If I were a better developer, would I have worked on more products people love? No. Even granting that good software always makes a well-loved product, big-company software is made by teams, and teams are shaped by incentives.
If I were a better developer, would I have worked on more products people love? No
There you go, justify your shitty work.
If you were a better person, you would work on better products.
You choose where you work and what you work on. The fact that you went from Zendesk working on a shitty product to Microsoft working on a shitty product is definitely about you.
In fact, a reliable engineer ought to be comfortable working on products people hate, because engineers work for the company, not for users.
“It’s ok that I work at shitty companies! They pay me more”
Perhaps it’s just me, but to me this article feels like belittling the problem by not differentiating between “hated” products and “harmful” products.
If a company makes you work on something that is hated, it’s fair and good to have sympathy. If a company makes you work on something that is harmful or unethical, like many perceive Co-Pilot to be, then an article about getting user hate that doesn’t talk at all about ethics feels a little tonedeaf.
I don’t know, perhaps that’s just me. I certainly don’t envy the writer for being employed to work on it.
This entire article feels like cope.
