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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is kind of the right place to ask. Does anyone else feel completely unproductive in their career? I have been employed full time as a software developer making six figures for nearly a decade now, and I literally cannot point to a single piece of working software being used today in production that I was responsible for. It seems like every new job hires me to work on some exciting new project that gets canned or dies off within a year or two. Mind you my performance reviews have always been stellar and I have been consistently promoted and given raises at every job I've had. Is this normal? I feel completely useless.

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I chop a bit of wood every morning to heat my office space. All that chopping work is burned. I don't have an expectation that my wood or code will last very long. I enjoy both chopping and coding.

At least the wood is definitely being useful - it's keeping you warm. Same for cooking a meal (it's eaten afterwards, was it useful?), cleaning your room, etc.

The problem with coding jobs is when they're not even _temporarily_ useful - which is a common occurrence in my experience on bigger corps as well, and (I suspect) is a big factor for engineer burnout)

Doesn't a coding job keep the coder warm?

I hear you, but that approach, while delightfully mindless, would never have pushed human civilization beyond subsistence farming.

You gotta wonder if the meaning of it all is pushing human civilization beyond anything. The older I am, the less I think so.

Also, the approach is definitely not mindless. It's mindful, if anything.

The older I am, the less I think so.

Yes, the younger you was naturally more appreciative of the technological advances that allowed him to live as long as the older you has.

And the older me is more appreciative of people who share their way of not wanting more, but appreciating the less. But I have to concede, painkillers and the internet is nice too.

> I've had. Is this normal? I feel completely useless.

This is all by design in my view. You're at an organization that is in maintenance mode, all talent has left and the only folks remain are to keep the lights on. Your one or two year projects are facades to keep the sheep from bailing. Leadership needs to keep new folks coming in and old folks from getting bored but the only real priority is to just keep. the. lights. on. Hence, why you get A+++ reviews for warming a seat and most importantly, answering a pager at 3 AM.

This perspective resonates strongly with me. If I'd read this comment two years ago I would've brushed it aside as an overly cynical take but it rings true to my ears now.

In the last two years I've joined and left a bay area tech company that was operating exactly as you described: a maintenance mode org that lost all its former glory and the execs were happy to sit and see the hamster wheel churn; slowly squeezing out whatever is left of the market. Even with strong quarterly marks and plenty of time to piss away I couldn't endure the overwhelming boredom and purposelessness of it all and had no option but to resign.

I think perhaps I was too hopeful and optimistic back then. If I'd understood early on that it was by design that nothing ever got done, I would've optimized for getting the most time/happiness out of it. Live and learn I guess.

I work in government contracting, and have been doing it longer than you. On one project recently, some teammates were complaining about some unproductive thing we were doing, and I said "hey, this project is actually getting deployed and used by somebody, which automatically makes it more worthwhile than 75% of the other projects I've been on".

While I sometimes think that it's mostly a government thing, I figure big companies probably do the same.

> I figure big companies probably do the same.

Yup. Sometimes it's a Manhattan-project-esque "try every approach and we'll run with the one(s) that work the best" (this was the philosophy behind methods for enriching fissile materials during the war). Sometimes it boils down to organizational ineptitude, especially a lack of situational awareness such that the project becomes, in military terms, overtaken by events.

Note that sometimes things run the other way, where inertia keeps a project going when the hard decision to pull the plug should have been made long ago.

Yes the discussion of productivity is often totally divorced from any questions of social utility, morality or meaning.

"You show me a guy laying around doing nothing all day and I'll show you someone who's not causing any trouble" - Carlin

This is part of the game. Embrace it; the vast majority of jobs produce no real-world value but few pay as well as SWE. At least you aren't part of a democracy-destroying behemoth.

>I feel completely useless.

I feel this. What I think you can do is try to look at the journey you made, the achievements you have, and the things you built from the work you did.

Along the journey, what kind of people have you met? Where are they now? Do they, and how are they living in your memory, and how could you live in theirs?

During the career, what were the high points? What were the high points that were recognized, like something you did for a client, and what were the ones where you, only you knew the kind of shit that would have hit the fan, if it weren't for you?

Looking around you, are you surrounded by things that you bought from the money you earned along the way? How was your life at the beginning and how is it now?

The thing I'm trying to get at, is that you're much more than your productivity in your career. Maybe your job is the most useless shit ever but it puts food on the table, enables a lifestyle you enjoy, opens gates for you or lets you provide for a family. And those things can have the value you're missing. Just as an average day doesn't really matter in the grander scheme of things, small slices of your existence might not matter too, and that's okay. It's what we build from these insignificant things that count.

I'm not sure it's "normal", but I've heard similar things from enough folks that I think it's at least "common" amongst 'full time corporate' devs. I work more in the freelance world, and there's usually not quite as much of that sentiment, as there's usually more self-direction, but freelance comes with its own set of problems as well.

I had a similar feeling at my last job: I'm building software no one uses :(

I made sure to probe about related details when I was looking for my next (current) job. I found a company with a strong customer relationship, existing production software running, and more in the pipeline. Things worked out well and I got to be happy about seeing my code running in production, helping people do "stuff".

My one piece of advice is to focus on this aspect during interviews whenever you decide it's time to move on. After a certain dollar amount, optimizing things like this that you value will likely lead to a happier result compared with a bigger paycheck.

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