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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

  And I have always found that a little hollow, and depressingly capitalist within tech.

I don't. I think the primary goal is to help customers/users - not to make developers feel something inside by writing code manually.

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I think the primary goal is usually to sell things quickly and at bigger scales, not to make an empath feel something inside for the plight of the users. It's a lucky circumstance to be intimately working on a direct to customer product that you can see tangible gains from and the impact on someone's day. In those lucky positions I've been in where the user hasn't been obscured by business outcomes, part of the implied deal is still that I've found the mechanics of the job somewhat gratifying, otherwise it is indeed hollow in the sense that the middle part where you cut things with a metaphorical chisel goes away or changes sufficiently. It was the goal for many developers to be engaged in that way, not anyone else who didn't like that, and certainly not the product goal, but it was part of why those people did it, and it always created tension with those who exclusively care about numbers and had no technical expertise. If all you do is grind for outcome, then have at it, but I find that only minimally and rarely mentally engaging.

I find the current work extremely engaging. A customer can ask for a fairly complex feature and 25 minutes later, I’ll show it to them.

In the past, I’d have to put it on the roadmap, prioritize it, debate it. It’d take 25 days instead of 25 minutes. More often than not, we would have never done the feature because it was deemed not impactful enough for all customers.

Today’s world is much more gratifying to me.

Which is perfectly fine, and I find that somewhat gratifying as well, but if the work involved amounted to wishing it into existence, than I may as well take a helicopter to the top of a mountain instead of climbing it. It's not not fun, but it's there's no meaningful process involved, and I'd be cool doing that only once in a while. Granted the processes you describe, and I've also experienced, are horribly bureaucratic and unsatisfying as well, but those do seem like a false dichotomy; either you're involved in the mechanics of the work and have tons of bureaucracy or you're not involved at all and have none. More than likely, process always accumulates to bureaucracy, but there are sweet spots that I hope stick around.

No one is stopping you from writing code by hand though. Whether someone wants to pay you to do it is a different story.

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