this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Pointless coding for the void (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago by reabsorbthelight@lemmy.world to c/cs_career_questions@programming.dev
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I feel like most of my work has been wasted throughout my career.

In my 10 years, I can look back and I think maybe 3 years of my work still exists today. A couple companies are not defunct. A couple projects were literally cut from under me.

Is this normal? Do most software engineers end up having a ton of their work wasted?

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[โ€“] catch22@programming.dev 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I would say one partial cure for this is to contribute to open source or if you are using open source in your projects see if you can get your company to allow you to contribute any fixes you have implemented up stream. Although at times rather than asking, I have fixed issues in a cpl of hours after work and pushed these up. But the simple fact is everything, even the most "advanced" projects eventually become obsolete, so I wouldn't worry about it, it is just part of working in tech.

[โ€“] reabsorbthelight@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah I'd feel like my work is more important if I worked on Postgres or an Apache project. Basically anything open source. The problem is getting paid.