As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It bugs the hell out of me because I tend to need to solve All The Problems before I can do any self-care, but rather than seem heroic, I think this attitude can seem transactional or uncaring as though everyone is just a screw that needed a bit of tightening, etc.

Corporate environments are almost always toxic places to fulfill your emotional needs.

It is true that finding a job that "resonates" with your personality is key to living a fulfilling life, and that software engineering is the kind of profession that is really going to fit certain personality types extremely well, but despite that corporate culture can and will take advantage of you, divide you and your work "friends", exploit your willingness to serve, and discard you like trash at any moment.

Be mindful of how much of yourself you derive from serving the financial goals of others.

So I decided to find a worthwhile problem that deserved my talent. And I did. And I am now even more happy than before.

I always liked being helpful, but at this point I've sort of become "aggressively helpful", which ironically probably isn't helping. I feel a constant need to take care of people and help people, and I think it's in no small part because a tiny part of me is afraid they're going to do something horrible to themselves, or they're going to make some decision that I think is "wrong".

It's more than a little frustrating, because at some level I'm aware I'm doing it, and of course I have to ask myself "who made me the 'correct' decision-maker?", but I also can't really stop myself from doing it either, and at a certain level I'm considerably more willing to help other people than myself because I'm ultimately a coward and I'm really afraid of guilt. Many people have told me that it's not my job to assume responsibility for everyone, and they're objectively correct about this, but human psychology is stupid. Or at least mine is.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185822

[2] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/July-2023/Guilt-and-...

I remember, decades ago, reading an article about some African politician visiting the UK. He was given a tour, which included some of the social housing. The UK bragging about how they took care of their people. He saw people sitting around with with their housing and food paid for. His comment? "How horrible!".

He found it horrible, because - from his perspective - they had no role in society, nothing to do, no purpose to their existence.

I love being an engineer and solving problems that I’m good at, which are problems too complex for most people to approach. But not everyone feels that way, some or most people don’t care or don’t understand the motivation, as they may have different motivations of their own. Learning to accept that and be confident without validation from others is very tough but possible, as you apply yourself consistently with focus and clarity, you gain a stronger sense of purpose. You are never fulfilled, but continue to pursue anyway, that is the trick I learned for myself. The trait is called equanimity and is more of a sustainable attitude vs a feeling, that is transactional. It’s easier as you get older and comes with maturity.

https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-times-are-over/

> In other words, your interests now conflict with your company’s interests.

> It’s okay for your interests to conflict with your company’s. You get to decide what you care about, and what you’re willing to fight for. But when you act in ways that don’t further your company’s interests, you risk being seen as ineffective or unreliable. In 2025, that makes you vulnerable to being laid off.

And this one:

https://www.seangoedecke.com/a-little-bit-cynical/

I personally don't have the mental fortitude to enjoy most things about my job. There are several reasons: 1) selfishness, my interests not aligning with optimizing shareholder value, 2) shared dysfunction, all the ways we work in bad ways that is not good for anyone, 3) the sense that we are convincing managers to shove our product down the throats of their underlings, 4) laziness and other transient states (or maybe not so transient)?)

The Cynical article was curious to me. But just because I expected it to be Cynical in the sense that the author thought things were bad. But Cynical just meant merrily working within the gears of the professional system. Then having no complaints about it. No commentary beyond gaining both money and pleasure from aligning with optimizing shareholder value.

Many people in my line of work do not share my attitude, and many of my coworkers are grouchy and complain they're overworked. They do just enough to get by, and are generally rude to the users (but, not always).

I am in my early fifties, and have been in the business most of my career. I have worked at only two different companies, and have had a great life, even the long days that turned into late nights/early mornings.

I would definitely say I am addicted to being useful.

If you constantly solve all the problems that come it can be stifling for the people you manage.

Nothing wrong with that, I have that compulsion as well.

Having a compulsion to play, purely for the sake of playing is a much healthier view. Useful, not useful, hard problem, easy problem, should not matter, you're playing.

Sometimes you can't be useful, yet you can always play.

All stems from inability to have systems without labor. Work, work.

I like how Pope John Paul II flipped the narrative and said work exist for the person, as a way for person to express itself. Made me realize how even communism stays trapped in labor mentality.

