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> Consider finding a role or opportunity to write software for people doing something you find meaningful - you can provide an enormous amount of value I agree
by tmpz22 2y ago
> Consider finding a role or opportunity to write software for people doing something you find meaningful - you can provide an enormous amount of value
I agree with the premise but I want to play devil's advocate because you can cause harm trying to help in this manner:
Consider a non-technical org like a non-profit that does marketing-like activities to further its cause. You can build automation for that using SaaS tools binding together a handful of their manual processes. But what happens if you leave? What happens if some of the vendors you picked disappear? How much of your time is now committed to maintaining that software?
Software is brittle. It takes a lot of empathy, time, and long-term thinking to effectively integrate software with an organization steeped in manual processes. So ultimately when you ask "Can I help here" also ask "Should I help here".
A six hour training in spreadsheets can sometimes provide more value then a thousand hours of software development.
- roughly 2y agoCompletely agree with this, and I think this is one of the areas where genuinely senior people distinguish themselves: finding the right mix of systems building and capacity building to provide a durable increases in the organization's capabilities, instead of just making a big flashy show and then leaving. I actually really enjoy building systems for less technical folks - it requires you to learn enough about the problem space and how the users think about the world to create the right interfaces and abstraction layers, but when you do it right, it's phenomenal how fast people can move and how much they can get done. The amount of compute power out there is mind boggling, and when you can actually open that up in a way where people who are less tech-focused can leverage it, you can enable some really incredible stuff.