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I lamented about this to a friend of mine recently. The first half of my short career were at companies where all we had were users. Endless customer support an
by runawaybottle 6y ago
I lamented about this to a friend of mine recently. The first half of my short career were at companies where all we had were users. Endless customer support and feedback, endless eyeballs looking at anything you build. Every decision was based on ... reality.
The second half of my career, even at larger places, was building MVPs where you go forever without a single user ever seriously using it.
This duality in my work experience created an odd existential crisis. Push to prod after awhile felt like fake urgency. Ideas being thrown around by team members after awhile felt like needlessness. New hires and growth initiatives felt stupid, we barely saturate the existing team. Demos/Presentations felt futile, with a part of your soul just screaming ‘Who the fuck uses this!’.
- tboyd47 6y agoAh, I've been there. I call this "rapid bozotyping" :D Hope you find something better! What tech stack do you work in?
- runawaybottle 6y agoThe favorite tech stack for bozotyping, React/GQL :p
- dvtrn 6y agoI call this "rapid bozotyping" :D I would read an entire research paper dedicated to this topic if it existed, heh.
- dmoy 6y agoIt is a nice reality check where if you break something too bad, you have tens of thousand / hundreds / millions / ?? people breathing down your neck in like a few hours. I never really considered that without that it would get too loopy.
- rootusrootus 6y agoThis is where I am with my current gig. We are abstracted so far from the actual user that it feels like a useless amount of urgency for no particular reason. And middle management is more experienced in hardware than software, so they keep trying to use the "we will just hire more contractors to make it happen faster!" strategy. Feels like needless stress to build something nobody is really going to use anyway. And on top of that, I don't even get to do any code, I'm too senior, so all they want me to do now is draw up architecture diagrams. I'm thinking about jumping ship and taking a pay cut if necessary just to get back to something where I can actually solve real problems building software I know people will actually use. It's so much more satisfying to work on something you know is useful.
- runawaybottle 6y agoBut I will say, this is a ‘us’ problem, not necessarily a ‘them’ problem. I guess this job requires dealing with the nebula. It’s not easy, but the feelings are valid.