I’ve been thinking about what exactly I want from a job. Money, obviously. I’m not going to pretend I show up every Monday purely out of passion for solving problems. I have expenses. Some necessary, some coffee-related.
At some point, the deal must have been fairly simple. You needed food, clothes, a place to live, so you found work that paid for those things. We’ve added a few things to the list since then. An iPhone on EMI, for example. But okay, you need money, you work.
What I’m trying to understand is how much other stuff I’ve attached to it.
If someone asks me to introduce myself, I’ll probably say, “I’m Vedant, I’m a software engineer.” I won’t say, “I sleep a lot and brew a lot of coffee,” even though that is also a fairly accurate description of what I do. Imagine saying that at one of those networking events. The person would be looking over my shoulder for someone more useful before I finished the sentence.
And I get it. They’re asking about work. But even outside those rooms, I reach for the same answer. I could blame society for that, but I also like having a title that sounds respectable. I like people thinking I do something worthwhile. Apparently, brewing a decent cup of coffee hasn’t earned me that privilege yet.
So yes, I need my job to pay me. But I also seem to need it to make me feel good about myself, which is where things start getting a little complicated.
That respect feels good, but I don’t think it explains all of it. There are things I’ve done at work that nobody outside my team would understand, let alone be impressed by, and I’ve still felt really good about doing them.
Sometimes it’s a problem I’ve been stuck on for hours. I’ve questioned the code, the documentation, my career choices, and briefly the person who wrote the code, before discovering that person was me. Then something clicks. I understand what’s wrong, I fix it, and for a while I’m disproportionately happy about a thing that six people on earth care about.
I like that feeling. I like being able to say, “Yeah, I figured that out.” The salary was going to arrive anyway, but this part felt like mine.
Which makes it difficult to take my own advice when I say things like “it’s just a job.” Clearly it isn’t just a job to me. I care whether I’m good at it. I care whether I’m learning anything. I’ve let one difficult afternoon convince me I’m terrible at something I’ve been doing for years. Very sensible behaviour from someone who claims to be there to pay bills.
And now AI is involved, and I’m trying to understand what happens to that feeling.
I use it. I want the help. I have no sentimental attachment to spending three hours on something that could take twenty minutes. But sometimes I get to the end of a day, look at everything that got done, and feel less satisfied than I expected.
“Bhai, I did forty PRs this week.”
Great. Why do I feel so little about it?
I’m not sure yet. Maybe I enjoyed figuring things out more than I realised. Maybe reviewing a solution doesn’t give me the same satisfaction as arriving at one, even when reviewing it takes skill. Or maybe being busy used to save me from asking whether I cared about what I was building in the first place.
That last possibility is slightly inconvenient. I was hoping to blame the chatbot.
The annoying thing is, I wouldn’t actually want to go back and do all forty of those PRs manually. If you took the tools away tomorrow, I’d complain before lunch. So I can’t honestly sit here and say AI has ruined the joy of work while another tab is open asking it to fix my build.
But I do want to understand what I’m missing.
Earlier, if something took me two days, I had a fairly detailed account of where those two days went. I tried something, it failed, I misunderstood something else, I went for coffee, and eventually I got somewhere. By the end, I knew that little corner of the problem quite well. Sometimes against my will.
Now there are days when I move through things faster than I can develop that kind of relationship with them. I understand enough to check the work and take responsibility for it. Still, by evening, some of it has barely registered. It’s done. There’s already something else waiting.
And yes, I know how this sounds. Man gets help with work, complains that work is now easier. Very moving.
I don’t think the difficulty itself was the thing I liked, though. I’ve spent enough time fighting configuration files to know that suffering doesn’t automatically become meaningful. Sometimes you’ve just wasted a Thursday.
What I liked was noticing that I was getting better. Something that confused me last month made sense this month. I could help someone with a problem I’d once needed help with. Those were small things, but I believed them. They gave me a reason to feel capable that didn’t depend entirely on somebody saying “great work” in a meeting.
