101–110 of 794 posts
I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online. It's way better than any other available option. I've never shared it with the magic community because I think wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so three years of work is just sitting idle. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
It's 2009. After spending 5 years at my first job, I got the opportunity to work for a small (15-person), new (around 6 months old) startup. I jumped at the chance. While I was grateful for my first job (the mentorship and experience turned out to be incredibly valuable), I wasn't really excited about it anymore.
The new gig was going to change higher education. No longer would students carry around several tens of pounds of textbooks. Instead they'd carry around our tablet (we planned to sell a one-screen and two-screen, foldable version). It was fairly large, and supported touch and pen input, so students could highlight and take notes directly in the textbooks. The iPad didn't exist yet, and the idea of pervasive touch screens was still new but exciting.
We all worked so hard on it: 12+ hour days, 5, 6, and sometimes 7 days a week. I would roll into the office around 10am, and on the worst days drive home at 2am, sleep for 5 or 6 hours, and start it all again. I was tech lead for the team that built the middle layers: the UI framework, graphics, and parts of the input stack.
A year passes, and the company has grown to over 200 people. The product is shaping up: there are bugs, of course, and a lot of missing features, but things are going well. We'd been getting a lot of press and had done talks and demos at tech conferences.
And then we (the rank and file) learn that the company can't get digital rights for any useful amount of textbooks ("come back in three years when we renegotiate contracts", the publishers had been telling us), something it's clear to us that the founders knew for a while, but hadn't told us. The first iPad had been released out nine months ago, and after initial skepticism, people were starting to realize how versatile and useful it could be. To top things off, despite the iPad's smaller size and lack of pen input, it cost less than what our tablet (even our one-screen version) would need to cost to just break even.
So that was it. The company laid off half the staff (mostly on the hardware side), pivoted to making iPad apps, and sold off the hardware IP for pennies on the dollar. I lasted a couple more months before I quit, disappointed and disillusioned.
In total it was about 15 months of 70+ hour work weeks, completely useless. I'm sure a lot of people have failed startup stories, but this was the only one that I (in hindsight, perhaps foolishly and naively) poured my heart and soul and time into.
If it’s at all possible to get moved to work on sometthing that is not “useless” then I would push for that. Would your TL be open to it? Not only for job satisfaction but, given the current market and the propensity for layoffs, working on something useful will give you a little more job security
Woof AlertTM converts dog barks to email. https://github.com/FoxDotBuild/woof-alert
I love it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have worked on earning money to live in your world. Good job. Don't over think work.
I program because I could do nothing else. I do it because it is the thing I most want to do with any given moment. The fact they pay me to do it is fortunate otherwise I would be homeless and programming in a shelter somewhere. I over think work simply because the aspect of “work” is entirely incidental to what I do out of passion. That said, I also never believe anything I do is useful and that also isn’t why I do…
I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online. It's way better than any other available option. I've never shared it with the magic community because I think wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so three years of work is just sitting idle. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
Have you tried contacting them to see if they are interested in using it to their advantage as well?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have worked on earning money to live in your world. Good job. Don't over think work.
The only reason to give a damn about what you're working on is to make sure you're accumulating good bullet points for your resume.
I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online. It's way better than any other available option. I've never shared it with the magic community because I think wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so three years of work is just sitting idle. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have worked on earning money to live in your world. Good job. Don't over think work.
This is the right attitude. Unless you own the business, you have no moral responsibility to ensure the projects you work on have a purpose. You can, of course, optionally choose to not work on projects you believe have a bad or evil purpose. I've quit jobs where I though the project was evil. You're writing the code, or producing the documentation, managing the project, performing QA, or whatever else your role is,…