See I like this but also the majority of software jobs these days are a net negative to humanity

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

I fight for the Users

If anything, coding agents gave me more autonomy to experiment and implement stuff. Management used to pretty much risk-adverse, and between building something in-house or paying for another crappy SaaS offering, they would perceive the second one as the least dangerous path in terms of schedule and cost. And then we would be fucked integrating with some shitty API and somehow shoehorning their nonsense abstractions and metaphors into our domain models.

Sometimes I feel that if I said tomorrow that we need to have our own operating system, they would say "sure! go ahead! just make sure to send the expense reports if you need to pay for more tokens with the company's credit card".

> 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 treats4, but they don’t do it for the treats. They do it for the work itself, which is inherently satisfying

I haven't been able to find a source for this, but I remember reading that Marx believed that doing productive work for the benefit of human beings was part of the "species essence" of humans. Needless to say, he did not approve of how this tendency was expressed under capitalism. He said that working for compensation alienates people from their work, prevents them from fulfilling their species essence, and therefore prevents them from being fully actualized human beings.

If you're working for the satisfaction of being useful to others, that's not dysfunction. That's you beating the odds and having a healthy relationship to your work despite the external social pressure to make it about the money. I think there's no irony in the fact that you have better working conditions; in fact, it makes perfect sense: you are privileged and insulated from the harshest pressures of capitalism that force people to think only about the financial benefit to themselves and not the benefit they provide to other people.

And I have a fear of rejection

does it not bother you that your company is not useful to society?

this resonated so much with me, thanks for sharing