11 ms·

I'm addicted to being useful

603 points by swah 9mo ago

ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
I can relate to this. I find that I have the same issue.
myself248 9mo ago
If this resonates with you, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Tracy Kidder's 1981 novel The Soul of a New Machine. You'll be hooked by the end of the introduction.
- tclancy 9mo ago
  And if you like that, the good news is you will probably like most every Kidder book. Or at least House. His works tend to be inquiries into how systems work, just at different scales.
iamflimflam1 9mo ago
Can definitely relate to this. But I have found that, when running a team, it can be very counter productive. If you constantly solve all the problems that come it can be stifling for the people you manage.
- poszlem 9mo ago
  Strongly agree with this. It may sound good in theory, but in practice, especially with real people, it can come across as overbearing, stifling, and exhausting for others. This isn’t meant as a dig at the OP. it’s just an observation based on personal experience with someone like that in my own family. edit: I am not critiquing enthusiasm itself, but a compulsion that can be productive and unhealthy.
- drekipus 9mo ago
  I see this as "my problem is to grow these people" so I don't solve anything for them I think it's just a case is perspective
harryday 9mo ago
Help is the sunny side of control.
- Ronsenshi 9mo ago
  Interesting quote and certainly can apply to some people, but this behavior could also be considered as "acts of service" type of "love language". You can take any endearing and genuinely good behavior and make a toxic version out of it.
  - inanutshellus 9mo ago
    Helping people is 100% my love language. My SIL queues up household tasks when I come over. "Hey I got this new thermostat, can you help me put it on?" kinda stuff that she could do herself but she knows that's what makes me feel fulfilled. Point being: GP - calm down bud. ;-)
- ambicapter 9mo ago
  An extremely toxic mindset.
- clcaev 9mo ago
  Someone who stops at road side, and helps a stranger with a tire iron, likely has no reason other than it just feels the right thing to do; the recipient's smile being the most precious payment they could possibly receive.
- pizzafeelsright 9mo ago
  I thought about this without instantly rejecting outright. I agree. I am not interested in controlling someone's thoughts or actions and I do not help.
tclancy 9mo ago
> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It bugs the hell out of me because I tend to need to solve All The Problems before I can do any self-care, but rather than seem heroic, I think this attitude can seem transactional or uncaring as though everyone is just a screw that needed a bit of tightening, etc.
- johnisgood 9mo ago
  Yeah, I am still learning to not be logical and fix whatever ails her. Often she really just wants to be heard, not solutions. I am ~30 years old, hopefully I will be able to just hear, without offering any solutions. It bothers me too. I am a SWE because I love solving problems!
  - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
    > It bothers me too. I am a SWE because I love solving problems! In my case, I've recently been wondering whether I really love solving problems, or rather just hate stupid bullshit and solving it - quickly and efficiently - is usually the best way to make it go away for good. In many cases, the behavior is identical - I just find myself to be motivated by frustration more often than curiosity these days.
    - johnisgood 9mo ago
      Yeah, I can relate. I would say I am motivated by frustration more than curiosity as well, not just with regarding to my partner but in general.
  - MarkLowenstein 9mo ago
    The real trouble is knowing what being heard, means. For me, as long as no one's intending to make this situation better, I'd like to go do other things. How long do I have to stay there pretending to lament that her life is so hard--especially when part of that is because she hates having her problems solved?
nusl 9mo ago
I wonder if this sort of thing can lead to faster burnout or such. I've sorta over time leaned toward guarding my own space/time since somehow I get more tired out, and over time more burned out, if I don't.
- Ronsenshi 9mo ago
  I probably have a very similar "dysfunction" as OP. Can't say how it is for him, but I do get burned out somewhat regularly if I push myself too much for too long. However it usually takes few days to a week at most of low-effort activity or travel to recover.
  - nusl 9mo ago
    Oh, that's really fast recovery for burnout
Ronsenshi 9mo ago
I can very much relate to the OP in this. I enjoy writing code, figuring out problems, finding solutions and in general helping other people with things that require some kind of software to be created or updated. And until year or two ago I thought I'd be able to continue to do what I love while getting paid decent money for it. With the advent of vibe coding and AI I'm starting to feel less sure in the future.
- drekipus 9mo ago
  I feel more useful now more than anything. The amount of ai generated planning and fluffy workloads that I've been able to just delete from the team has saved the company many engineering hours. Not least of all in bugs. Value your expertise and experience. It's only greeting more valuable, not less.
  - Ronsenshi 9mo ago
    It's great that this is a case for you. I actually enjoy process of writing code, understanding deeply the system I work on, finding elegant solutions to business problems - not just a list of checkboxes with features for a given sprint that agent churns in background. Sure, practically I understand that business doesn't care how well something is written as long as it works somewhat reliably. I might eventually adapt to this new horrible reality of developers who have no idea what's going on in the codebase they "work" on.
    - phito 9mo ago
      You can still understand a system deeply and find elegant solutions, and use LLMs to translate your idea into code, then review the code. It's still much faster than writing everything by hand in a lot of cases, if done properly.
      - Ronsenshi 9mo ago
        Reviewing code that was written by somebody else is one of the least fun and enjoyable activities in my experience . I personally don't know any programmers who enjoy process of doing PR reviews. If you only care about number of features Copilot implements for you or lines of code Claude Code gave you - you must be a manager.
bradley13 9mo ago
I feel the same way. I retired last summer, but that only means that I found a place that needs me, where I can work part time without worrying too much about money. I remember, decades ago, reading an article about some African politician visiting the UK. He was given a tour, which included some of the social housing. The UK bragging about how they took care of their people. He saw people sitting around with with their housing and food paid for. His comment? "How horrible!". He found it horrible, because - from his perspective - they had no role in society, nothing to do, no purpose to their existence.
- pjc50 9mo ago
  This is a big topic in disability rights activism; there are a lot of people who can do some work some of the time, with a certain level of accommodation, and would benefit from so doing. But that's not how the system works. It forces everyone into binary categorizations, with the aim of removing help if at all possible. So it becomes economically necessary for people to present themselves as helpless and stay away from work or even volunteering, because doing so jeopardizes their means of surviving the bureaucracy.
- jadbox 9mo ago
  I'm skeptical of this perspective as most social housing in the UK and the USA have stiff REQUIREMENTS that housing residents be either either employed OR be showing proof of interviewing OR enroll in a job placement program (which requires active training participation). If you fail these, you are generally kicked out of these social housing programs. Maybe there are some exceptions here and there, but it's generally unusual to have social housing without strict policies and monitored policies on job placements. This policy exists as social housing is highly limited and the administrators wants people to get jobs so that they move out (and into a better shelter they can now afford).
  - liminvorous 9mo ago
    I don't believe UK social housing has any work requirements, it is just massively oversubscribed, such that you need to be very vulnerable to realistically be offered council housing. You do have to pay (below market rate) rent, so you probably need to be searching for work or have been declared to have limited capability for work or work related activities to get a benefit to pay for your social housing. I think there's some state where they've decided no one will hire you for minimum wage, but you're otherwise able so you have to do some kind of volunteering.
PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
Nietzsche would approve that you are seeking power through usefulness. Even if he disdained money, he is a bit idealistic/outdated here. Hobbes says riches is a form of power.
techdmn 9mo ago
I identify very strongly with this. More than once in my career I have gotten feedback along the lines of: > We really like your work! How can you help other engineers be more like you? The thing I think (but usually don't say) is: > You realize I'm like this because I often work directly against your instruction in order to satisfy my personal sense of professional pride and responsibility?
zhisme 9mo ago
giving a like for quoting Gogol and Akakiy Akakievich (I wish you could understand this russian wordplay and what's meaning about that nicknames and why they were chosen)
- ambicapter 9mo ago
  > I think in Russian this is supposed to be an obviously silly name, like “Poop Poopson”. Is this correct? From the footnotes.
  - zhisme 9mo ago
    yep, that's right. The idea of his nickname that he is really silly. Small man and no good at anything. If you want to go deeper and harsh synonyms he is like "shitty" man, doing shit and receiving shit. His nickname fully describes him like useless, small, no influence, clueless, talentless man. One from the great unwashed
  - justsomehnguy 9mo ago
    Nope. >> Gogol makes much of Akaky's name in the opening passages, saying, "the circumstances were such that it was quite out of the question to give him any other name..." The literal meaning of the name Akaky, derived from the Greek, is "harmless" or "lacking evil", showing the humiliation it must have taken to drive his ghost to violence.[citation needed] His surname Bashmachkin, meanwhile, comes from the word 'bashmak', a type of shoe. It is used in an expression "быть под башмаком" which means to be "under someone's thumb" or to "be henpecked". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat#Interpretations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat#Interpretations Literally in the first paragraph it states what when p. was born they used the church calendar to randomly choose the name but they all were sounding unpleasant so the mother chose to use the father's name. There are multiple saints with this name and they are celebrated on Name day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acacius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acacius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_liturgical_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_liturgical_ca... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_day#Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_day#Russia
