I think an important difference, for me, is that at a certain point the chest of drawers is finished.
Software - or at least, the kind of software I have worked on in my career - is never finished. It is a neverending ship of theseus.
I can muster motivation to try really hard on something that has an end point. But the idea of maintaining that kind of motivation and focus on a project that just goes on and on and on is, for me, near-unimaginable. You could pay me a million dollars a year and I think I would still really struggle with it. It's something I think about a lot and struggle with, because I have certainly had colleagues who seem to be able to maintain that level of craft on software projects.
> I think an important difference, for me, is that at a certain point the chest of drawers is finished.
> Software - or at least, the kind of software I have worked on in my career - is never finished. It is a neverending ship of theseus.
Totally agree. I've done several rants on HN about the software industry's inability to declare their products "done" and moving on. Every product that we complain about becoming "enshittified" should have been declared "done" and developers pencils-down years ago.
Software - or at least, the kind of software I have worked on in my career - is never finished. It is a neverending ship of theseus.
I can muster motivation to try really hard on something that has an end point. But the idea of maintaining that kind of motivation and focus on a project that just goes on and on and on is, for me, near-unimaginable. You could pay me a million dollars a year and I think I would still really struggle with it. It's something I think about a lot and struggle with, because I have certainly had colleagues who seem to be able to maintain that level of craft on software projects.