alt Hacker NewsI'm addicted to being useful
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It's not addiction. That makes in sound like self pat on the back disguised as a problem.
It's the equivalent of being neat freak. Some people are annoyed when they see breadcrumbs on the floor and feel a compelling urge to clean it. You experience a compelling urge to fix tech problems.
I think many people have that on various subjects.
It's not really a problem though. More an obsession than an addiction really. Being obsessive about your work is not a problem as long as you maintain proper live/work balance.
does it not bother you that your company is not useful to society?
I am kinda the same only I'm not clear how the author describes useful. Being useful to my team, my employer my clients is ok but a lot of my career has been building software for businesses I did not understand and sometimes actively disliked. I'm unofficially retired after 25+ years in industry and look back at a spotty record of building anything lasting and positive. I had plenty of great teams and received praise for being effective at delivery but honestly it feels hollow in retrospect.
this resonated so much with me, thanks for sharing
I agree broadly with this, but was surprised to see the staff software engineer callout. Then OP linked to some other docs about how to avoid being stuck in rut at "merely" useful. At my job we call that "You can't get promoted to next level by doing the job of someone 2 levels above you."
to feeling useful
Being useful easily turns into to Superman syndrome. Superman syndrome easily turns into to/masks lack of self worth. It's sometimes healthy to figure out how to be comfortable with yourself without external validation.
Cog loves machine!
This sounds almost like "adult female fetish".
I mean you shouldn't let people take advantage of you, but being useful to others is the essence of humanity.
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>> But despite all that, I’m still having a blast
This is proves its mostly over for the high income industry.
There are no good paying jobs where you are having a blast. Otherwise there is a lot of those who want to do that job which drives wages waay down.
High paying jobs are tough/stressful/not fun. Which was the case with software before.
If anything, coding agents gave me more autonomy to experiment and implement stuff. Management used to pretty much risk-adverse, and between building something in-house or paying for another crappy SaaS offering, they would perceive the second one as the least dangerous path in terms of schedule and cost. And then we would be fucked integrating with some shitty API and somehow shoehorning their nonsense abstractions and metaphors into our domain models.
Sometimes I feel that if I said tomorrow that we need to have our own operating system, they would say "sure! go ahead! just make sure to send the expense reports if you need to pay for more tokens with the company's credit card".