Perhaps it's because completing those tasks elicits a dependency on you, and stepping back from them allows others to step up and fill that gap. In the meantime, you might not _think_ you're doing more impactful work, but perhaps the mental cycles stepping back from those tasks frees you up to think about more important / higher value work.

That is the author’s real intention is to assert engineers should deliver what their bosses ask.

I do think it can be a double-edged sword that often leads to burnout. Respecting your limits and occasional therapy seem to help, as does ensuring you're in as stable and supportive environment as possible so your efforts are sustainable and "heroics" don't get normalized in your org. I wish I had a full solution but have yet to find one in my career that works :)

https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/

I used to love my job (DevOps, Platform, DevSecOps Engineer) but I learned the hard way to disappear after 4:59PM and never get online before 8:59

Also, no more e-mail, teams, slack, etc, on my personal phone. While working be in the office or WFH, I do my best but outside that, you won't find me.

I am addicted to being useful culture died in early 2000s.... I am seeing projects where the goal is to have AI Teams managing AI Teams without human intervention, so enjoy your life and take workplace less seriously, we are gonna be replaced and you will regret spending more time working than living!!

I've been in therapy off and on through the years and I think this stems from a childhood with neglectful parents. I need to start seeing someone again. Thanks for the reminder!

The best part about HackerNews, is that you get a very good sense of the envious and jealous nature of people. A lot of the "hate" or "angry" comments, are basically people who hate their relationship with "work".

To the author, I think you'll continue that process of being useful, but you'll see that in this new world, you're usefulness now scales..

It's the equivalent of being neat freak. Some people are annoyed when they see breadcrumbs on the floor and feel a compelling urge to clean it. You experience a compelling urge to fix tech problems.

I think many people have that on various subjects.

It's not really a problem though. More an obsession than an addiction really. Being obsessive about your work is not a problem as long as you maintain proper live/work balance.

Unfortunately, my career has been solving such things; and once I realized that, there was no going back and no job satisfaction.

I also take offense at the belief of “being the only one who can solve the problem”. This is an arrogant self serving justification to blind oneself of the harm the solutions cause.

> We really like your work! How can you help other engineers be more like you?

The thing I think (but usually don't say) is:

> You realize I'm like this because I often work directly against your instruction in order to satisfy my personal sense of professional pride and responsibility?

Absolutely. They inevitably get promoted to managers, because they are able to parasitically get things done.

There’s a famous billionaire founder in Germany that attempted suicide just recently, because … he didn’t feel useful anymore.

https://7news.com.au/news/ex-boss-of-major-textile-brand-tri...

It's not always healthy; at my current job (started 8 months ago) I see tons of issues to fix. Some of them are explicitly mine to fix, some close enough to my area of responsibility, but some of them are well outside it. And I'm annoyed that nobody has fixed these problems, because everybody is aware that these are problems. But the entire way the organisation works, seems designed to make it as hard as possible for me to fix them.

I'll probably burn out and leave in a few months to do something I care less about.

I haven't been able to find a source for this, but I remember reading that Marx believed that doing productive work for the benefit of human beings was part of the "species essence" of humans. Needless to say, he did not approve of how this tendency was expressed under capitalism. He said that working for compensation alienates people from their work, prevents them from fulfilling their species essence, and therefore prevents them from being fully actualized human beings.

If you're working for the satisfaction of being useful to others, that's not dysfunction. That's you beating the odds and having a healthy relationship to your work despite the external social pressure to make it about the money. I think there's no irony in the fact that you have better working conditions; in fact, it makes perfect sense: you are privileged and insulated from the harshest pressures of capitalism that force people to think only about the financial benefit to themselves and not the benefit they provide to other people.

Sometimes I feel that if I said tomorrow that we need to have our own operating system, they would say "sure! go ahead! just make sure to send the expense reports if you need to pay for more tokens with the company's credit card".

I mean you shouldn't let people take advantage of you, but being useful to others is the essence of humanity.

This is proves its mostly over for the high income industry.

There are no good paying jobs where you are having a blast. Otherwise there is a lot of those who want to do that job which drives wages waay down.

High paying jobs are tough/stressful/not fun. Which was the case with software before.