On motivation and meaning

The Daily Grind

I’ve talked a bit about the spectrum between theoretical computer science and software engineering. I think about this a lot, especially when I’m burned out by my day job. For anyone who is doing (or has done) typical software engineering work, you know that it can be very draining and often orthogonal to the things that you find interesting or important.

In all honesty I can look back at entire eras of my career where the work I did had no meaningful impact on the world. That’s a tough pill to swallow, but it’s the reality. I’ve known a lot of engineers in my career, and I’d wager that almost all of them would say the same, if prompted. In fact there may be many people who could say that they’ve never worked on anything that mattered at all. This has captured my attention for the last 5 years, and I want to do everything I can to ensure I’m working on things that matter to me (and to the world) for the rest of my career.

The first step is to identify what matters, though, and I think it’s weirdly difficult to decide. What took me years to see is that when the work itself doesn’t matter to you, you cling to the craft of it instead, and after long enough, you mistake the craft for the point.

I think in my case I was just always focused on survival, on paying the bills, and on my family. I remember being maybe 25 and wondering for the first time why I never tried very hard to go work at a big shop. I always just kind of took what was in front of me.

I’m sure to some degree this was fueled by impostor syndrome, or the feeling that I wasn’t good enough to work somewhere like a Google. To a huge degree I know it was because I have a natural distaste for large corporations, governments, and other organizations that centralize (and abuse) power. Weirdly though, I think to a certain degree, I just never stopped to consider it.

I don’t remember ever sitting around longing to work on important things, or to be surrounded by people who cared about their work. Not until a certain point in my career. I was just always onto the next thing and doing the job in front of me. My passion was put into things outside of work that I cared about on an individual level (even software to some degree). There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course. But some quotes about an unconsidered life come to mind here.

Chasing Meaning at FAANG

I joined FAANG (specifically F -> M) because I wanted to be surrounded by people that really cared about the work they were doing. I wanted to work on things that mattered. I wanted to have conversations with my coworkers about deeply intellectual things like P vs NP, or the nature of reality, the role of software in the progression of humanity.

None of these things happened. Most people were doing the same thing as engineers at any company, just doing the day job and collecting a paycheck.

The people that were passionate about their work tended to be passionate about compensation, promotions, and performance. There are many other sources that document why this typically has nothing to do with the work, with engineers actually landing projects that they know will be a bust because they are on paper having committed to them. In any sanely run organization, this would be identified quickly as sunk cost fallacy and people would move on.

Now it’s worth stating loudly that this in no way means there aren’t people at these companies who love their work and are extremely passionate. This is likely true even at the small companies where I found the least meaning in my career. It just hasn’t been obvious to me.

I know for example that there were people in VR or ML at Meta that had a true, honest, deep passion for their work. Just for a solid example, we are talking about the difference between someone working on generic software for a use case they have absolutely no passion about, and someone working on something like climate change or space exploration. I’m sure there are many people at SpaceX, for example, who live, sleep, eat, and breathe space exploration. Or people at Anthropic who have been obsessed with Artificial Intelligence since their adolescence.

It must be a wonderful thing to have a deep sense of purpose that fuels you on a daily basis, to have a clear vision of exactly the thing that matters to you, with no confusion about the direction you’re headed in. I’m not sure that anyone truly feels that way every minute of every day, surely even the most self assured people have moments of doubt. I imagine Demis Hassabis wakes up some days and wonders if a certain direction is the right one. In fact it may be the core responsibility of great leaders to constantly be questioning themselves and their vision.

It must be a wonderful thing to have a deep sense of purpose that fuels you, a clear vision of exactly the thing that matters to you.

Clinging to the Craft

So how does someone find meaning and motivation for themselves, beyond the daily grind? For most of my career I was motivated by the tech itself. I spent a lot of time caring about programming languages, frontend frameworks, libraries, code organization, algorithms, and all the other technical details. I wanted to write clean, reusable code that didn’t leave performance on the table without cause. These things are all important, of course, but without being applied to a real problem, it just amounts to a form of mental masturbation.

I actually see a lot of talented engineers get caught up in this same thing. We are engineers, and the thing we do every day is write code, orchestrate services, deploy to prod, etc. These are the invariants, we all need to think about this. If you spend 10 years doing this, and for all of that time you basically don’t give a shit about the software you’re working on, it makes sense that you’ll build a sense of passion around the engineering work itself. I don’t really care about this banking software I’m writing, but I can still care about the quality of my code!

In the absence of something truly motivating to grab onto in the software/job/project, we often cling to the technical details because it’s all that’s left. I think that over time this creates the illusion that this is all there ever was.

As a side note, thank god for open source maintainers. I’ve been really terrible about contributing to open source through my career. I’ve tried a dozen times to ramp up and really dig in and start contributing. Flying spaghetti monster knows I’ve started my own super awesome revolutionary open source project like 30 times in my career. It’s tough to grind the day job and then dig into MORE software in your free time unless that’s the only thing you’re passionate about.

Sometimes I wish I had never gotten into music, or reading/writing so seriously, so that I could hack away all day. It’s really not in me though to spend 15 hours a day writing software. I love software, I love code, I love programming. But I love so many other things just as much, if not more.