Havoc 9mo ago
This only works if the environment caps the work somehow. Else there is an endless amount of problems finding their way into the plate of those with a rep for being helpful problem solvers
tootie 9mo ago
I am kinda the same only I'm not clear how the author describes useful. Being useful to my team, my employer my clients is ok but a lot of my career has been building software for businesses I did not understand and sometimes actively disliked. I'm unofficially retired after 25+ years in industry and look back at a spotty record of building anything lasting and positive. I had plenty of great teams and received praise for being effective at delivery but honestly it feels hollow in retrospect.
risyachka 9mo ago
>> But despite all that, I’m still having a blast This is proves its mostly over for the high income industry. There are no good paying jobs where you are having a blast. Otherwise there is a lot of those who want to do that job which drives wages waay down. High paying jobs are tough/stressful/not fun. Which was the case with software before.
- phito 9mo ago
  What if I'm having a blast doing the tasks no one wants to do that are in the backlog.
  - bell-cot 9mo ago
    Maybe you're incredibly lucky? But I wouldn't count on that luck lasting.
- elzbardico 9mo ago
  Bullshit. There are some dysfunctional exceptions, but higher pay usually correlates with more freedom, more responsibility and access to more resources. You may get frustrated in Big Tech, because nowadays, people like to have no bounds in their expectations, but try changing your big tech job for a job in the oil or insurance industry with half the pay, and you'll see that most of the time, you not getting a blast out of your 600k job is mostly your fault.
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al_borland 9mo ago
I was this way for a long time at work. A re-org and management change broke me. It's been very hard to get motivated these days. I want it to be like it was, but I'm starting to think there is no going back.
- clircle 9mo ago
  You need a new job to feel energized again (and so do I)
bloomingeek 9mo ago
I'm kind of this way also. My work motto was always: "Be the best worker and you'll always have a job." This was easy, because I was always curious about how things worked and didn't mind helping others. In my thirties, while training for a new position, I thanked my trainer for his help and he told me: "You seem willing to work and now I won't have to do your job for you." That simple statement changed how I thought about coworkers. Gradually, I became less helpful to the ones who thought it was a good idea for me to do their job with/for them.
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vjerancrnjak 9mo ago
This internal compulsion is just learned behavior. The society conditions you to work instead of play. Nothing wrong with that, I have that compulsion as well. Having a compulsion to play, purely for the sake of playing is a much healthier view. Useful, not useful, hard problem, easy problem, should not matter, you're playing. Sometimes you can't be useful, yet you can always play. All stems from inability to have systems without labor. Work, work. I like how Pope John Paul II flipped the narrative and said work exist for the person, as a way for person to express itself. Made me realize how even communism stays trapped in labor mentality.
- alphawhisky 9mo ago
  I like this thought. It is interesting to look at our current societal/economic systems on the earth and realize none of them will survive the death of scarcity.
  - kubanczyk 9mo ago
    In abstract terms capitalism doesn't depend on scarcity? Capitalism as in centralisation of the means of production (even when there is no human labor anymore).
- deepvibrations 9mo ago
  Was about to comment the same till I found your comment. I have this compulsion too, and did some deep-diving at some point through therapy. I found that really it's just likely conditioning from family/society. If you are generally praised for helping out whilst growing up and this is when you receive a lot of love/attention, it's natural to build pathways that favour this and thus behavioural patterns.
- carlosjobim 9mo ago
  As we mature mentally, we need more interesting games to play, more interesting challenges. Work is many times the result of this. It's the same with romance. When we are children we have a crush on somebody, become pretend "boyfriend and girlfriend", and as we mature the game becomes more interesting as it becomes real. But it's all a game throughout life. So perhaps it is those who enjoy work who has elevated their spiritual level, and not the other way around?
lazarus01 9mo ago
It’s great to be useful as living for your purpose is the best way to achieve life satisfaction. But it’s important to establish boundaries and avoid developing codependency and not to define yourself through the perception of your acts towards others. Having a skill that helps others gives you a sense of mastery. The fact that you have this skill and apply it in good faith should be enough to establish a good sense of self without feedback from others. I love being an engineer and solving problems that I’m good at, which are problems too complex for most people to approach. But not everyone feels that way, some or most people don’t care or don’t understand the motivation, as they may have different motivations of their own. Learning to accept that and be confident without validation from others is very tough but possible, as you apply yourself consistently with focus and clarity, you gain a stronger sense of purpose. You are never fulfilled, but continue to pursue anyway, that is the trick I learned for myself. The trait is called equanimity and is more of a sustainable attitude vs a feeling, that is transactional. It’s easier as you get older and comes with maturity.
- metabagel 9mo ago
  Yes, equanimity is a great quality to possess. It means that you never get too high or too low. When things are really going your way, you know that things can change for the worse. Yet you can be content. When things are not going your way, you know that things can change for the better. And you can be content. This doesn't mean that you don't try to achieve anything. It means that you can still be content whether you succeed or fail. Thank you for reminding me about this word.
  - lazarus01 9mo ago
    No problem! Happy it was helpful. I learned about equanimity last year in a book I read about the science of self actualization, how to reach your unique potential. https://scottbarrykaufman.com/books/transcend/ https://scottbarrykaufman.com/books/transcend/ cheers
keybored 9mo ago
Yeah I see the plot here. From this one: https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-times-are-over/ https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-times-are-over/ > In other words, your interests now conflict with your company’s interests. > It’s okay for your interests to conflict with your company’s. You get to decide what you care about, and what you’re willing to fight for. But when you act in ways that don’t further your company’s interests, you risk being seen as ineffective or unreliable. In 2025, that makes you vulnerable to being laid off. And this one: https://www.seangoedecke.com/a-little-bit-cynical/ https://www.seangoedecke.com/a-little-bit-cynical/ I personally don't have the mental fortitude to enjoy most things about my job. There are several reasons: 1) selfishness, my interests not aligning with optimizing shareholder value, 2) shared dysfunction, all the ways we work in bad ways that is not good for anyone, 3) the sense that we are convincing managers to shove our product down the throats of their underlings, 4) laziness and other transient states (or maybe not so transient)?) The Cynical article was curious to me. But just because I expected it to be Cynical in the sense that the author thought things were bad. But Cynical just meant merrily working within the gears of the professional system. Then having no complaints about it. No commentary beyond gaining both money and pleasure from aligning with optimizing shareholder value.
- paulsnar 9mo ago
  Re: the plot, there's also this one which fits in among those two: https://www.seangoedecke.com/shareholder-value/ https://www.seangoedecke.com/shareholder-value/
choonway 9mo ago
I was like the author of the article, then I realized that I was solving problems that were created by other peoples' incompetence. Sure they were challenging, fun but they didn't bring anything postive overall. The incompetent people are still there - causing more problems. So I decided to find a worthwhile problem that deserved my talent. And I did. And I am now even more happy than before.
- posed 9mo ago
  Mind sharing what that worthwhile problem is?
  - choonway 9mo ago
    I have purposely omitted the specifics as I also have given up trying to convince others interested in my worthwhile problem. If interests align, we will naturally meet. I usually tell them it is more important that they should take some time (6 months - 1 year) to reflect in isolation to find their own worthwhile problems, and not get distracted by fads and drama.
    - kubanczyk 9mo ago
      "Convincing others" is a serious problem on its own, and it's okay to let someone else handle it full-time.
- jayd16 9mo ago
  Sometimes it's useful to just solve the problem at hand and sometimes it's useful to solve the root problem. Sometimes solving the root cause is knowledge sharing or mentoring. Sometimes the entire task is just not what you want to be doing with your career. Part of becoming more senior is learning when each is appropriate.
- brandonmb 9mo ago
  This is exactly where I am now. I had fun solving problems for the sake of solving them for the first ten years of my career. But the last couple of years have burnt me out as I realize this is not worth my time. I’m in the process of trying to find a worthwhile problem to solve, but it’s difficult to not just be jaded.
mcv 9mo ago
Is this not something everybody wants to some degree? Maybe not to the extreme of Akaky, but of course I like being useful. I like solving problems. I like making things that people use, and love to use. It's not always healthy; at my current job (started 8 months ago) I see tons of issues to fix. Some of them are explicitly mine to fix, some close enough to my area of responsibility, but some of them are well outside it. And I'm annoyed that nobody has fixed these problems, because everybody is aware that these are problems. But the entire way the organisation works, seems designed to make it as hard as possible for me to fix them. I'll probably burn out and leave in a few months to do something I care less about.
- scjon 9mo ago
  I think it depends on the person, I've had coworkers who struggle or don't enjoy solving problems. I enjoy solving problems at work so much that I find myself doing it on nights and weekends. I've also got an unhealthy mindset that I'm not going to let the "computer" win.
- showsover 9mo ago
  Seeing things being broken but not being fixed is a real source of frustration. The tricky thing in my experience has been figuring out which are issues that nobody bothered to fix and which are issues that seem simple but require huge changes to fix. The day-to-day gets so much better when you can do a few of these fixes every so often, after a few months it really adds up when you compare to how things used to be.
