You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled?
It's a pretty frustrating experience -- was it all for naught? Maybe it's useful to vent about it a bit.
I definitely had this feeling early on in my career, but it did flip around somewhere around halfway through.
"We're not shipping? Well, that's a bummer, but also, what a relief! If building it that was this hard, I can only imagine how bad shipping it would've been; now we can delete that code and with it all of the maintenance we would've had to commit to for years."
The personal attachment just had to go eventually. It proved not to be terribly helpful or healthy anyways.
Ok, but then honestly, spending 40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time.
It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.
>40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time.
For almost everyone, working is not the best way to spend their time, it's just how they can afford the stuff they do the rest of the time. Obviously it's preferable if it's useful and/or enjoyable, but they're not necessary qualities.
>It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.
Odd. "Agency" usually refers to the ability to exert will. Understanding would not seem to contribute towards that.
Yep 90% of companies don't matter and don't affect things. Only 10% of people do. That's just the way the world works. There's no way to know before you start so just live while you can enjoy.
I worked at a company whose product was truly boneheaded. Without giving too much away, it’s the kind of technology that would have been useful if we lived in a world where smartphones weren’t being carried around by literally everybody.
I knew this, but took the job because I was burned out and knew I could spend a year or two coasting and padding my resume with some interesting things.
I came to the conclusion that the company was a grift, but at least they took care of their employees and included them in the profit part of it.
We had startup perks that were basically paid out in cash when the pandemic hit. The “gym” perk became $500 in cash which could be spent on anything vaguely fitness related, like an Apple Watch. The commuter benefits rolled into our accounts which gave me free tolls for years afterward. Instead of taking all the money, they cut us in.
So yeah, maybe frustrating if you expected your startup to be successful, but that’s so often outside of the control of any engineer. It’s always a crap shoot. Get your best offer and make the most of it. You can do resume driven development even in the shadiest of firms.
This attitude actually becomes the only viable strategy once you realize that the majority of the economy in the majority of the world is connected in some way with some kind of graft. Even honest salt-of-the-earth sewer workers or something are probably pawns in some larger fraud scheme. The "economy* is in some sense one large scam.
> You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled?
I would have thought most people would grow out of having this kind of feeling after their 1st job. But I also definitely work to live, not live to work, so YMMV.
So much of what I’ve worked on in my career has proven to be utterly ephemeral. I’ve learned not to dwell on it too much, in part because one of software’s great strengths is its malleability[0].
However, I was quite surprised a few weeks ago, on a client project, to find in one of their repos a chunk of example code that I’d worked on 22 years ago.
[0] Being real, a lot of the ephemerality actually stems from questionable commercial decisions, working on the wrong thing, etc. But some at least is a legitimate result of evolving markets and needs.
Same same. I don't expect any of my product code to survive for very long.
I suspect some of my open source contributions will live a long time. Not my personal projects that I make open source just in case, but the (very small) contributions to fix things in the dark shadows of established projects with longevity. Some of that will become obsolete and hopefully be removed, and some might get refactored eventually, but if the project is older than my career it's may well last beyond me.
Our work is extremely ephemeral by nature. Many times I only value the communication that happened and the shared understanding that was built. The code is an .. artifact. Nice to hang on the wall.
Do you get your major feeling of success primarily from work, or is it the rest of life? I don't think I need to spell what is viewed as the proper long term winning strategy here. I know folks who ride the work part, and let me tell you - unless you land a stellar employer and exceptional boss, its recipe for a lot of miserable days and worse, for decades. Its also a symptom of what I would call 'unfulfilled life', but thats my personal take please don't get offended quickly.
With that mindset (or work-to-live or whatever you can call it), these things are just an afterthought. That after-work climbing session and that weekend meeting with friends or hiking trip in the mountains with kids mean world to me, and I fully indent to keep that mindset till retirement and continue with it further. If it means I won't get into top 1% or whatever I am fine with that, QoL is firmly above that and career rat races are meaningless (and fruitless) ego polishing / insecurities managing exercises.
