It’s worthwhile to “go above and beyond” for individuals who will help you, who may exist in a company… but never for the company itself. A company is no less and no more than a pile of someone else’s money that will do literally anything, including destroy your life, to become a bigger pile.
You should do a good job for individuals who will repay you later on. Companies themselves these days can sod off—they stand for nothing.
Not a specific piece of software, but a characteristic of a limited percentage of anonymous internal systems--one of the most beautiful things to witness in the realm of design is a system undergoing catastrophic stress when the designers anticipated and planned for such events, and in usually a very short period of time you see the results of extensive planning spool out, design features hidden from view and unappreciated until this moment, kick in and recover/compensate in ways that feel almost magical.
For obvious reasons it is much more common to see this level of design in physical, life-critical systems like aerospace or automotive technology, but you do see it sometimes in software. Well designed services that under heavy load, various kinds of infrastructure failure, attack, or other kinds of scenarios well outside the bounds of normal expected operations intelligently compensate while signaling alerts with precise, useful information, and attempt whatever kind of recovery is possible.
This is hard to anticipate and often thankless to build in advance. It's always a stressful time when this behavior is visible, but it gives me a feeling of admiration for the perhaps long gone employees who built it.
You should do a good job for individuals who will repay you later on. Companies themselves these days can sod off—they stand for nothing.