jebarker 9mo ago
I get stuck on asking “why am I solving this problem” too much. I am surrounded by technical problems that it would give a dopamine hit to solve and I’d feel the pleasure of helping my fellow man, but 99% of them feel like they shouldn’t even exist and solving them doesn’t really lead to any meaningful progress beyond providing me job security and money. (How) do people deal with this?
- giraffe_lady 9mo ago
  Deciding which problems should be solved, identifying where there is business value in solving them, is pretty much the definition of business leadership. I think the only real answer is moving into management, where you can more effectively argue against spending effort on things that aren't worthwhile.
  - jebarker 9mo ago
    Well that’s not what I wanted to hear! I think you’re right though, you get to choose your challenge: do you want your problem to be possibly working on things that don’t really matter or be responsible (and empowered) to figure out what really matters.
    - giraffe_lady 9mo ago
      Yeah it sucks but unfortunately this is the conclusion I came to after pondering on this for my own career. I think you phrased it as well as I've ever seen it put though. And of course there is always the other options. For myself I didn't relish either choice and now I teach programming and CS. But I'm old and this feels like a good way to end my working years.
rammy1234 9mo ago
One of thing I have noticed of good software engineers is while they are trying to solve problems, they also communicate with clarity to upper management chain. The clarity they bring to the table was always appreciated and also puts them in the career growth path easily.
- giraffe_lady 9mo ago
  Every good engineer is an excellent communicator. Everyone who is not an excellent communicator is not a good engineer. Everyone hates that this is true but it remains true. A lot of people are very good programmers who have mistaken that for being good engineers, however.
  - phito 9mo ago
    And this is the determining factor to whether a current dev will be replaced by AI or will evolve alongside with it, being the bridge between humans and AI. Which is not really different to what we're already doing, translating human requirements to machine code. Just that communication skills will become an even bigger part of the job.
  - fsckboy 9mo ago
    people who do not understand orthogonality also take poor measurements.
    - giraffe_lady 9mo ago
      I'm not sure what you're implying.
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hnal943 9mo ago
This is a fantastic intro to the article I wanted to read, which was Sean's advice on how to best leverage this trait.
anitakirkovska 9mo ago
this resonated so much with me, thanks for sharing
elzbardico 9mo ago
If anything, coding agents gave me more autonomy to experiment and implement stuff. Management used to pretty much risk-adverse, and between building something in-house or paying for another crappy SaaS offering, they would perceive the second one as the least dangerous path in terms of schedule and cost. And then we would be fucked integrating with some shitty API and somehow shoehorning their nonsense abstractions and metaphors into our domain models. Sometimes I feel that if I said tomorrow that we need to have our own operating system, they would say "sure! go ahead! just make sure to send the expense reports if you need to pay for more tokens with the company's credit card".
JohnMakin 9mo ago
I'm similar, but make sure you're addicted to being useful, and not addicted to being needed - the latter can come about by being useful enough. Sometimes it comes from a feeling of wanting control, but opens the door wide open to abusive relationships (both ways).
jitl 9mo ago
I fight for the Users
rednafi 9mo ago
I find it kinda amazing how these vaporware equivalent nullprose keep on hitting the front page.
- slfreference 9mo ago
  vagueprose = vagueposting
css_apologist 9mo ago
does it not bother you that your company is not useful to society?
- GMoromisato 9mo ago
  I thought this meant he worked for a blood diamond trader or maybe Ticketmaster, but no, he works for GitHub. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a Philip Dick novel where the world is not what I thought it was.
  - Shellban 9mo ago
    I am not sure where you found this, but I would agree that GitHub is very useful, for code backup and for sharing with the world.
haizhung 9mo ago
Just a word of warning to not take this to the max. Do not define your personal self worth over how useful (you think) you are. There’s a famous billionaire founder in Germany that attempted suicide just recently, because … he didn’t feel useful anymore. https://7news.com.au/news/ex-boss-of-major-textile-brand-trigema-reveals-suicide-attempt-just-days-after-smiling-for-the-cameras-c-19399839 https://7news.com.au/news/ex-boss-of-major-textile-brand-tri...
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anp 9mo ago
Anyone who finds this relatable (like me) might benefit from learning more about the last couple of decades of research on emotional regulation, trauma, and the nervous system. I have a great “trauma informed” therapist and over time this tendency of mine feels much less compulsive and more like a choice I can make because I know I’m good at something. At least for me having a calmer internal life has made it way easier to pick my battles and it usually means I end up feeding my desire to be useful on more satisfying and impactful things than I would have chased in more obsessive times in my life.
niedbalski 9mo ago
Computers were never a job to me. They were curiosity, play, obsession. Until, quietly, they became work.
jwHollister 9mo ago
I have something similar to this need to be useful but perhaps a different twist that is causing me problems. It's not so much a sense that I want to be useful but a feeling that I HAVE to be or bad things will happen. Lately it's a constantly running internal narrative that everyone around me is useless. Which breeds an anxiety that if I don't do everything then something important will slip through the cracks. That yields a sense of dispair and eventually anger because of this constant weight that I expect I'll have to carry indefinitely. I've been in therapy off and on through the years and I think this stems from a childhood with neglectful parents. I need to start seeing someone again. Thanks for the reminder!
- carlosjobim 9mo ago
  > something important will slip through the cracks Unless you work with life-and-death situations, what's so fucking important?
duhprey 9mo ago
So insightful! This idea that some people just like the puzzles and some people like the control struck me. I get why Factorio is addictive but I can't really stand to play it much. I'd rather be refactoring something useful. And the idea that the same mentality covers forum mods. This is incredibly helpful to understand some of my friends and colleagues a little better.
- brailsafe 9mo ago
  > I'd rather be refactoring something useful. Ya, that's the thought I have sometimes too, and then bugs attack my coal train and I have to accept I won't be useful for another 10 hours
brcmthrowaway 9mo ago
Cog loves machine!
_DeadFred_ 9mo ago
Being useful easily turns into to Superman syndrome. Superman syndrome easily turns into to/masks lack of self worth. It's sometimes healthy to figure out how to be comfortable with yourself without external validation.
rawgabbit 9mo ago
The article’s title is awkward. In it, he says he is addicted to being useful to his management queue. He avoids “time predators” and dismisses Jira ticket jockeys. That is the author’s real intention is to assert engineers should deliver what their bosses ask.
- nlawalker 9mo ago
  I don't think that's necessarily the case, it could just be that, in the author's role, the only people that articulate a need for help from him is his management chain. I've had roles where my job satisfaction came from largely ignoring my management chain and helping people outside of my org for whom I was the point of contact for a set of services offered by my team's internal platform, and this piece really resonated with me.
gowld 9mo ago
I agree broadly with this, but was surprised to see the staff software engineer callout. Then OP linked to some other docs about how to avoid being stuck in rut at "merely" useful. At my job we call that "You can't get promoted to next level by doing the job of someone 2 levels above you."
dkarl 9mo ago
> the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional: specifically, my addiction to being useful. (Of course, it helps that my working conditions are overall much better than Akaky’s). I’m kind of like a working dog, in a way. Working dogs get rewarded with treats4, but they don’t do it for the treats. They do it for the work itself, which is inherently satisfying I haven't been able to find a source for this, but I remember reading that Marx believed that doing productive work for the benefit of human beings was part of the "species essence" of humans. Needless to say, he did not approve of how this tendency was expressed under capitalism. He said that working for compensation alienates people from their work, prevents them from fulfilling their species essence, and therefore prevents them from being fully actualized human beings. If you're working for the satisfaction of being useful to others, that's not dysfunction. That's you beating the odds and having a healthy relationship to your work despite the external social pressure to make it about the money. I think there's no irony in the fact that you have better working conditions; in fact, it makes perfect sense: you are privileged and insulated from the harshest pressures of capitalism that force people to think only about the financial benefit to themselves and not the benefit they provide to other people.
epolanski 9mo ago
to feeling useful
farceSpherule 9mo ago
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medion 9mo ago
Being useful can often be a curse without strong boundaries - in work and relationships, I personally have ended up becoming overly extracted... Which later seems to lead on to resentment and in the worst case, contempt.
junglistguy 9mo ago
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spicyusername 9mo ago
Nothing wrong on the surface with this, and the author explicitly acknowledges this risk, but it bears repeating: Corporate environments are almost always toxic places to fulfill your emotional needs. It is true that finding a job that "resonates" with your personality is key to living a fulfilling life, and that software engineering is the kind of profession that is really going to fit certain personality types extremely well, but despite that corporate culture can and will take advantage of you, divide you and your work "friends", exploit your willingness to serve, and discard you like trash at any moment. Be mindful of how much of yourself you derive from serving the financial goals of others.
- pclalv 9mo ago
  I have similar reservations that this expresses, and it leaves me wondering as to what kind of person is suited for this kind of environment. Perhaps that's a pointless question, although I think that there is at least one useful answer to it: I'm not the kind of person who's suited to those environment. I'm not well-suited to take such a huge chunk of my life and basically throwing it away by creating a barrier between it and my emotional life; I find it difficult to imagine even asking another human to do such a thing, and wonder how 'natural' it is to members of a species that evolved without such artificial separations between work and emotions and life.
