Steve Yegge's got balls, but don't dis the cat's completely

Today a colleague of mine (Seb Martin) pointed me towards a video of Steve Yegge publicly quitting Google durring his presentation at OSCON 2011:



It appears he quit because he was starting to work on something that he doesn't love, namely cat pictures, and ways to share those cat pictures and fluff money making software. More importantly on something he deems not to add value to the human race. This hit close to home. I've recently also had one of these software engineer/developer mid-life crisis' and I blogged about it 2 years ago as one of my very first posts: 'what is green computing etc...'.

This is part of why I love working at Macadamian, and in many parts why I love my job. I get to do a ton of pre-sales/solution architecture where I meet new or existing customers, ramp up quickly on new technologies, figure out how to smash them all together, and finally kick start an amazing team (developers, QA specialists, and UX researchers/designers) down a road of building actual product. I also get to mentor developers, young minds, point them towards very cool ideas and help shape the future - maybe just a little bit, but it's doing my part.

But what do Steve Yegge quitting and my job have in common? Healthcare: One of Macadamian's key verticals is healthcare software products. We've done a ton of EHR, PHR, Mobility and Health devices UI revamps etc... And this is very morally rewarding work. We might not be solving the domain problems, but we are working with domain experts to help their lives or their customer's lives get better, easier, more efficient, cheaper, or all the above. This I can live with. This gets my passion going. This recharges my batteries.

But what about the cats? I don't want to upset them. I think there is tons of value in building solutions involving hundreds of millions of kitty photo being shared. I think what we do there pushes the technology envelope, and facilitates innovation in other sectors. I've taken what I've learned building kitty cat sharing software and have been able to apply out of the box technologies to typically conservative old tech problems. So don't undervalue the cats...

Now I have to go buy this book!