I used to struggle a bit with that. My first full time job was at a startup making puzzle/logic games and I was hoping that at one point everybody is going to play them and I’ll be able to say “yeah, I worked on that”. Needless to say it wasn’t that successful at all, but I learned not to care that much. Money’s in my bank account, food is on the table, everything’s fine.
On the flip side, software not being material is also a plus - you make it once and distribute it an infinite number of times.
I used to work for a major cable company whose name rhymes with “bombast”. Although working for them was kind of like working for Darth Vader, I did take some pride in the fact that our app had millions of daily users. Eventually I learned that essentially all of those daily users were faked and that nobody actually used the shit (and they only installed the app in the first place to get a discount on their cable bills). Then I was only able to take pride in the fact that we were essentially scamming the c-suite and the shareholders out of millions of dollars a year.
I used to struggle a bit with that. My first full time job was at a startup making puzzle/logic games and I was hoping that at one point everybody is going to play them and I’ll be able to say “yeah, I worked on that”. Needless to say it wasn’t that successful at all, but I learned not to care that much. Money’s in my bank account, food is on the table, everything’s fine.
On the flip side, software not being material is also a plus - you make it once and distribute it an infinite number of times.
I used to work for a major cable company whose name rhymes with “bombast”. Although working for them was kind of like working for Darth Vader, I did take some pride in the fact that our app had millions of daily users. Eventually I learned that essentially all of those daily users were faked and that nobody actually used the shit (and they only installed the app in the first place to get a discount on their cable bills). Then I was only able to take pride in the fact that we were essentially scamming the c-suite and the shareholders out of millions of dollars a year.
It’s somewhat amazing to be able to pull this off - and also speaks of the layers and layers of management in modern corporations.
Did the c-level folks find out eventually?