The unfortunate truth of software for technologists
It's all about the money, baby
an unspoken, uncomfortable truth: as a technologist, you’re truly blessed if you have the opportunity to build something solely for the users, without having to worry about your business, capturing “value”, or even just paying rent (I learnt it the hard way).
If that opportunity presents itself, consider yourself super lucky, but it’s so rare I wouldn’t even go looking for it. that’s what the weekends/open source mad science is for.
it… kinda sucks. it would be a utopia if we could build many things that amplify data/compute independence, encouraged software tinkering, all that. unfortunately not true yet (but def better than 20 years ago.)
the flip side is that if you actually commit to doing a good job and learning how to build things that grow business AND are good for users without taking advantage of them, you’re in the top 0.1% of engineers. go become friends with your marketing team and build something for them.