  - WalterBright 9mo ago
    Throughout the vast arc of human existence, you worked or you died. Nature does not hand you food, shelter, clothing, and flush toilets for free. Most of us, if dropped naked into the wilderness, will die within 24 hours. Bone evidence from colonial America is the colonists worked like dogs and died young. Bone evidence from the Indians showed repeated famines.
    - danielmarkbruce 9mo ago
      You've misunderstood what the person is saying.
    - 9mo ago
waltwalther 9mo ago
I love every minute of my sysadmin job (different job, I know)..and it's not always easy. I enjoy the work. I enjoy educating the users. I even enjoy being on call. And it isn't necessarily the money. I enjoy researching and fixing issues that I might not have come across before, and improving on the current infrastructure and workflow. I even enjoy talking to the salespeople and vendors who call. I love putting projects together and seeing them work when finished. Many people in my line of work do not share my attitude, and many of my coworkers are grouchy and complain they're overworked. They do just enough to get by, and are generally rude to the users (but, not always). I am in my early fifties, and have been in the business most of my career. I have worked at only two different companies, and have had a great life, even the long days that turned into late nights/early mornings. I would definitely say I am addicted to being useful.
metabagel 9mo ago
> some people in tech companies will identify people like me and wring us out in ways that only benefit them Absolutely. They inevitably get promoted to managers, because they are able to parasitically get things done.
mrburton 9mo ago
I can relate to this and in my journey, I was able to maintain feeding my need to be useful to the world around me and do well money-wise. The latter was my desire to be there for my family so they can focus on their health. The best part about HackerNews, is that you get a very good sense of the envious and jealous nature of people. A lot of the "hate" or "angry" comments, are basically people who hate their relationship with "work". To the author, I think you'll continue that process of being useful, but you'll see that in this new world, you're usefulness now scales..
sota_pop 9mo ago
This concept comes up a lot, especially on this site. I am sometimes surprised how seldomly it is mentioned by this name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai
d--b 9mo ago
It's not addiction. That makes in sound like self pat on the back disguised as a problem. It's the equivalent of being neat freak. Some people are annoyed when they see breadcrumbs on the floor and feel a compelling urge to clean it. You experience a compelling urge to fix tech problems. I think many people have that on various subjects. It's not really a problem though. More an obsession than an addiction really. Being obsessive about your work is not a problem as long as you maintain proper live/work balance.
h4kunamata 9mo ago
The problem of doing this now is that no company will care, they will be happy that you are doing more for less, so no salary increase, no job tittle change. I used to love my job (DevOps, Platform, DevSecOps Engineer) but I learned the hard way to disappear after 4:59PM and never get online before 8:59 Also, no more e-mail, teams, slack, etc, on my personal phone. While working be in the office or WFH, I do my best but outside that, you won't find me. I am addicted to being useful culture died in early 2000s.... I am seeing projects where the goal is to have AI Teams managing AI Teams without human intervention, so enjoy your life and take workplace less seriously, we are gonna be replaced and you will regret spending more time working than living!!
- therealdrag0 9mo ago
  1. Disagree. Plenty of companies still care about impact as a key metric in promotion processes so if working more increases impact, then it can increase rewards. 2. Not all this type of work is transactional. I’ve “worked” many extra hours for the pleasure of it, in which case it’s not working instead of living, it is living. This is the spirit of OPs article IMO.
gatefolded 9mo ago
The working dog analogy really resonated. I've noticed this same trait in teachers, nurses, even parents; that intrinsic satisfaction from being needed. The tricky part is knowing when it tips from fulfilling to self-depleting.
jojobas 9mo ago
This sounds almost like "adult female fetish". I mean you shouldn't let people take advantage of you, but being useful to others is the essence of humanity.
drivebyhooting 9mo ago
Many of the problems are self inflicted or don’t deserve solving in the first place. In fact solving Facebook’s ad targeting “problem” is actively working against The Good. Unfortunately, my career has been solving such things; and once I realized that, there was no going back and no job satisfaction. I also take offense at the belief of “being the only one who can solve the problem”. This is an arrogant self serving justification to blind oneself of the harm the solutions cause.
camnora 9mo ago
And I have a fear of rejection
rconti 9mo ago
I think my warning would be that prioritizing tasks you know you can do and do well may be satisfying, but may limit growth. I identify with the author's POV quite a bit, but sometimes I find that when I take a step back and put in less effort on the day-to-day tasks, the feedback on my performance goes _up_. Perhaps it's because completing those tasks elicits a dependency on you, and stepping back from them allows others to step up and fill that gap. In the meantime, you might not _think_ you're doing more impactful work, but perhaps the mental cycles stepping back from those tasks frees you up to think about more important / higher value work.
- therealdrag0 9mo ago
  I haven’t read them but there seemed to be some links to other articles about being wise about what you chose to work on, as you say.
sashank_1509 9mo ago
I’ve never felt useful in any of the big tech companies I’ve worked at. It always feels pointless. Is it just the projects I’ve been assigned never being worth anything or whether it is my perspective on those projects, I have no idea
0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
Aka, identity-affirming obsessive-compulsive personality disorder with compulsive mastery as defense mechanism. Welcome to the club, we have cookies (and they're Michelin-rated but it takes us three weeks to make them).
tombert 9mo ago
Ever since Lowtax killed himself and I felt a lot of undeserved guilt over it [1] [2] I have developed a sort of "savior complex". I always liked being helpful, but at this point I've sort of become "aggressively helpful", which ironically probably isn't helping. I feel a constant need to take care of people and help people, and I think it's in no small part because a tiny part of me is afraid they're going to do something horrible to themselves, or they're going to make some decision that I think is "wrong". It's more than a little frustrating, because at some level I'm aware I'm doing it, and of course I have to ask myself "who made me the 'correct' decision-maker?", but I also can't really stop myself from doing it either, and at a certain level I'm considerably more willing to help other people than myself because I'm ultimately a coward and I'm really afraid of guilt. Many people have told me that it's not my job to assume responsibility for everyone, and they're objectively correct about this, but human psychology is stupid. Or at least mine is. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185822 [2] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/July-2023/Guilt-and-Frustration https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/July-2023/Guilt-and-...
- whacked_new 9mo ago
  What sillysaurusx said, good on you.
- sillysaurusx 9mo ago
  It’s really sweet that you still think about him and bring it up. You’re a good one.
- muzani 9mo ago
  I think having friends suicide does that. It sucks because you also see the patterns repeat and it feels like something solvable with intervention. A friend put it well - sometimes people are sick, and you can help them heal. And sometimes it's just terminal. First, do no harm.
  - tombert 9mo ago
    The weird part to me (and a lot of people) is that I barely knew the guy. I had exchanged a few messages, we joked around a bit, and arranged to meet. This wasn't a close friend killing himself, this was effectively a Z-list celebrity that I liked. What bothers me more than the actual suicide (though that's very sad too) is the fact that I chose to do nothing. I saw signs, I debated doing something, and I prioritized meeting my man-crush more than trying to do the right thing. I know that me doing something wouldn't have changed anything, I have no idea what I would even do. It just bothers me that I actively decided to not do anything. Everyone thinks they're a good person, and everyone thinks they'll do the right thing when it matters. I certainly thought that, and ultimately I guess that's not strictly true, or at least it wasn't in 2021. I let being a coward and selfish stop me from trying to help someone, and in my mind it stopped me from doing the right thing. I don't really believe in anything supernatural, but it feels like this was some kind of important cosmic test that I failed. Metaphorically speaking. And I think at this point, I overcompensate; I treat people as surrogates to try and assuage some of the guilt that I have over that. If something bad happens, I can at least tell myself that I did what I could. I realize that this kind of thinking is not healthy for me. Guilt isn't inherently bad, it's important to have guilt to learn from your mistakes and to make yourself as good of a person as you can be, but carrying this kind of guilt for someone I barely knew and aggressively trying to "fix it" by over-helping everyone is probably bad for my mental health. At this point, and I'm a little embarrassed it took me until my 30's to reach this conclusion, but I've started living by the motto of "don't let being a coward stop you from doing the right thing". Taken to the extreme I'm not sure that's healthy either.
mirawelner 9mo ago
See I like this but also the majority of software jobs these days are a net negative to humanity
kinjba11 9mo ago
This reminds me of the "three tribes of programming: mathematical poetry, machine hackery, and business value". I think each SWE gets similar but different feelings of satisfaction. I knew a coworker who cared about the result, and little about the code he wrote. This was foreign to me when I saw it, as I was and still am definitely in the love for "math poetry" camp when it's possible. https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/ https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/
Willish42 9mo ago
This resonated a lot with me. I am also addicted to being useful and find that off days where my output and usefulness isn't where I'd like it to be really tank my self esteem. I do think it can be a double-edged sword that often leads to burnout. Respecting your limits and occasional therapy seem to help, as does ensuring you're in as stable and supportive environment as possible so your efforts are sustainable and "heroics" don't get normalized in your org. I wish I had a full solution but have yet to find one in my career that works :)