I’m still figuring out what the equivalent feels like now. There’s skill in asking the right questions, catching a bad solution, deciding what’s worth building at all. I know that. I’ve used those skills. But knowing they matter hasn’t immediately changed what makes me feel proud at the end of a day.
Maybe my idea of doing a good job hasn’t caught up with how I do the job anymore.
Or maybe I’ve been using the amount of effort something costs me as evidence that it matters. Which would explain a few things beyond work, unfortunately.
I don’t want to turn this into a tribute to the good old days of doing everything manually. I was there. I was on Stack Overflow. It wasn’t that spiritual.
And when I think about the work I’m actually proud of, the effort isn’t always the part I remember.
Sometimes I remember someone using what I built and saying, “Oh, this makes my life easier.” Sometimes it’s catching a problem before it became everyone’s problem. Or helping a teammate understand something and then watching them run with it. I’ve had days where a twenty-minute conversation felt more useful than the code I wrote for the rest of the afternoon.
None of that required me to personally type every character.
So there are already parts of the job I find fulfilling that AI hasn’t taken away. I just don’t give them the same attention when I’m judging my own day. I’ll remember the unfinished ticket more clearly than the person I helped. Then I’ll wonder why I feel unproductive. Excellent accounting on my part.
Maybe that’s something I can change.
If I can get a working version sooner, I can spend more time seeing whether it’s actually any good. I can understand the problem better before enthusiastically solving the wrong one. I can try the idea I would previously have abandoned because setting it up sounded like a whole weekend.
I like that possibility. There are things I’ve wanted to make for years that are suddenly within reach. It would be a little ridiculous if I spent all my time mourning the effort they used to require instead of making them.
Of course, a faster way to work can also become an invitation to do more work. Finish early, receive additional work. Congratulations on your efficiency. Here is your punishment.
I don’t control all of that. But where I do have some room, I’d like to be more deliberate about what I do with it. Some days I might go deeper into something I want to learn. Some days I might help someone. And some days I would like to finish work, close the laptop, and have enough of a brain left to enjoy my evening.
I’m beginning to think that last one deserves a place in my definition of a good workday.
I still want to be good at my job. I want to make things I’m proud of, earn well, and occasionally have someone look at my work and say, “F*ck, that’s good.” I’m not above any of this. Please appreciate me and process my increment.
But I’d like to stop expecting every working day to confirm that I’m doing something worthwhile with my life. Some days I’ll learn something. Some days I’ll make something useful. Some days I’ll attend four meetings to discover that we’re waiting for another team. I need to be able to survive that third kind without having an identity crisis.
And I think I can be a little fairer about what counts as a satisfying day.
If AI helped me build something that I’d otherwise never have attempted, I’d like to enjoy that without deducting marks because I had help. If I made a good decision, I’d like to give myself some credit even if there’s no impressive pile of code attached to it. When I genuinely want to understand something, I can still slow down and work through it. Using these tools doesn’t mean I’ve signed an agreement to stop thinking.
There’s a lot here I’m actually excited about. I have ideas I can try now without first clearing three weekends and negotiating with my own attention span. Some will be useless. I know myself. But I get to find out, and that feels good.
Then there’s the rest of my life, which I keep treating as something I’ll get to once work feels sufficiently complete. An ambitious plan, considering work has apparently never been complete in the history of employment.
I like brewing coffee. I like sleeping. There are people I want to spend time with and things I’m curious about that have absolutely no relevance to my career. I don’t need to turn all of them into achievements before they’re allowed to make me happy. A good cup of coffee can just be a good cup of coffee. I can drink it without developing a roadmap.
So I’ll probably still introduce myself as Vedant, a software engineer. It’s true, it’s convenient, and nobody who casually asks what I do deserves to have this entire blog recited at them.
But I’d like to remember the other answers too. Especially on the days when the job isn’t giving me much.
I want work to pay for my life, and I’d love to enjoy a decent amount of the work along the way. Right now, I have new ways to build, plenty left to learn, and a chance to be a bit more thoughtful about what deserves my time. That’s quite a lot to look forward to.
I also have a coffee getting cold because I’ve been trying to find a meaningful ending to this.
I’m going to drink it while I watch the new episode of Lanterns.