That’s great work, but even there you’re mostly building tools that make other engineers more efficient at building more tools. It’s not that the work lacks value it absolutely does, but it’s still part of the same recursive loop where the ultimate “benefit to society” gets pretty abstract. At the end of the chain, most of those tools are still helping businesses optimize, capture margin, or intermediate in some way.
It’s fine to take pride in craftsmanship, just maybe less fine to pretend it’s immune from the same critique applied elsewhere.
I am not critiquing the engineers… we are all rational agents looking at the data that we have in front of us and try to make sensible decisions about our lives.
I am just blaming society in that it doesn’t seem to prioritise “good” and “useful” things.
But you replied to my post saying your job is most definitely useful and my argument is that it’s not.
I don’t disagree there are certainly things each of us on this planet think is good or useful but in my opinion that’s the problem. How do you get a collective group of different humans to agree what that is. Capitalism with all its faults solves this problem pretty nicely. It’s not perfect but as far as I know it has been the best system so far.
It’s fine to take pride in craftsmanship, just maybe less fine to pretend it’s immune from the same critique applied elsewhere.