603 points by swah 9mo ago

I can relate to this. I find that I have the same issue.

If this resonates with you, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Tracy Kidder's 1981 novel The Soul of a New Machine. You'll be hooked by the end of the introduction.

tclancy 9mo ago
And if you like that, the good news is you will probably like most every Kidder book. Or at least House. His works tend to be inquiries into how systems work, just at different scales.

iamflimflam1 9mo ago

Can definitely relate to this. But I have found that, when running a team, it can be very counter productive. If you constantly solve all the problems that come it can be stifling for the people you manage.

poszlem 9mo ago
Strongly agree with this. It may sound good in theory, but in practice, especially with real people, it can come across as overbearing, stifling, and exhausting for others. This isn’t meant as a dig at the OP. it’s just an observation based on personal experience with someone like that in my own family. edit: I am not critiquing enthusiasm itself, but a compulsion that can be productive and unhealthy.
drekipus 9mo ago
I see this as "my problem is to grow these people" so I don't solve anything for them I think it's just a case is perspective

harryday 9mo ago

Help is the sunny side of control.

Ronsenshi 9mo ago
Interesting quote and certainly can apply to some people, but this behavior could also be considered as "acts of service" type of "love language". You can take any endearing and genuinely good behavior and make a toxic version out of it.
- inanutshellus 9mo ago
  Helping people is 100% my love language. My SIL queues up household tasks when I come over. "Hey I got this new thermostat, can you help me put it on?" kinda stuff that she could do herself but she knows that's what makes me feel fulfilled. Point being: GP - calm down bud. ;-)
ambicapter 9mo ago
An extremely toxic mindset.
clcaev 9mo ago
Someone who stops at road side, and helps a stranger with a tire iron, likely has no reason other than it just feels the right thing to do; the recipient's smile being the most precious payment they could possibly receive.
pizzafeelsright 9mo ago
I thought about this without instantly rejecting outright. I agree. I am not interested in controlling someone's thoughts or actions and I do not help.

tclancy 9mo ago

> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It bugs the hell out of me because I tend to need to solve All The Problems before I can do any self-care, but rather than seem heroic, I think this attitude can seem transactional or uncaring as though everyone is just a screw that needed a bit of tightening, etc.

johnisgood 9mo ago
Yeah, I am still learning to not be logical and fix whatever ails her. Often she really just wants to be heard, not solutions. I am ~30 years old, hopefully I will be able to just hear, without offering any solutions. It bothers me too. I am a SWE because I love solving problems!
- TeMPOraL 9mo ago
  > It bothers me too. I am a SWE because I love solving problems! In my case, I've recently been wondering whether I really love solving problems, or rather just hate stupid bullshit and solving it - quickly and efficiently - is usually the best way to make it go away for good. In many cases, the behavior is identical - I just find myself to be motivated by frustration more often than curiosity these days.
  - johnisgood 9mo ago
    Yeah, I can relate. I would say I am motivated by frustration more than curiosity as well, not just with regarding to my partner but in general.
- MarkLowenstein 9mo ago
  The real trouble is knowing what being heard, means. For me, as long as no one's intending to make this situation better, I'd like to go do other things. How long do I have to stay there pretending to lament that her life is so hard--especially when part of that is because she hates having her problems solved?

nusl 9mo ago

I wonder if this sort of thing can lead to faster burnout or such. I've sorta over time leaned toward guarding my own space/time since somehow I get more tired out, and over time more burned out, if I don't.

Ronsenshi 9mo ago
I probably have a very similar "dysfunction" as OP. Can't say how it is for him, but I do get burned out somewhat regularly if I push myself too much for too long. However it usually takes few days to a week at most of low-effort activity or travel to recover.
- nusl 9mo ago
  Oh, that's really fast recovery for burnout

Ronsenshi 9mo ago

I can very much relate to the OP in this. I enjoy writing code, figuring out problems, finding solutions and in general helping other people with things that require some kind of software to be created or updated. And until year or two ago I thought I'd be able to continue to do what I love while getting paid decent money for it. With the advent of vibe coding and AI I'm starting to feel less sure in the future.

drekipus 9mo ago
I feel more useful now more than anything. The amount of ai generated planning and fluffy workloads that I've been able to just delete from the team has saved the company many engineering hours. Not least of all in bugs. Value your expertise and experience. It's only greeting more valuable, not less.
- Ronsenshi 9mo ago
  It's great that this is a case for you. I actually enjoy process of writing code, understanding deeply the system I work on, finding elegant solutions to business problems - not just a list of checkboxes with features for a given sprint that agent churns in background. Sure, practically I understand that business doesn't care how well something is written as long as it works somewhat reliably. I might eventually adapt to this new horrible reality of developers who have no idea what's going on in the codebase they "work" on.
  - phito 9mo ago
    You can still understand a system deeply and find elegant solutions, and use LLMs to translate your idea into code, then review the code. It's still much faster than writing everything by hand in a lot of cases, if done properly.
    - Ronsenshi 9mo ago
      Reviewing code that was written by somebody else is one of the least fun and enjoyable activities in my experience . I personally don't know any programmers who enjoy process of doing PR reviews. If you only care about number of features Copilot implements for you or lines of code Claude Code gave you - you must be a manager.

bradley13 9mo ago

I feel the same way. I retired last summer, but that only means that I found a place that needs me, where I can work part time without worrying too much about money. I remember, decades ago, reading an article about some African politician visiting the UK. He was given a tour, which included some of the social housing. The UK bragging about how they took care of their people. He saw people sitting around with with their housing and food paid for. His comment? "How horrible!". He found it horrible, because - from his perspective - they had no role in society, nothing to do, no purpose to their existence.

pjc50 9mo ago
This is a big topic in disability rights activism; there are a lot of people who can do some work some of the time, with a certain level of accommodation, and would benefit from so doing. But that's not how the system works. It forces everyone into binary categorizations, with the aim of removing help if at all possible. So it becomes economically necessary for people to present themselves as helpless and stay away from work or even volunteering, because doing so jeopardizes their means of surviving the bureaucracy.
jadbox 9mo ago
I'm skeptical of this perspective as most social housing in the UK and the USA have stiff REQUIREMENTS that housing residents be either either employed OR be showing proof of interviewing OR enroll in a job placement program (which requires active training participation). If you fail these, you are generally kicked out of these social housing programs. Maybe there are some exceptions here and there, but it's generally unusual to have social housing without strict policies and monitored policies on job placements. This policy exists as social housing is highly limited and the administrators wants people to get jobs so that they move out (and into a better shelter they can now afford).
- liminvorous 9mo ago
  I don't believe UK social housing has any work requirements, it is just massively oversubscribed, such that you need to be very vulnerable to realistically be offered council housing. You do have to pay (below market rate) rent, so you probably need to be searching for work or have been declared to have limited capability for work or work related activities to get a benefit to pay for your social housing. I think there's some state where they've decided no one will hire you for minimum wage, but you're otherwise able so you have to do some kind of volunteering.

PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago

Nietzsche would approve that you are seeking power through usefulness. Even if he disdained money, he is a bit idealistic/outdated here. Hobbes says riches is a form of power.

techdmn 9mo ago

I identify very strongly with this. More than once in my career I have gotten feedback along the lines of: > We really like your work! How can you help other engineers be more like you? The thing I think (but usually don't say) is: > You realize I'm like this because I often work directly against your instruction in order to satisfy my personal sense of professional pride and responsibility?

zhisme 9mo ago

giving a like for quoting Gogol and Akakiy Akakievich (I wish you could understand this russian wordplay and what's meaning about that nicknames and why they were chosen)

ambicapter 9mo ago
> I think in Russian this is supposed to be an obviously silly name, like “Poop Poopson”. Is this correct? From the footnotes.
- zhisme 9mo ago
  yep, that's right. The idea of his nickname that he is really silly. Small man and no good at anything. If you want to go deeper and harsh synonyms he is like "shitty" man, doing shit and receiving shit. His nickname fully describes him like useless, small, no influence, clueless, talentless man. One from the great unwashed
- justsomehnguy 9mo ago
  Nope. >> Gogol makes much of Akaky's name in the opening passages, saying, "the circumstances were such that it was quite out of the question to give him any other name..." The literal meaning of the name Akaky, derived from the Greek, is "harmless" or "lacking evil", showing the humiliation it must have taken to drive his ghost to violence.[citation needed] His surname Bashmachkin, meanwhile, comes from the word 'bashmak', a type of shoe. It is used in an expression "быть под башмаком" which means to be "under someone's thumb" or to "be henpecked". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat#Interpretations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat#Interpretations Literally in the first paragraph it states what when p. was born they used the church calendar to randomly choose the name but they all were sounding unpleasant so the mother chose to use the father's name. There are multiple saints with this name and they are celebrated on Name day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acacius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acacius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_liturgical_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_liturgical_ca... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_day#Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_day#Russia

