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Posted by swah 15 hours ago

I'm addicted to being useful(www.seangoedecke.com)
470 points | 226 commentspage 4
camnora 3 hours ago||
And I have a fear of rejection
PlatoIsADisease 13 hours ago||
Nietzsche would approve that you are seeking power through usefulness. Even if he disdained money, he is a bit idealistic/outdated here. Hobbes says riches is a form of power.
sota_pop 4 hours ago||
This concept comes up a lot, especially on this site. I am sometimes surprised how seldomly it is mentioned by this name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai
hnal943 11 hours ago||
This is a fantastic intro to the article I wanted to read, which was Sean's advice on how to best leverage this trait.
Ronsenshi 13 hours ago||
I can very much relate to the OP in this. I enjoy writing code, figuring out problems, finding solutions and in general helping other people with things that require some kind of software to be created or updated. And until year or two ago I thought I'd be able to continue to do what I love while getting paid decent money for it. With the advent of vibe coding and AI I'm starting to feel less sure in the future.
drekipus 13 hours ago|
I feel more useful now more than anything.

The amount of ai generated planning and fluffy workloads that I've been able to just delete from the team has saved the company many engineering hours. Not least of all in bugs.

Value your expertise and experience. It's only greeting more valuable, not less.

Ronsenshi 12 hours ago||
It's great that this is a case for you.

I actually enjoy process of writing code, understanding deeply the system I work on, finding elegant solutions to business problems - not just a list of checkboxes with features for a given sprint that agent churns in background. Sure, practically I understand that business doesn't care how well something is written as long as it works somewhat reliably. I might eventually adapt to this new horrible reality of developers who have no idea what's going on in the codebase they "work" on.

phito 10 hours ago||
You can still understand a system deeply and find elegant solutions, and use LLMs to translate your idea into code, then review the code. It's still much faster than writing everything by hand in a lot of cases, if done properly.
Ronsenshi 8 hours ago||
Reviewing code that was written by somebody else is one of the least fun and enjoyable activities in my experience . I personally don't know any programmers who enjoy process of doing PR reviews.

If you only care about number of features Copilot implements for you or lines of code Claude Code gave you - you must be a manager.

phito 7 hours ago||
I really don't mind PR reviews, as long as the author is cooperative. I do not like arguing over obvious things with someone who isn't participating in good faith. Thankfully I have a good team in which it doesn't happen.
JohnMakin 10 hours ago||
I'm similar, but make sure you're addicted to being useful, and not addicted to being needed - the latter can come about by being useful enough. Sometimes it comes from a feeling of wanting control, but opens the door wide open to abusive relationships (both ways).
rammy1234 11 hours ago||
One of thing I have noticed of good software engineers is while they are trying to solve problems, they also communicate with clarity to upper management chain. The clarity they bring to the table was always appreciated and also puts them in the career growth path easily.
giraffe_lady 11 hours ago|
Every good engineer is an excellent communicator. Everyone who is not an excellent communicator is not a good engineer. Everyone hates that this is true but it remains true. A lot of people are very good programmers who have mistaken that for being good engineers, however.
phito 10 hours ago|||
And this is the determining factor to whether a current dev will be replaced by AI or will evolve alongside with it, being the bridge between humans and AI.

Which is not really different to what we're already doing, translating human requirements to machine code. Just that communication skills will become an even bigger part of the job.

fsckboy 4 hours ago|||
people who do not understand orthogonality also take poor measurements.
giraffe_lady 52 minutes ago||
I'm not sure what you're implying.
techdmn 12 hours ago||
I identify very strongly with this. More than once in my career I have gotten feedback along the lines of:

> We really like your work! How can you help other engineers be more like you?

The thing I think (but usually don't say) is:

> You realize I'm like this because I often work directly against your instruction in order to satisfy my personal sense of professional pride and responsibility?

haizhung 10 hours ago|
Just a word of warning to not take this to the max. Do not define your personal self worth over how useful (you think) you are.

There’s a famous billionaire founder in Germany that attempted suicide just recently, because … he didn’t feel useful anymore.

https://7news.com.au/news/ex-boss-of-major-textile-brand-tri...

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