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Comment by Zhenya | Hacker News Reader

Why does any of this actually matter? Why were you shaken?

You weren’t committing fraud. You did real work. Now you’re in the US with a family and a career.

Happy Father’s Day.

You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled?

It's a pretty frustrating experience -- was it all for naught? Maybe it's useful to vent about it a bit.

I definitely had this feeling early on in my career, but it did flip around somewhere around halfway through.

"We're not shipping? Well, that's a bummer, but also, what a relief! If building it that was this hard, I can only imagine how bad shipping it would've been; now we can delete that code and with it all of the maintenance we would've had to commit to for years."

The personal attachment just had to go eventually. It proved not to be terribly helpful or healthy anyways.

look at you you lucky devil, getting to delete code!

> was it all for naught?

I accepted a long time ago that it is all for naught :)

Enjoy our time on this earth, do what we can, focus on people and it'll be alright

Ok, but then honestly, spending 40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time.

It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.

Many people's enjoyment stems from knowing they do less work for more money than the people they grew up around.

'Useful' is not even a thought that's ever entered their brain.

> doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time.

When the world starts paying people for the best use of their time, people will start prioritizing that.

>40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time.

For almost everyone, working is not the best way to spend their time, it's just how they can afford the stuff they do the rest of the time. Obviously it's preferable if it's useful and/or enjoyable, but they're not necessary qualities.

>It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.

Odd. "Agency" usually refers to the ability to exert will. Understanding would not seem to contribute towards that.

Work can be useless for society. I do useless work for example.

My clients are happy though and they pay and I receive money for tinkering with computers. It's a win-win.

I'm under no illusion this all serves some grander purpose. I don't think anything does.

Yep 90% of companies don't matter and don't affect things. Only 10% of people do. That's just the way the world works. There's no way to know before you start so just live while you can enjoy.

So much of what I’ve worked on in my career has proven to be utterly ephemeral. I’ve learned not to dwell on it too much, in part because one of software’s great strengths is its malleability[0].

However, I was quite surprised a few weeks ago, on a client project, to find in one of their repos a chunk of example code that I’d worked on 22 years ago.

[0] Being real, a lot of the ephemerality actually stems from questionable commercial decisions, working on the wrong thing, etc. But some at least is a legitimate result of evolving markets and needs.

Same same. I don't expect any of my product code to survive for very long.

I suspect some of my open source contributions will live a long time. Not my personal projects that I make open source just in case, but the (very small) contributions to fix things in the dark shadows of established projects with longevity. Some of that will become obsolete and hopefully be removed, and some might get refactored eventually, but if the project is older than my career it's may well last beyond me.

Our work is extremely ephemeral by nature. Many times I only value the communication that happened and the shared understanding that was built. The code is an .. artifact. Nice to hang on the wall.

I worked at a company whose product was truly boneheaded. Without giving too much away, it’s the kind of technology that would have been useful if we lived in a world where smartphones weren’t being carried around by literally everybody.

I knew this, but took the job because I was burned out and knew I could spend a year or two coasting and padding my resume with some interesting things.

I came to the conclusion that the company was a grift, but at least they took care of their employees and included them in the profit part of it.

We had startup perks that were basically paid out in cash when the pandemic hit. The “gym” perk became $500 in cash which could be spent on anything vaguely fitness related, like an Apple Watch. The commuter benefits rolled into our accounts which gave me free tolls for years afterward. Instead of taking all the money, they cut us in.

So yeah, maybe frustrating if you expected your startup to be successful, but that’s so often outside of the control of any engineer. It’s always a crap shoot. Get your best offer and make the most of it. You can do resume driven development even in the shadiest of firms.

>but at least they took care of their employees and included them in the profit part of it.

All good grifts let some "little people" in on it so they go to bat for it.

This attitude actually becomes the only viable strategy once you realize that the majority of the economy in the majority of the world is connected in some way with some kind of graft. Even honest salt-of-the-earth sewer workers or something are probably pawns in some larger fraud scheme. The "economy* is in some sense one large scam.

> You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled?

I would have thought most people would grow out of having this kind of feeling after their 1st job. But I also definitely work to live, not live to work, so YMMV.

Do you get your major feeling of success primarily from work, or is it the rest of life? I don't think I need to spell what is viewed as the proper long term winning strategy here. I know folks who ride the work part, and let me tell you - unless you land a stellar employer and exceptional boss, its recipe for a lot of miserable days and worse, for decades. Its also a symptom of what I would call 'unfulfilled life', but thats my personal take please don't get offended quickly.

With that mindset (or work-to-live or whatever you can call it), these things are just an afterthought. That after-work climbing session and that weekend meeting with friends or hiking trip in the mountains with kids mean world to me, and I fully indent to keep that mindset till retirement and continue with it further. If it means I won't get into top 1% or whatever I am fine with that, QoL is firmly above that and career rat races are meaningless (and fruitless) ego polishing / insecurities managing exercises.

I assume because it turns out it was a actual bullshit job, and they were probably proud of what they had achieved. They probably trusted and may have even got on well with their boss.

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