I wonder if there are some people who are exceptions.

I worked with an software developer at my last job who was incredible. He seemed to have a strong interest for the technology, no matter what technology that was. At the time, it was iOS, and he was an absolute master of iOS. I was constantly impressed by his attention to detail and emphasis on quality, well written, technically challenging code.

I've loosely followed him since, and he seems to be absolutely crushing it wherever he goes. He's spanned many different roles and seems to do enjoy taking on new challenges in the form of different programming languages / platforms.

When I think back to him, I remember someone who seemed to just love programming. In a way, he was like a Robot. It doesn't appear to matter much to him what he's working on, or if it's "fulfilling" in the ethical sense.... He just enjoys the process of coding, and being damn good at it.

>I've loosely followed him since, and he seems to be absolutely crushing it wherever he goes.

Question - is his management crushing it as well or are they crushing him? Is he good at standing up for himself and not letting management crush him?

I think a lot of enthusiastic and brilliant people get destroyed by their managers exploiting them. So the individual goes from crushing it to getting crushed. Management really has to enable that kind of person to succeed.

> Is he good at standing up for himself and not letting management crush him?

Yes. This. He was very, very good at standing his ground and asserting that his time and effort was being spent well.

Multiple times I witnessed management clashing with him over something. Usually he felt like more time and effort needed to go into a certain part of code. Rather than just "get it done" he took pride in his work and wanted it done RIGHT.

In general he was so good / fast that he could get it done "RIGHT" within management's expectations. But occasionally he would take on a big chunk of work, and management would try and shut him down. 9/10 they failed, he would do the work, and a damn good job of it.

Interesting point. Can you elaborate a bit on what you'd expect from a manager to help that person succeed? Is it mostly case-specific?

I can tell you that for this particular person he needed to be silo'd and given time.

A good manager would realize that his quality of work was top notch but that he was at times difficult to get along with. He was a perfectionist who held those around him to the same standards, and that often clashed with the business needs and even sometimes other teammates. A business generally isn't concerned with the product being perfect, they're more concerned with it getting to market on time.

So my suggestion to any manager that has an employee like this: Value him for what he is. Put him on MISSION CRITICAL tasks, where you need a rock solid implementation. Let him work for 2 weeks without interruption.

For other tasks that are perhaps not as "critical", throw other team mates at them.

It's always case specific, but it usually involves the manager supporting them by providing time and/or space. rubicon33's example and response is a great one. Put them in a situation where their strengths can be well utilized and the effect of their weaknesses minimized.

Also, not everybody has the personality or energy to constantly stand up for themselves. A lot of people will eventually crumble or leave. Don't make it so the only way the employee can do their best (e.g. what rubicon33 describes) is if they put their foot down and scream.

>Why? I've discovered over the years that I am far more excited by making customers happy than by doing technically interesting work. I've come to see the technology as a means to an end, not the end in itself.

100% agree. I'm a Data Scientist and I'm supposed to have one of the most exciting and sexiest jobs in tech. But after many years of doing this I've come to realize that working with good customers and seeing them happy is much more rewarding than playing with the latest machine learning thing. New tech is just the thing that makes it easier to tackle a customer use case.

There's a strong relationship between the quality of the people I'm working for and my sense of the work being interesting. If the people I'm working for are unrealistic a-holes no amount of technical novelty can make up for that.

I've seen this sentiment many times here on HN. I wonder, who are your customers exactly?

At one of my previous jobs, "my customers" were the managers of some company who asked managers of the company I worked in to deliver some software that will be sold as a part of a software package, to be used by someone downstream. I don't know who ended up using my work and how, because we were isolated by several abstraction layers from that. I did care about the happiness of those people, little I knew about them. But I couldn't care less about the happiness of our customers - a company I didn't hold in high regard, with managers not being particularly helpful. I suppose I did get some small sense of satisfaction when their managers told my managers that the work is good. But that was it.

So, are we talking about happiness of customers, or happiness of people actually using the product? Those are very often different groups. Or, in other words, are we talking about finding happiness in generalized servitude, or making people's lives better?

I was referring to people who were actually using the product. I've had a number of jobs in my life, including being in the services division of a product company and also in an internal consulting team of an extremely large non-tech company. I would typically interact directly with the people who are using what we were building. So I could see exactly what they needed and did not need (despite what they said they wanted) and manage that so they were happy with the end product.

I've also worked in situations you've described. My only interaction with the end user is through layers of middle management. I found that environment to be extremely demotivating and certainly no direct sense of satisfaction. One of the small benefits of being a Data Scientist right now is that a lot of managers don't really understand what it is I do so I get some interaction with the end-user from a requirements and solution validation standpoint. But I suspect in a few years Data Scientists will become invisible cogs (like everybody else) in the Enterprise IT machine.

Personally I work in the health tech space - specifically a pharmacy. Our customers are people who are able to get cheaper medications and better health help and pharmacy technicians who are more productive due to our software. The job is technically just Django/CRUD with some integrations, but the impact can be fulfilling.

I don't think you can get that kind of satisfaction in B2B software as a developer (only a salesperson/exec).

What are the thing that is intresting ( as per your opinion, if you are willing to share? )? I mean not everybody will get the job they like and it will be the boring thing to do ( but, still we have to do this boring job! ). But, life shouldn't be boring and it should be beautiful and enjoying.

The interesting thing isn't the technology, it's what the users/customers are doing with it. It's how it improves their lives, simplifies their business, enables them to build other products and increase profits, etc.

I personally think the people working on things like database and filesystem performance are doing really cool work. Any time you're taking conference papers and turning it into code to solve a particularly hairy problem... that's pretty cool.