Havoc 9mo ago

This only works if the environment caps the work somehow. Else there is an endless amount of problems finding their way into the plate of those with a rep for being helpful problem solvers

tootie 9mo ago

I am kinda the same only I'm not clear how the author describes useful. Being useful to my team, my employer my clients is ok but a lot of my career has been building software for businesses I did not understand and sometimes actively disliked. I'm unofficially retired after 25+ years in industry and look back at a spotty record of building anything lasting and positive. I had plenty of great teams and received praise for being effective at delivery but honestly it feels hollow in retrospect.

risyachka 9mo ago

>> But despite all that, I’m still having a blast This is proves its mostly over for the high income industry. There are no good paying jobs where you are having a blast. Otherwise there is a lot of those who want to do that job which drives wages waay down. High paying jobs are tough/stressful/not fun. Which was the case with software before.

phito 9mo ago
What if I'm having a blast doing the tasks no one wants to do that are in the backlog.
- bell-cot 9mo ago
  Maybe you're incredibly lucky? But I wouldn't count on that luck lasting.
elzbardico 9mo ago
Bullshit. There are some dysfunctional exceptions, but higher pay usually correlates with more freedom, more responsibility and access to more resources. You may get frustrated in Big Tech, because nowadays, people like to have no bounds in their expectations, but try changing your big tech job for a job in the oil or insurance industry with half the pay, and you'll see that most of the time, you not getting a blast out of your 600k job is mostly your fault.

deleted 9mo ago

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al_borland 9mo ago

I was this way for a long time at work. A re-org and management change broke me. It's been very hard to get motivated these days. I want it to be like it was, but I'm starting to think there is no going back.

clircle 9mo ago
You need a new job to feel energized again (and so do I)

bloomingeek 9mo ago

I'm kind of this way also. My work motto was always: "Be the best worker and you'll always have a job." This was easy, because I was always curious about how things worked and didn't mind helping others. In my thirties, while training for a new position, I thanked my trainer for his help and he told me: "You seem willing to work and now I won't have to do your job for you." That simple statement changed how I thought about coworkers. Gradually, I became less helpful to the ones who thought it was a good idea for me to do their job with/for them.

deleted 9mo ago

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vjerancrnjak 9mo ago

This internal compulsion is just learned behavior. The society conditions you to work instead of play. Nothing wrong with that, I have that compulsion as well. Having a compulsion to play, purely for the sake of playing is a much healthier view. Useful, not useful, hard problem, easy problem, should not matter, you're playing. Sometimes you can't be useful, yet you can always play. All stems from inability to have systems without labor. Work, work. I like how Pope John Paul II flipped the narrative and said work exist for the person, as a way for person to express itself. Made me realize how even communism stays trapped in labor mentality.

alphawhisky 9mo ago
I like this thought. It is interesting to look at our current societal/economic systems on the earth and realize none of them will survive the death of scarcity.
- kubanczyk 9mo ago
  In abstract terms capitalism doesn't depend on scarcity? Capitalism as in centralisation of the means of production (even when there is no human labor anymore).
deepvibrations 9mo ago
Was about to comment the same till I found your comment. I have this compulsion too, and did some deep-diving at some point through therapy. I found that really it's just likely conditioning from family/society. If you are generally praised for helping out whilst growing up and this is when you receive a lot of love/attention, it's natural to build pathways that favour this and thus behavioural patterns.
carlosjobim 9mo ago
As we mature mentally, we need more interesting games to play, more interesting challenges. Work is many times the result of this. It's the same with romance. When we are children we have a crush on somebody, become pretend "boyfriend and girlfriend", and as we mature the game becomes more interesting as it becomes real. But it's all a game throughout life. So perhaps it is those who enjoy work who has elevated their spiritual level, and not the other way around?

lazarus01 9mo ago

It’s great to be useful as living for your purpose is the best way to achieve life satisfaction. But it’s important to establish boundaries and avoid developing codependency and not to define yourself through the perception of your acts towards others. Having a skill that helps others gives you a sense of mastery. The fact that you have this skill and apply it in good faith should be enough to establish a good sense of self without feedback from others. I love being an engineer and solving problems that I’m good at, which are problems too complex for most people to approach. But not everyone feels that way, some or most people don’t care or don’t understand the motivation, as they may have different motivations of their own. Learning to accept that and be confident without validation from others is very tough but possible, as you apply yourself consistently with focus and clarity, you gain a stronger sense of purpose. You are never fulfilled, but continue to pursue anyway, that is the trick I learned for myself. The trait is called equanimity and is more of a sustainable attitude vs a feeling, that is transactional. It’s easier as you get older and comes with maturity.

metabagel 9mo ago
Yes, equanimity is a great quality to possess. It means that you never get too high or too low. When things are really going your way, you know that things can change for the worse. Yet you can be content. When things are not going your way, you know that things can change for the better. And you can be content. This doesn't mean that you don't try to achieve anything. It means that you can still be content whether you succeed or fail. Thank you for reminding me about this word.
- lazarus01 9mo ago
  No problem! Happy it was helpful. I learned about equanimity last year in a book I read about the science of self actualization, how to reach your unique potential. https://scottbarrykaufman.com/books/transcend/ https://scottbarrykaufman.com/books/transcend/ cheers

keybored 9mo ago

Yeah I see the plot here. From this one: https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-times-are-over/ https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-times-are-over/ > In other words, your interests now conflict with your company’s interests. > It’s okay for your interests to conflict with your company’s. You get to decide what you care about, and what you’re willing to fight for. But when you act in ways that don’t further your company’s interests, you risk being seen as ineffective or unreliable. In 2025, that makes you vulnerable to being laid off. And this one: https://www.seangoedecke.com/a-little-bit-cynical/ https://www.seangoedecke.com/a-little-bit-cynical/ I personally don't have the mental fortitude to enjoy most things about my job. There are several reasons: 1) selfishness, my interests not aligning with optimizing shareholder value, 2) shared dysfunction, all the ways we work in bad ways that is not good for anyone, 3) the sense that we are convincing managers to shove our product down the throats of their underlings, 4) laziness and other transient states (or maybe not so transient)?) The Cynical article was curious to me. But just because I expected it to be Cynical in the sense that the author thought things were bad. But Cynical just meant merrily working within the gears of the professional system. Then having no complaints about it. No commentary beyond gaining both money and pleasure from aligning with optimizing shareholder value.

paulsnar 9mo ago
Re: the plot, there's also this one which fits in among those two: https://www.seangoedecke.com/shareholder-value/ https://www.seangoedecke.com/shareholder-value/

choonway 9mo ago

I was like the author of the article, then I realized that I was solving problems that were created by other peoples' incompetence. Sure they were challenging, fun but they didn't bring anything postive overall. The incompetent people are still there - causing more problems. So I decided to find a worthwhile problem that deserved my talent. And I did. And I am now even more happy than before.

posed 9mo ago
Mind sharing what that worthwhile problem is?
- choonway 9mo ago
  I have purposely omitted the specifics as I also have given up trying to convince others interested in my worthwhile problem. If interests align, we will naturally meet. I usually tell them it is more important that they should take some time (6 months - 1 year) to reflect in isolation to find their own worthwhile problems, and not get distracted by fads and drama.
  - kubanczyk 9mo ago
    "Convincing others" is a serious problem on its own, and it's okay to let someone else handle it full-time.
jayd16 9mo ago
Sometimes it's useful to just solve the problem at hand and sometimes it's useful to solve the root problem. Sometimes solving the root cause is knowledge sharing or mentoring. Sometimes the entire task is just not what you want to be doing with your career. Part of becoming more senior is learning when each is appropriate.
brandonmb 9mo ago
This is exactly where I am now. I had fun solving problems for the sake of solving them for the first ten years of my career. But the last couple of years have burnt me out as I realize this is not worth my time. I’m in the process of trying to find a worthwhile problem to solve, but it’s difficult to not just be jaded.

mcv 9mo ago

Is this not something everybody wants to some degree? Maybe not to the extreme of Akaky, but of course I like being useful. I like solving problems. I like making things that people use, and love to use. It's not always healthy; at my current job (started 8 months ago) I see tons of issues to fix. Some of them are explicitly mine to fix, some close enough to my area of responsibility, but some of them are well outside it. And I'm annoyed that nobody has fixed these problems, because everybody is aware that these are problems. But the entire way the organisation works, seems designed to make it as hard as possible for me to fix them. I'll probably burn out and leave in a few months to do something I care less about.

scjon 9mo ago
I think it depends on the person, I've had coworkers who struggle or don't enjoy solving problems. I enjoy solving problems at work so much that I find myself doing it on nights and weekends. I've also got an unhealthy mindset that I'm not going to let the "computer" win.
showsover 9mo ago
Seeing things being broken but not being fixed is a real source of frustration. The tricky thing in my experience has been figuring out which are issues that nobody bothered to fix and which are issues that seem simple but require huge changes to fix. The day-to-day gets so much better when you can do a few of these fixes every so often, after a few months it really adds up when you compare to how things used to be.

