> It feels very Sisyphean at times I suppose, in a way that making a physical product and then seeing someone use it or eat it really doesn't. An ex-manager ha

> It feels very Sisyphean at times I suppose, in a way that making a physical product and then seeing someone use it or eat it really doesn't. An ex-manager had a phrase that stuck with me, that we are building the factories. Ultimately software gets used to do something, there are lots little "products" being emitted each time it is used. If you are looking at physical products on the shelf, people don't normally think "who fixes the factory that built this when something goes wrong? who makes the factory more efficient so the producer doesn't go bankrupt? who changes the factory when a new design needs to be produced?". This kind of work is rather ephemeral and Sisyphean by nature, so sometimes I like to remind myself that there are these tangible products people rely on but they are just a layer removed. (Nowadays I'm two layers removed - I build a factory to build factories, i.e. compilers and platforms and such). (This particular business line essentially processed data - it was much more complicated than that but fundamentally was remote-sensing -> data-in -> data-out, so the "data factory" metaphore kinda made sense in that setting).