Discussion
I think a lot of software developers have a hard time dealing with the fact that the main value of our work to society is… record-keeping.
They’re *sure* it must somehow be about hard technical problems and there is a *little* of that but the vast majority of valuable software development work is ultimately stuff like “made it easier to see the status of this widget as it moves through this business process.”
@nat my first serious software job, and the one that turned me into an actually effective programmer and wrangler of programmers, was about the status of widgets and their constituent sub-widgets in the most literal and direct way possible. we wrote stuff to manage them from pieces coming in the door, through an assembly process, to pieces going out the door as products on a website.
there were hard technical problems! (...but most of them were about keeping records.)
@nat there were a lot of ways i didn't know wtf i was doing with that, but it was gratifying to talk recently to an old coworker from that time who told me how much he missed the stuff we built, now that he's out in the world using big expensive megacorp products to do the same kinds of thing. there's a lot i miss about the direct utility and groundedness of that kind of work.
Install Fedizen
Get the full app experience
Meanwhile there’s me, who grew up wanting to be a scribe in Ancient Egypt