On some Pixar movie (Ratatouille, I think), one of the DVD extras was a set of deleted scenes that happened to be the entire work of individual animators - basically they spent 18 months of their life working on that stubble, and the whole guard was cut because that didn't work with the story.

That's an extreme, but something like that is possible for anyone working on a sufficiently large project. I get how people like that could really feel like their time was wasted - your assumption is that their contribution will be in the final project in a small but interesting way, and that's not an assumption that can always be made.

I used to be on the Space Shuttle Primary Flight Software team in Houston. Super motivating environment.

There was another independent team in Huntington Beach that wrote the Backup Flight Software. Never used it in 34 years of flights.

Poor bastards ...

I'm pretty sured it was indeed used, at least as part of emergency drills. I think that is pretty good, to know that your backup system works in case it is ever needed.

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

Same example can be applied to many folks working on startups that go nowhere. Especially the early days of pivots, a/b tests et al where many solutions get thrown out. Maybe a better way to handle this is focusing on growth achieved (startup or corporate) and less on the ego?

Your time is never wasted. You still get paid. That might just be my jaded way of looking at it though.

When your job becomes something useless you do because you want the money you get super unmotivated, to say the least.

An painter spends 18 months creating a great work of art, one of his best. After he is finished, a guy buys it for a large sum of money and promptly burns it. How does the artist feel? Is he going to be motivated to spend another 18 months on his next idea, even though his previous idea was a financial success?

That all depends on how you feel about ice sculptures. Maybe only a few people see it before it melts, but that doesn't matter. The skills gained in striving towards excellence are not ephemeral. Even if the product goes nowhere, no one can take away what was gained in the process.

And if the process is pure tedium and you learned nothing about yourself or the tools throughout it, you should try to create the tools that do inspire you to perform the tasks that don't. Manually creating a production build is boring and you rarely learn anything, but creating a good task runner can be incredibly satisfying.

I think the difference between the example and ice sculptures is that ice sculptures are enjoyed before they melt, but the example was produced for the sole purpose of being destroyed, rather than enjoyed for a short time.

Edit: Another example with something temporary would be spending time making food for someone who consumes it, versus spending time making food for someone who just throws it in the trash.

Good point about ice sculptures. However, the difference with ice sculptures is that you know it is going to melt before you start.

> An painter spends 18 months creating a great work of art, one of his best. After he is finished, a guy buys it for a large sum of money and promptly burns it

Out of topic, but in some countries, it's illegal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights)

>An painter spends 18 months creating a great work of art, one of his best. After he is finished, a guy buys it for a large sum of money and promptly burns it. How does the artist feel?

Those poor nuclear physicists and rocket engineers -- thousands of them -- in the US and the Soviet Union whose ICBMs and nuclear warheads were never used!

While they may not be in the job for the money, there is still a split between those who are in the job for the recognition and those who are in the job for the learning experience. Most of my work is hidden to everyone except those on my immediate team of 2-3, but I learn an incredible amount.

> You still get paid.

In the case of the game industry, you still got paid, but markedly less than a comparable software engineering job outside the game industry and with poor working conditions in general. This is tolerated because you're invested in the work; when that work just gets thrown away, you might as well have been working on the next Facebook for Cats and making the correspondingly at-market/inflated salary.

It might be that the attitude comes, not from actually thinking "my stuff doesn't matter at all", but more from thinking "if I leave, almost anybody else could do my job".

Not sure if this was the case, but I believe a lot of our developer egos would like us to think that I and ONLY I would be able to do this particular thing (even if you know you'll actually never be THE ONLY one at anything) it definitely feels like you might be one of the very few.

And then when you realize that no, you are not a special snowflake, you kind of feel "my contribution doesn't matter", not in that it doesn't actually matter at all, but in that someone else could've done it as well.

I worked at a company where I built the first version of the product, then, because I was remote I was removed from the main user-facing product and was sent to the virtual basement where I built and maintained internal tools. I was not happy, but, hey! at least I was getting a very nice deposit every month.

Four years later I was laid off and realised that I had absolutely nothing to show for my years there. No portfolio. Nothing on a public url that I could share.

Landing the next job was extremely difficult.

My resolution was that the next company I worked for should be one that allowed me to point at cool stuff and said, proudly, see that? I built it.

Ownership is very important for your career.