Growing as an engineer” means becoming a better engineer, and becoming a better engineer (directly or indirectly) means getting better at using your skills to create business value. Early in your career, the work you do will likely have far less longevity than the work you do later on, simply because you gain maturity over time and learn to build tools that tend to be useful for longer.
The devops saying “Cattle, not pets” is apt here: code (and by proxy, the products built with that code) is cattle. It does a job for you, and when that job is no longer useful, the code is ready to be retired. If you treat the code like a pet for sentimental reasons, you’re working in direct opposition to the interests of the business.
It’s extremely human to want the validation of our beautiful things being seen and used and recognized; it means we’ve done well. On the other hand, our work being discarded gives us an opportunity to understand what (if anything) we could have done better:
And yet as it pertains to fighting a fight and fixing societal problems, we see the longevity of our work as part and parcel with those solutions; they aren’t. spirit
