I'm Addicted to Being Useful

Summary

When I get together with my friends in the industry, I feel a little guilty about how much I love my job. This is a tough time to be a software engineer. The job was less stressful in the late 2010s than it is now, and I sympathize with anyone who is upset about the change. There are a lot of objective reasons to feel bad about work. But despite all that, I’m still having a blast. I enjoy pulling together projects, figuring out difficult bugs, and writing code in general. I like spending time with computers. But what I really love is being useful. The main character in Gogol’s short story The Overcoat is a man called Akaky Akaievich. Akaky’s job is objectively terrible: he’s stuck in a dead-end copyist role, being paid very little, with colleagues who don’t respect him. Still, he loves his work, to the point that if he has no work to take home with him, he does some recreational copying just for his own sake. Akaky is a dysfunctional person. But his dysfunction makes him a perfect fit for his job. It’s hard for me to see a problem and not solve it. This is especially true if I’m the only person (or one of a very few people) who could solve it, or if somebody is asking for my help. I feel an almost physical discomfort about it, and a corresponding relief and satisfaction when I do go and solve the problem. The work of a software engineer - or at least my work as a staff software engineer - is perfectly tailored to this tendency. Every day people rely on me to solve a series of technical problems. In other words, like Akaky Akaievich, I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches 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 treats, but they don’t do it for the treats. They do it for the work itself, which is inherently satisfying. This isn...