All for Naught?

Potentially False Dichotomy

My friend Vic is a programmer working for a big company. They’ve hired a lot of non-engineers who are wasting his time in meetings.

He said that on one hand it is good money and he should take it and not worry about anything else. On the other hand, it is hard to see opportunities being squandered. He doesn’t want to turn into a cynic.

I thought about my related experiences over the past 17 years of work and how my approaches have evolved.

Consulting is like therapy. As a therapist, you don’t go in thinking that your client is going to not change for the better at all. But you also recognize how hard any meaningful change really is. If you get stressed out every time a client doesn’t follow your advice, you’ll tear your hair out in no time.

Effecting Change

A good part of being a successful consultant is being able to effect changes. Even if you are a salaried employee or a therapist, some aspects of your work are still “consulting”. In this role, you need to effect change. So it is hard not to get frustrated when all your work is essentially tossed into the trash can.

The way I’ve kept my sanity and continued enthusiasm is by adopting stoicism, rather than cynicism, when it comes to how my work is used.

I worked hard building a sophisticated webapp for a company in Palo Alto. It was challenging and I learned a lot. I was happy to deliver it on time and under budget, and proud of the tight clean code. Shortly thereafter, completely unrelatedly, the CTO who had brought me in was asked cheated out of his equity stake by the CEO and the company then pivoted into something else entirely. There are forces way beyond your control and it doesn’t make sense to worry about them. I have to admit that I was pretty bummed when I heard that they didn’t use my code at all. I did get paid, so there is that.

Intrinsic Satisfaction

Taking satisfaction out of having done good work is important to avoid burnout that might come otherwise.