3 ms·

Wow, this hits close to home. I have shipped exactly 1 feature that has helped anyone, and it's only helped a few 10s of thousands of people. And the product

by jressey 10y ago

Wow, this hits close to home. I have shipped exactly 1 feature that has helped anyone, and it's only helped a few 10s of thousands of people. And the product which uses the feature is probably going to shut down soon.

ashark 10y ago
Yeah, solidly 80-90% of my time working has never really led to anything like enough benefit to anyone to justify it. Much of it's never benefitted anyone at all. There's a ton of stupid money in software right now. Enough to waste tons of our time on 9 things that don't work for the 1 that does. Doesn't make it feel good to be a part of such an impersonal and abstract process, especially when software's already kinda impersonal and abstract on the best days.
roflc0ptic 10y ago
Speaking as a dev of 8 years who has shipped a fair amount, that... sounds like a cool accomplishment. My work has been integral to the professional lives of like, 40 people - extremely small scale applications for scientific endeavors, mostly. I'm pretty proud of it. I'd be really proud of building something that helped ~20k people.
- jressey 10y ago
  If it makes you feel better this feature was an enhancement to an in-app messaging system. So like, they could have just used email.
steven777400 10y ago
10s of thousands is great, and much more than many developers will experience. A lot of developers (outside of tech companies especially) create software for "internal" or corporate use, often by one division. The various projects I supervise/work on have between 10 and 100 users. The total user count for all my projects together is less than 1000. On the other hand, there's a good segment of those users who basically "live" (w.r.t work) in the software; every time I walk by the customer users area I see it front and center on their screens, which is a good feeling.

3 ms·

Wow, this hits close to home. I have shipped exactly 1 feature that has helped anyone, and it's only helped a few 10s of thousands of people. And the product

by jressey 10y ago

ashark 10y ago
Yeah, solidly 80-90% of my time working has never really led to anything like enough benefit to anyone to justify it. Much of it's never benefitted anyone at all. There's a ton of stupid money in software right now. Enough to waste tons of our time on 9 things that don't work for the 1 that does. Doesn't make it feel good to be a part of such an impersonal and abstract process, especially when software's already kinda impersonal and abstract on the best days.
roflc0ptic 10y ago
Speaking as a dev of 8 years who has shipped a fair amount, that... sounds like a cool accomplishment. My work has been integral to the professional lives of like, 40 people - extremely small scale applications for scientific endeavors, mostly. I'm pretty proud of it. I'd be really proud of building something that helped ~20k people.
- jressey 10y ago
  If it makes you feel better this feature was an enhancement to an in-app messaging system. So like, they could have just used email.
steven777400 10y ago
10s of thousands is great, and much more than many developers will experience. A lot of developers (outside of tech companies especially) create software for "internal" or corporate use, often by one division. The various projects I supervise/work on have between 10 and 100 users. The total user count for all my projects together is less than 1000. On the other hand, there's a good segment of those users who basically "live" (w.r.t work) in the software; every time I walk by the customer users area I see it front and center on their screens, which is a good feeling.