of-major-textile-brand-tri...
This only works if the environment caps the work somehow. Else there is an endless amount of problems finding their way into the plate of those with a rep for being helpful problem solvers
giving a like for quoting Gogol and Akakiy Akakievich (I wish you could understand this russian wordplay and what's meaning about that nicknames and why they were chosen)
Yeah I see the plot here. From this one:
https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-times-are-over/
> In other words, your interests now conflict with your company’s interests.
> It’s okay for your interests to conflict with your company’s. You get to decide what you care about, and what you’re willing to fight for. But when you act in ways that don’t further your company’s interests, you risk being seen as ineffective or unreliable. In 2025, that makes you vulnerable to being laid off.
And this one:
https://www.seangoedecke.com/a-little-bit-cynical/
I personally don't have the mental fortitude to enjoy most things about my job. There are several reasons: 1) selfishness, my interests not aligning with optimizing shareholder value, 2) shared dysfunction, all the ways we work in bad ways that is not good for anyone, 3) the sense that we are convincing managers to shove our product down the throats of their underlings, 4) laziness and other transient states (or maybe not so transient)?)
The Cynical article was curious to me. But just because I expected it to be Cynical in the sense that the author thought things were bad. But Cynical just meant merrily working within the gears of the professional system. Then having no complaints about it. No commentary beyond gaining both money and pleasure from aligning with optimizing shareholder value.
Is this not something everybody wants to some degree? Maybe not to the extreme of Akaky, but of course I like being useful. I like solving problems. I like making things that people use, and love to use.
It's not always healthy; at my current job (started 8 months ago) I see tons of issues to fix. Some of them are explicitly mine to fix, some close enough to my area of responsibility, but some of them are well outside it. And I'm annoyed that nobody has fixed these problems, because everybody is aware that these are problems. But the entire way the organisation works, seems designed to make it as hard as possible for me to fix them.
I'll probably burn out and leave in a few months to do something I care less about.
I can relate to this. I find that I have the same issue.
> the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional: specifically, my addiction to being useful. (Of course, it helps that my working conditions are overall much better than Akaky’s). I’m kind of like a working dog, in a way. Working dogs get rewarded with treats4, but they don’t do it for the treats. They do it for the work itself, which is inherently satisfying
I haven't been able to find a source for this, but I remember reading that Marx believed that doing productive work for the benefit of human beings was part of the "species essence" of humans. Needless to say, he did not approve of how this tendency was expressed under capitalism. He said that working for compensation alienates people from their work, prevents them from fulfilling their species essence, and therefore prevents them from being fully actualized human beings.
If you're working for the satisfaction of being useful to others, that's not dysfunction. That's you beating the odds and having a healthy relationship to your work despite the external social pressure to make it about the money. I think there's no irony in the fact that you have better working conditions; in fact, it makes perfect sense: you are privileged and insulated from the harshest pressures of capitalism that force people to think only about the financial benefit to themselves and not the benefit they provide to other people.
I fight for the Users
Nothing wrong on the surface with this, and the author explicitly acknowledges this risk, but it bears repeating:
Corporate environments are almost always toxic places to fulfill your emotional needs.
It is true that finding a job that "resonates" with your personality is key to living a fulfilling life, and that software engineering is the kind of profession that is really going to fit certain personality types extremely well, but despite that corporate culture can and will take advantage of you, divide you and your work "friends", exploit your willingness to serve, and discard you like trash at any moment.
Be mindful of how much of yourself you derive from serving the financial goals of others.