Why Am I Continually Solving Problems That I Don’t Care About?
It’s a question that’s always been there, but I’d never really thought about it until today.
Today, it’s time for a thought provoking bit of self-reflection, in that I’d never given too much thought to the bigger picture of the problems I solve every day. Well, most days, as I don’t solve a problem every day.
Anyway, that is until I saw one of the most remarkably honest, and at least for me, accurate, depictions of an average day working as a software engineer in (I’m guessing) one of those soul sucking tremendously ‘structured and culturally railroading’ workhouses masquerading as a ‘big tech’ company¹.
It’s absolutely true.
I’ve worked on so many problems during my ongoing tenure in the grand game of software engineering that I’ve lost count, but I can accurately remember the number of problems I’ve actually really cared about — and that number can easily fit on one hand.
Originally I thought it was because I honestly didn’t care about that many things — after all, life’s too short to worry about everything, just like it’s too short to learn all of the myriad programming languages², operating systems, and get involved with yet another NoSQL database. Spoiler: They’re all the same.