I assume because it turns out it was a actual bullshit job, and they were probably proud of what they had achieved. They probably trusted and may have even got on well with their boss.
Prasad, to the extent he had a reputation before, was for critiquing the scientific practice as inadequate, which would hope that he'd bring the idea of rigor to his stint at the FDA. Instead, we see quite the opposite:
- This baffling Moderna decision, which is so bad that many in the industry assumed it was from a failed bribe solicitation
- Prasad holding a defamatory PR event about the company producing the HD candidate treatment, and only talking "on background" to hide his identity, which is sleazy and unethical "The criticism apparently struck a nerve with Prasad. The FDA held a press briefing later Thursday in which an unnamed “senior FDA official”—who identified himself as a hematology-oncologist—launched into a diatribe against UniQure, saying its “failed therapy” was supported by “distorted and manipulated” data. As for Woodcock’s comments, the official said he “expect[s] better” from her." https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/03/trumps-divisive-fda-v...
- His first ouster and reinstatement last year, over a unilateral Duchenne muscular dystrophy decision, severely lacking in scientific rigor and analysis
- Lied on his CV about being on a highly prestigious council he was not on (The Cancer Letter is not a random YouTube channel, it's high quality cancer research journalism) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCASAb7J-LE&t=41
As is often the case with such contrarians and critics, their own critiques apply most aptly to themselves.
Nah, by 2021 Prasad's reputation had gone into the shitter
I actually think he's just grifting and the notoriety he achieved went to his head. His pre-2020 takes were better reasoned and at least worth engaging with. I could see his takes shifting with popular misinformation ideas in real time as it contributed to his success
IMO this is worse than if he were just wrong. I think he knows better, but then he talked himself into a box, and doesn't have the people and political skills to survive on a bigger stage.
These are not out of luck people if this is a long term
Problem. These are people who are chronically bad at allocating resources.
Even if they could afford the 65$ membership (yes anyone car). They couldn’t afford the per package goods. Is this even alluring to them? They demonstrate poor basic economic understanding.
Dunwoody asked the JCC for camera access in case of live shooter events but then used it for many other reasons.
“ In September 2024, Dunwoody PD Major Patrick Krieg requested access to the private securiy cameras at a community center on behalf of the department. When the community center pushed back and demanded to know what the access would be used for, Krieg was unambiguous: “This is solely for real-time critical incident response.” The community center agreed to share their cameras, including cameras in gymnastics rooms, pools, and fitness studios, with Dunwoody PD for emergencies”
"So here's a data sharing scenario, prospect agency"
"Isn't that illegal in [insert our state]?"
"Well, that's for your agency and your state to determine".
"Will that feature be turned off for our agency if it is is prohibited or illegal in our state?"
"Why would we turn it off? You'll use the system responsibly, right? Why don't we take a quick coffee break and after that, we can go through data sharing in the system."
Greenhouse gas emissions are a larger existential threat than global war. A global nuclear war might be more catastrophic than unchecked climate change, but probably not by much.
I use voice typing for almost the same thing every day.
I run to/from daycare to drop off my son and I title the run "Daycare drop-off". It constantly types "Take care drop-off" which drives me nuts. Those words don't even make sense together. A simple Markov chain should do better.
Wanna is in a number of notable and respected English dictionaries including the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, and Collins. I don't know what else defines if a word is or is not in the language.
Its an informal word, and it does not belong in a device used for professional communications.
"Wanna is used in written English to represent the words `want to' when they are pronounced informally.
I wanna be married to you. Do you wanna be married to me? "
Ah, good then, great to see you've changed your mind and now we both agree it is most definitely a word commonly used in English for over a hundred years.
Its incredible the dictionary pronounced it to you instead of showing it to you in a written form. When I go to the link I definitely see it written!
I do agree with you that it is an unprofessional word and probably not the most charitable and professional dictation result. But in the end there's two different directions dictation software can go: what was more accurate to what the person actually said (or what it thinks the person actually said), or the more correct way of saying what was said. If someone was legitimately saying "wanna", should the dictation software always auto-correct it to "want to"? If you were to type "wanna", should the keyboard auto-correct to "want to"?
