It feels better only as long as everybody else cares too. Being the only one competent in a room of imbeciles is a terrible feeling.
Hmm, this is perhaps why we get socially-negative businesses that often have very friendly (and driven, and hard-working, and intelligent) internal cultures. Competency becomes a fault line. When it becomes obvious that a large fraction of humanity just doesn't give a shit, a small group of people who are competent and driven turn their efforts to taking advantage of people who don't give a shit. Thus creating industries like market-makers, cryptocurrency, advertising, and AI.
> It feels better only as long as everybody else cares too.
Not sure who “everybody else” is in your statement, but as someone who founded a healthcare tech platform (since sold) [1], I spent 20 years caring about the many millions of patient medical records we held and making sure my team cared too. In my mind it wasn’t optional.
I did it because:
* it’s the right thing to do
* for professional pride
* and so I could sleep at night
And, at least at the beginning, I believed a data breach could be the death knell of the company. Over time the laissez faire attitude to data protection, by the industry as a whole, made it seem like a breach would be survivable, but luckily we never tested that theory.
I still walked away from it a wealthy man. Being competent and caring about your customers (and being able to sleep at night) doesn’t have to mean failure like it seems everyone here thinks.
[1] https://www.meddbase.com/