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>Ask yourself this - what qualities do you see in this work that you admire? The qualities in he work output is what I admire. I won't deny that if you were a

>Ask yourself this - what qualities do you see in this work that you admire? The qualities in he work output is what I admire. I won't deny that if you were a musician at a company that creates elevator music, or a corporate writer compiling a quarterly report, that it could just be as bad as programming for hire. In my very quickly written submission, I wasn't very clear what kind of musician or writer I meant, and I agree this may be an idealized projection. But if you've ever read a novel that at the end you feel a bit lonely, like you've lost a friend, or been moved by a beautiful piece of music, then you'll perhaps see what I'm getting at. Perhaps the artists that created these moving pieces of art had a difficult experience when creating the work. It's common to hear some writers say they hate the act of writing, for example. But at the very least the end product has the ability to create joy in others. As a maintenance programmer working on some horrible ball of mud codebase that all programmers fear to touch, I don't even have that chance. All too often the code is both painful to work on and painful to consume as a user.

apohn 9y ago
>But if you've ever read a novel that at the end you feel a bit lonely, like you've lost a friend, or been moved by a beautiful piece of music, then you'll perhaps see what I'm getting at. If you don't mind, here's an anecdote. I used to work in the consulting arm of a typical enterprise software company. The company sold consulting software+consulting hours, and definitely preferred to sell long term consulting projects that typically embedded us in big changes at large non-tech companies. Lots of people, lots of management/stakeholders, etc. For some customers they also sold smaller blocks (e.g. 160 hours) of undefined consulting hours. The customer typically used these when they needed a bit of help. A typical project would be something like "3 Analysts have something that is being done in Excel and is a total mess as a business process. Can you streamline this?" Can you guess which projects I found more rewarding? When I worked on the small projects it was typically me and someone else working directly with the Analysts and I knew exactly what they needed. At the end of the short project they were extremely happy that some small thing we built made their day to much easier. I felt like I had built a relationship with the people I worked with and could directly see how valuable (or not) what I built was. I felt like I mattered to those people. Note that this was not the type of work that made my resume shine or made people envious when I talked about it. Compare that to the big projects where I basically was 1 of 20 bolt tighteners working on a new bridge. Great stuff for resumes and for some press release in a newspaper. But anybody else could have tightened that bolt and I knew it. So the success of the project barely made me feel anything about what I had done. Note that I did work on pointless small projects as well. When a company has consulting hours they have to burn by Dec 31st they can imagine all sorts of pointless ways to burn them. So my point isn't about small vs big, but how connected you are to the impact of what you are doing. Big projects can have big impact, but it's harder to feel that if you are just a cog in it.

apohn 9y ago

>But if you've ever read a novel that at the end you feel a bit lonely, like you've lost a friend, or been moved by a beautiful piece of music, then you'll perhaps see what I'm getting at. If you don't mind, here's an anecdote. I used to work in the consulting arm of a typical enterprise software company. The company sold consulting software+consulting hours, and definitely preferred to sell long term consulting projects that typically embedded us in big changes at large non-tech companies. Lots of people, lots of management/stakeholders, etc. For some customers they also sold smaller blocks (e.g. 160 hours) of undefined consulting hours. The customer typically used these when they needed a bit of help. A typical project would be something like "3 Analysts have something that is being done in Excel and is a total mess as a business process. Can you streamline this?" Can you guess which projects I found more rewarding? When I worked on the small projects it was typically me and someone else working directly with the Analysts and I knew exactly what they needed. At the end of the short project they were extremely happy that some small thing we built made their day to much easier. I felt like I had built a relationship with the people I worked with and could directly see how valuable (or not) what I built was. I felt like I mattered to those people. Note that this was not the type of work that made my resume shine or made people envious when I talked about it. Compare that to the big projects where I basically was 1 of 20 bolt tighteners working on a new bridge. Great stuff for resumes and for some press release in a newspaper. But anybody else could have tightened that bolt and I knew it. So the success of the project barely made me feel anything about what I had done. Note that I did work on pointless small projects as well. When a company has consulting hours they have to burn by Dec 31st they can imagine all sorts of pointless ways to burn them. So my point isn't about small vs big, but how connected you are to the impact of what you are doing. Big projects can have big impact, but it's harder to feel that if you are just a cog in it.