Embrace Pointless Tech Work

The effect of your work on the world is more than the fame of your company

As a programmer, I feel a social pressure to leverage my skills and interest to do a certain kind of work. Extended family might ask about working for household names. Parts of the internet treat you as a corporate drone if you aren’t on a tour of unicorn-or-bust startups making promises that they will change the world.

Feel free to ignore them.

Your code can be directly impactful even if it’s hard to explain how

There’s a whole network of people with jobs like “Write a program which converts abstract program descriptions into real code which is as unrealistic, ineffecient, and overall weird as possible”. These people might work for companies you’ve never heard of and sell to customers you’ve never heard of. Nevertheless, these abstract, unheralded engineers are an important part of the chain of effort underlying all the positive and negative results of our complex technological world. The work you do can be valuable, even if the final results aren’t visible for several more steps.

You can help the world even when your work doesn’t on its own

Most people don’t build their identity around their employer in the way that seems common for programmers. To some extent, it makes sense for programmers to give it more thought- companies do seem to vary more in software than elsewhere, across lots of dimensions. But if the only thing your job gives you is excellent working conditions, high pay, and good job security then the rewards for your work are already among the highest in the world. Even if the direct effect of your work is only that company A makes an extra sale instead of company B, if the indirect effect is that you can afford to send a child to college or donate $5,000 to save a life, you’ve had an enormous positive impact on the world.

If programming gives you joy, that’s enough

A poet may write only to express themselves, sharing the result with no one but enriching their own experience. Give yourself permission to program for only the joy of the craft, the struggle over the problem, and the curiosity for the system. Whether you’re writing code for pay or exploring fizzbuzz variants over a glass of wine, if programming gives you joy, that’s enough.