I don’t know. I agree with the point that indifference is worse than hate but I would not take a lot of this article’s advice.

I’ve spent my career finding and working on things people love. I’d join a less stable company to know I’m actually putting products out that are worth spending time on.

This article comes across as coping to me, “it’s okay to ship junk, just comfort your tears by rolling in your pile of money.”

Companies don't want to delight their users! They simply want to take their money!

> In fact, a reliable engineer ought to be comfortable working on products people hate, because engineers work for the company, not for users.

I prefer to take pride in my work. This sounds like hiding ones neck to collect a paycheck.

I prefer to have hard discussions about pivoting or making changes so that we can improve the product, or company, for our users. Anything less is simply "not doing the job", or at least making a serious consession, in my opinion.

Author mentions working on product people hate, GitHub Copilot. Honestly it ain’t too bad. Definitely better than a lot of “enterprise” software.

The most successful businesses are often the most harmful forces in society. There's a lesson there.

Seans quest continues gaslighting himself one blog post at a time. As usual on his pieces away from pure technology I have the opposite opinion.

Pure cope.

It is extremely possible to work on a product people don’t hate, and still maintain a realistic perspective on your engineering abilities or impact or whatever.

If you’re toiling on a product that’s actively making the world worse, quit now. There are better gigs out there.

People talk a lot, but their wallet really speaks. I don't build for people's mouths. I build for their wallets. I'm happy with outcome.

The nature of feedback is that the most vocal express their dislike of a product more loudly and are noticed. The people who like the product won't often take time to express it. So it would certainly help you to take the criticism with some salt.

Don't attach your pride to how well a product you work on is received. You can still take pride in improving a poorly received product, or even in just trying.

In a perfect society, companies would find that the more negative externality they create, the more difficult a time they'll have finding people willing to do it for them. One case in point is when a civil-oriented software company starts taking on military contracts and putting their people to work towards death and destruction. In a perfect society, the reaction we would get is the employees going "wait a second; I liked this company when I joined, but I never signed up for this." … and even in our less-than-perfect society, we do get some of this; what we need is more of this, not less.

Are people really using Github CoPilot on their own volition or is it just "my employer only lets me use this tool"?

Most software is just there to get the job done. I’m building compliance tools that most users would very much like to never use as they’re just adding overheard over what they consider real work. You can still strive to make the software in a way that makes the unpleasant task of having to use it as painless as possible.

IDK why these vacuous corpo tropes appear on the front page of HN every now and then. Sounds like exactly what a quasi-technical, management-leaning staff engineer would say.

Sure, in the end we work for these faceless, meat-grinding machines. But more or less, we all have some semblance of autonomy, and I absolutely can choose not to work on a product that people hate. I can switch teams before switching companies.

To some extent, I also just do what leadership asks, keep my mouth shut, and collect paychecks. But whenever that happens, I don’t gaslight myself by writing a post on why it's supposed to be this way.

To me, this seems like someone who is married to their paycheck and would do whatever necessary to protect that.

I spent a couple of years of my career working on a multiplayer / social game. We definitely got some angry feedback on that, but overwhelmingly the users loved it. Our game hovered around a 92% approval rating. I even got fan art! I think I’ll always look on that period as an absolute highlight of my career. I shifted industries to renewable energy driven by a personal mission to work on a greater cause. It’s B2B so I’m back in the familiar place of having users who I imagine would rather be doing something else than using our product. If my work means they get to spend less time at their computers then I’m happy.