jebarker 9mo ago

I get stuck on asking “why am I solving this problem” too much. I am surrounded by technical problems that it would give a dopamine hit to solve and I’d feel the pleasure of helping my fellow man, but 99% of them feel like they shouldn’t even exist and solving them doesn’t really lead to any meaningful progress beyond providing me job security and money. (How) do people deal with this?

giraffe_lady 9mo ago
Deciding which problems should be solved, identifying where there is business value in solving them, is pretty much the definition of business leadership. I think the only real answer is moving into management, where you can more effectively argue against spending effort on things that aren't worthwhile.
- jebarker 9mo ago
  Well that’s not what I wanted to hear! I think you’re right though, you get to choose your challenge: do you want your problem to be possibly working on things that don’t really matter or be responsible (and empowered) to figure out what really matters.
  - giraffe_lady 9mo ago
    Yeah it sucks but unfortunately this is the conclusion I came to after pondering on this for my own career. I think you phrased it as well as I've ever seen it put though. And of course there is always the other options. For myself I didn't relish either choice and now I teach programming and CS. But I'm old and this feels like a good way to end my working years.

rammy1234 9mo ago

One of thing I have noticed of good software engineers is while they are trying to solve problems, they also communicate with clarity to upper management chain. The clarity they bring to the table was always appreciated and also puts them in the career growth path easily.

giraffe_lady 9mo ago
Every good engineer is an excellent communicator. Everyone who is not an excellent communicator is not a good engineer. Everyone hates that this is true but it remains true. A lot of people are very good programmers who have mistaken that for being good engineers, however.
- phito 9mo ago
  And this is the determining factor to whether a current dev will be replaced by AI or will evolve alongside with it, being the bridge between humans and AI. Which is not really different to what we're already doing, translating human requirements to machine code. Just that communication skills will become an even bigger part of the job.
- fsckboy 9mo ago
  people who do not understand orthogonality also take poor measurements.
  - giraffe_lady 9mo ago
    I'm not sure what you're implying.

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hnal943 9mo ago

This is a fantastic intro to the article I wanted to read, which was Sean's advice on how to best leverage this trait.

anitakirkovska 9mo ago

this resonated so much with me, thanks for sharing

elzbardico 9mo ago

If anything, coding agents gave me more autonomy to experiment and implement stuff. Management used to pretty much risk-adverse, and between building something in-house or paying for another crappy SaaS offering, they would perceive the second one as the least dangerous path in terms of schedule and cost. And then we would be fucked integrating with some shitty API and somehow shoehorning their nonsense abstractions and metaphors into our domain models. Sometimes I feel that if I said tomorrow that we need to have our own operating system, they would say "sure! go ahead! just make sure to send the expense reports if you need to pay for more tokens with the company's credit card".

JohnMakin 9mo ago

I'm similar, but make sure you're addicted to being useful, and not addicted to being needed - the latter can come about by being useful enough. Sometimes it comes from a feeling of wanting control, but opens the door wide open to abusive relationships (both ways).

jitl 9mo ago

I fight for the Users

rednafi 9mo ago

I find it kinda amazing how these vaporware equivalent nullprose keep on hitting the front page.

slfreference 9mo ago
vagueprose = vagueposting

css_apologist 9mo ago

does it not bother you that your company is not useful to society?

GMoromisato 9mo ago
I thought this meant he worked for a blood diamond trader or maybe Ticketmaster, but no, he works for GitHub. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a Philip Dick novel where the world is not what I thought it was.
- Shellban 9mo ago
  I am not sure where you found this, but I would agree that GitHub is very useful, for code backup and for sharing with the world.

haizhung 9mo ago

Just a word of warning to not take this to the max. Do not define your personal self worth over how useful (you think) you are. There’s a famous billionaire founder in Germany that attempted suicide just recently, because … he didn’t feel useful anymore. https://7news.com.au/news/ex-boss-of-major-textile-brand-trigema-reveals-suicide-attempt-just-days-after-smiling-for-the-cameras-c-19399839 https://7news.com.au/news/ex-boss-of-major-textile-brand-tri...

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anp 9mo ago

Anyone who finds this relatable (like me) might benefit from learning more about the last couple of decades of research on emotional regulation, trauma, and the nervous system. I have a great “trauma informed” therapist and over time this tendency of mine feels much less compulsive and more like a choice I can make because I know I’m good at something. At least for me having a calmer internal life has made it way easier to pick my battles and it usually means I end up feeding my desire to be useful on more satisfying and impactful things than I would have chased in more obsessive times in my life.

niedbalski 9mo ago

Computers were never a job to me. They were curiosity, play, obsession. Until, quietly, they became work.

jwHollister 9mo ago

I have something similar to this need to be useful but perhaps a different twist that is causing me problems. It's not so much a sense that I want to be useful but a feeling that I HAVE to be or bad things will happen. Lately it's a constantly running internal narrative that everyone around me is useless. Which breeds an anxiety that if I don't do everything then something important will slip through the cracks. That yields a sense of dispair and eventually anger because of this constant weight that I expect I'll have to carry indefinitely. I've been in therapy off and on through the years and I think this stems from a childhood with neglectful parents. I need to start seeing someone again. Thanks for the reminder!

carlosjobim 9mo ago
> something important will slip through the cracks Unless you work with life-and-death situations, what's so fucking important?

duhprey 9mo ago

So insightful! This idea that some people just like the puzzles and some people like the control struck me. I get why Factorio is addictive but I can't really stand to play it much. I'd rather be refactoring something useful. And the idea that the same mentality covers forum mods. This is incredibly helpful to understand some of my friends and colleagues a little better.

brailsafe 9mo ago
> I'd rather be refactoring something useful. Ya, that's the thought I have sometimes too, and then bugs attack my coal train and I have to accept I won't be useful for another 10 hours

brcmthrowaway 9mo ago

Cog loves machine!

_DeadFred_ 9mo ago

Being useful easily turns into to Superman syndrome. Superman syndrome easily turns into to/masks lack of self worth. It's sometimes healthy to figure out how to be comfortable with yourself without external validation.

rawgabbit 9mo ago

The article’s title is awkward. In it, he says he is addicted to being useful to his management queue. He avoids “time predators” and dismisses Jira ticket jockeys. That is the author’s real intention is to assert engineers should deliver what their bosses ask.

nlawalker 9mo ago
I don't think that's necessarily the case, it could just be that, in the author's role, the only people that articulate a need for help from him is his management chain. I've had roles where my job satisfaction came from largely ignoring my management chain and helping people outside of my org for whom I was the point of contact for a set of services offered by my team's internal platform, and this piece really resonated with me.

gowld 9mo ago

I agree broadly with this, but was surprised to see the staff software engineer callout. Then OP linked to some other docs about how to avoid being stuck in rut at "merely" useful. At my job we call that "You can't get promoted to next level by doing the job of someone 2 levels above you."

dkarl 9mo ago

> the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional: specifically, my addiction to being useful. (Of course, it helps that my working conditions are overall much better than Akaky’s). I’m kind of like a working dog, in a way. Working dogs get rewarded with treats4, but they don’t do it for the treats. They do it for the work itself, which is inherently satisfying I haven't been able to find a source for this, but I remember reading that Marx believed that doing productive work for the benefit of human beings was part of the "species essence" of humans. Needless to say, he did not approve of how this tendency was expressed under capitalism. He said that working for compensation alienates people from their work, prevents them from fulfilling their species essence, and therefore prevents them from being fully actualized human beings. If you're working for the satisfaction of being useful to others, that's not dysfunction. That's you beating the odds and having a healthy relationship to your work despite the external social pressure to make it about the money. I think there's no irony in the fact that you have better working conditions; in fact, it makes perfect sense: you are privileged and insulated from the harshest pressures of capitalism that force people to think only about the financial benefit to themselves and not the benefit they provide to other people.

epolanski 9mo ago

to feeling useful

farceSpherule 9mo ago

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medion 9mo ago

Being useful can often be a curse without strong boundaries - in work and relationships, I personally have ended up becoming overly extracted... Which later seems to lead on to resentment and in the worst case, contempt.

junglistguy 9mo ago

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spicyusername 9mo ago

Nothing wrong on the surface with this, and the author explicitly acknowledges this risk, but it bears repeating: Corporate environments are almost always toxic places to fulfill your emotional needs. It is true that finding a job that "resonates" with your personality is key to living a fulfilling life, and that software engineering is the kind of profession that is really going to fit certain personality types extremely well, but despite that corporate culture can and will take advantage of you, divide you and your work "friends", exploit your willingness to serve, and discard you like trash at any moment. Be mindful of how much of yourself you derive from serving the financial goals of others.

pclalv 9mo ago
I have similar reservations that this expresses, and it leaves me wondering as to what kind of person is suited for this kind of environment. Perhaps that's a pointless question, although I think that there is at least one useful answer to it: I'm not the kind of person who's suited to those environment. I'm not well-suited to take such a huge chunk of my life and basically throwing it away by creating a barrier between it and my emotional life; I find it difficult to imagine even asking another human to do such a thing, and wonder how 'natural' it is to members of a species that evolved without such artificial separations between work and emotions and life.
- WalterBright 9mo ago
  Throughout the vast arc of human existence, you worked or you died. Nature does not hand you food, shelter, clothing, and flush toilets for free. Most of us, if dropped naked into the wilderness, will die within 24 hours. Bone evidence from colonial America is the colonists worked like dogs and died young. Bone evidence from the Indians showed repeated famines.
  - danielmarkbruce 9mo ago
    You've misunderstood what the person is saying.
  - 9mo ago

waltwalther 9mo ago

I love every minute of my sysadmin job (different job, I know)..and it's not always easy. I enjoy the work. I enjoy educating the users. I even enjoy being on call. And it isn't necessarily the money. I enjoy researching and fixing issues that I might not have come across before, and improving on the current infrastructure and workflow. I even enjoy talking to the salespeople and vendors who call. I love putting projects together and seeing them work when finished. Many people in my line of work do not share my attitude, and many of my coworkers are grouchy and complain they're overworked. They do just enough to get by, and are generally rude to the users (but, not always). I am in my early fifties, and have been in the business most of my career. I have worked at only two different companies, and have had a great life, even the long days that turned into late nights/early mornings. I would definitely say I am addicted to being useful.

metabagel 9mo ago

> some people in tech companies will identify people like me and wring us out in ways that only benefit them Absolutely. They inevitably get promoted to managers, because they are able to parasitically get things done.

mrburton 9mo ago

I can relate to this and in my journey, I was able to maintain feeding my need to be useful to the world around me and do well money-wise. The latter was my desire to be there for my family so they can focus on their health. The best part about HackerNews, is that you get a very good sense of the envious and jealous nature of people. A lot of the "hate" or "angry" comments, are basically people who hate their relationship with "work". To the author, I think you'll continue that process of being useful, but you'll see that in this new world, you're usefulness now scales..

sota_pop 9mo ago

This concept comes up a lot, especially on this site. I am sometimes surprised how seldomly it is mentioned by this name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai

d--b 9mo ago

It's not addiction. That makes in sound like self pat on the back disguised as a problem. It's the equivalent of being neat freak. Some people are annoyed when they see breadcrumbs on the floor and feel a compelling urge to clean it. You experience a compelling urge to fix tech problems. I think many people have that on various subjects. It's not really a problem though. More an obsession than an addiction really. Being obsessive about your work is not a problem as long as you maintain proper live/work balance.

h4kunamata 9mo ago

The problem of doing this now is that no company will care, they will be happy that you are doing more for less, so no salary increase, no job tittle change. I used to love my job (DevOps, Platform, DevSecOps Engineer) but I learned the hard way to disappear after 4:59PM and never get online before 8:59 Also, no more e-mail, teams, slack, etc, on my personal phone. While working be in the office or WFH, I do my best but outside that, you won't find me. I am addicted to being useful culture died in early 2000s.... I am seeing projects where the goal is to have AI Teams managing AI Teams without human intervention, so enjoy your life and take workplace less seriously, we are gonna be replaced and you will regret spending more time working than living!!

therealdrag0 9mo ago
1. Disagree. Plenty of companies still care about impact as a key metric in promotion processes so if working more increases impact, then it can increase rewards. 2. Not all this type of work is transactional. I’ve “worked” many extra hours for the pleasure of it, in which case it’s not working instead of living, it is living. This is the spirit of OPs article IMO.

gatefolded 9mo ago

The working dog analogy really resonated. I've noticed this same trait in teachers, nurses, even parents; that intrinsic satisfaction from being needed. The tricky part is knowing when it tips from fulfilling to self-depleting.

jojobas 9mo ago

This sounds almost like "adult female fetish". I mean you shouldn't let people take advantage of you, but being useful to others is the essence of humanity.

drivebyhooting 9mo ago

Many of the problems are self inflicted or don’t deserve solving in the first place. In fact solving Facebook’s ad targeting “problem” is actively working against The Good. Unfortunately, my career has been solving such things; and once I realized that, there was no going back and no job satisfaction. I also take offense at the belief of “being the only one who can solve the problem”. This is an arrogant self serving justification to blind oneself of the harm the solutions cause.

camnora 9mo ago

And I have a fear of rejection

rconti 9mo ago

I think my warning would be that prioritizing tasks you know you can do and do well may be satisfying, but may limit growth. I identify with the author's POV quite a bit, but sometimes I find that when I take a step back and put in less effort on the day-to-day tasks, the feedback on my performance goes _up_. Perhaps it's because completing those tasks elicits a dependency on you, and stepping back from them allows others to step up and fill that gap. In the meantime, you might not _think_ you're doing more impactful work, but perhaps the mental cycles stepping back from those tasks frees you up to think about more important / higher value work.

therealdrag0 9mo ago
I haven’t read them but there seemed to be some links to other articles about being wise about what you chose to work on, as you say.

sashank_1509 9mo ago

I’ve never felt useful in any of the big tech companies I’ve worked at. It always feels pointless. Is it just the projects I’ve been assigned never being worth anything or whether it is my perspective on those projects, I have no idea

0xbadcafebee 9mo ago

Aka, identity-affirming obsessive-compulsive personality disorder with compulsive mastery as defense mechanism. Welcome to the club, we have cookies (and they're Michelin-rated but it takes us three weeks to make them).

tombert 9mo ago

Ever since Lowtax killed himself and I felt a lot of undeserved guilt over it [1] [2] I have developed a sort of "savior complex". I always liked being helpful, but at this point I've sort of become "aggressively helpful", which ironically probably isn't helping. I feel a constant need to take care of people and help people, and I think it's in no small part because a tiny part of me is afraid they're going to do something horrible to themselves, or they're going to make some decision that I think is "wrong". It's more than a little frustrating, because at some level I'm aware I'm doing it, and of course I have to ask myself "who made me the 'correct' decision-maker?", but I also can't really stop myself from doing it either, and at a certain level I'm considerably more willing to help other people than myself because I'm ultimately a coward and I'm really afraid of guilt. Many people have told me that it's not my job to assume responsibility for everyone, and they're objectively correct about this, but human psychology is stupid. Or at least mine is. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185822 [2] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/July-2023/Guilt-and-Frustration https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/July-2023/Guilt-and-...

whacked_new 9mo ago
What sillysaurusx said, good on you.
sillysaurusx 9mo ago
It’s really sweet that you still think about him and bring it up. You’re a good one.
muzani 9mo ago
I think having friends suicide does that. It sucks because you also see the patterns repeat and it feels like something solvable with intervention. A friend put it well - sometimes people are sick, and you can help them heal. And sometimes it's just terminal. First, do no harm.
- tombert 9mo ago
  The weird part to me (and a lot of people) is that I barely knew the guy. I had exchanged a few messages, we joked around a bit, and arranged to meet. This wasn't a close friend killing himself, this was effectively a Z-list celebrity that I liked. What bothers me more than the actual suicide (though that's very sad too) is the fact that I chose to do nothing. I saw signs, I debated doing something, and I prioritized meeting my man-crush more than trying to do the right thing. I know that me doing something wouldn't have changed anything, I have no idea what I would even do. It just bothers me that I actively decided to not do anything. Everyone thinks they're a good person, and everyone thinks they'll do the right thing when it matters. I certainly thought that, and ultimately I guess that's not strictly true, or at least it wasn't in 2021. I let being a coward and selfish stop me from trying to help someone, and in my mind it stopped me from doing the right thing. I don't really believe in anything supernatural, but it feels like this was some kind of important cosmic test that I failed. Metaphorically speaking. And I think at this point, I overcompensate; I treat people as surrogates to try and assuage some of the guilt that I have over that. If something bad happens, I can at least tell myself that I did what I could. I realize that this kind of thinking is not healthy for me. Guilt isn't inherently bad, it's important to have guilt to learn from your mistakes and to make yourself as good of a person as you can be, but carrying this kind of guilt for someone I barely knew and aggressively trying to "fix it" by over-helping everyone is probably bad for my mental health. At this point, and I'm a little embarrassed it took me until my 30's to reach this conclusion, but I've started living by the motto of "don't let being a coward stop you from doing the right thing". Taken to the extreme I'm not sure that's healthy either.

mirawelner 9mo ago

See I like this but also the majority of software jobs these days are a net negative to humanity

kinjba11 9mo ago

This reminds me of the "three tribes of programming: mathematical poetry, machine hackery, and business value". I think each SWE gets similar but different feelings of satisfaction. I knew a coworker who cared about the result, and little about the code he wrote. This was foreign to me when I saw it, as I was and still am definitely in the love for "math poetry" camp when it's possible. https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/ https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/

Willish42 9mo ago

This resonated a lot with me. I am also addicted to being useful and find that off days where my output and usefulness isn't where I'd like it to be really tank my self esteem. I do think it can be a double-edged sword that often leads to burnout. Respecting your limits and occasional therapy seem to help, as does ensuring you're in as stable and supportive environment as possible so your efforts are sustainable and "heroics" don't get normalized in your org. I wish I had a full solution but have yet to find one in my career that works :)