Luckily I think music opened my eyes to the idea that you can write software for something you are deeply passionate about, and it feels so much less painful (sometimes, anyways). The early days of working on Fourths Hub were like this.

When I joined Facebook my goal was to work on VR. That didn’t pan out during team selection and I ended up on a team working in CI/CD. Talk about no passion for the problem space.

CI/CD is something I just want to get done; every minute I spend thinking about it is painful time wasted, not working on a real problem. It’s totally cool if someone’s passion is entirely focused on CI/CD, I make no judgement calls about what others find interesting (and of course there are some interesting theoretical problems in the space). I just can’t bring myself to give a shit. In the same way I couldn’t care less about some modal in a banking app, I can’t care about CI/CD. Certainly not for years at a time.

So what do I care about? How do I figure out what matters and where to focus my career? How do I align my day to day work with something meaningful.

When the work itself doesn’t matter to you, you cling to the craft of it instead, and eventually you mistake the craft for the point.

It’s About Science

I think I’ve found the answer. It’s about science, for me. I want to work on things that push real science forward in a meaningful way. Whether that ends up being directly doing science research, or just supporting a team of scientists, I don’t really know.

I had been watching and reading about physics stuff non-stop for years, despite not really having a strong background in physics. I just really enjoyed the subject, especially Quantum Mechanics and some of the spin offs from there. Weirdly I had never cared much about science in school, I had always mostly cared about Math and everything else felt like a distraction.

Of course as I mature it’s the opposite, the Math all feels incidental to the things I really care about (and I care much more deeply about literature than I ever thought possible). A few years ago this realization got me digging back into biology and chemistry in a way that I never had before. It always felt like busy work, but now I read books and research papers about these things for fun, longing for the opportunity to spend my days thinking about them without being distracted by mundane concerns such as modals, CSS, APIs, or AWS cloudwatch logs.

Ironically I may have been closest just before I joined Facebook. I took a job at a place called Citrine Informatics, a company working on materials science. I would have been in the data science and systems side of things, supporting but not really working directly with the scientists. Still though, it would have been adjacent to something that I think actually matters (materials science, climate change, etc.).

The Facebook offer came as a big surprise very early into my tenure there.¹ For various reasons taking the Facebook gig was probably the right move for me at the time, but a part of me does regret not forgoing the draw of prestige and money to work on something I thought was actually important. Of course I was deluded in thinking that I would find meaning at Facebook as well, but it never even came close to materializing for me.

The Novelty Trap

To a degree I wonder if this is just a fault within myself. Some combination of the grass is greener and/or not being able to find meaning in anything. I was recently talking with a friend about gamedev. I find rendering and gamedev extremely interesting and quite fun to work on, at times. However, I think if I was really working on these things full time, day after day, eventually I would find it tiresome.

Maybe it would take 5 years, maybe 1 year, maybe just a month. But I have a feeling that eventually I would wake up and just feel like it was annoying busywork that was constantly pressuring me despite having no real value.

It’s the novelty of rendering that I think holds the real draw. The novelty of a new puzzle to dabble in, a way to step away from work and challenge myself, to think about math and apply it to code in a way that my day to day jobs never challenge me. A way to fuel learning for the sake of fun. These are all great things, but they are nothing to build a lifetime worth of work on.

The Thing I Almost Missed

Of course no blog post in 2026 would be complete without talking about AI. If you’re reading this at all then you know that I’m deeply interested in ML/AI, and this is where I’ve been focused since early 2025. I’m sure a lot of people, like myself, feel foolish for not realizing much earlier how important and impactful this technology would be.

I dabbled in college, making little robots that could complete mazes. But it was nonsense, it was a simple novelty with some path finding algorithms and some glue code for movement. It never felt like there was anything even approaching real intelligence lurking there. I honestly forgot about it entirely.

Auto complete, image categorization, etc. I just assumed these were all deeply involved things where people had baked in a lot of knowledge, the equivalent of giant if-else tables. Never did I imagine that we were right on the edge of something real. It’s insane and honestly to a degree disheartening to look back and realize it was only two years after I graduated with a B.S. in computer science that the transformer was invented. How much could I have learned if I had spent the following decade obsessed with AI and science rather than just myopically focused on the day to day of what was in front of me?

Reading as Fuel

I know now that a big part of my current inspiration has been from reading. I read almost every day, and I strive for somewhere between 1-2 hours. It’s not always sustainable, and I often use this time for reading fiction or take a break from the knowledge grind.

But most of the time I’m reading non fiction. A lot of my reading since 2025 has been focused on ML fundamentals, AI, Math. A large portion has been focused on science. Neuroscience, chemistry, biology, physics. Not to mention philosophy.

I find that these things genuinely motivate me and bring me hope. They make it feel like the grind is worth it, and they help me re-center myself regularly on the things I care about. I really can’t recommend reading enough, it’s a fantastic way to build a regular habit that you can use to motivate yourself and learn continuously.

Looking Beyond the Grind

I think the main point here is that we all have a unique perspective, and therefore unique things that will motivate us and bring us meaning in the long run. I hope that my fellow software engineers will move beyond the miasma of the day to day and try to find something that deeply moves them.

With AI actively encroaching on the world of code, soon certain activities that have captured people’s attention will be essentially outmoded.² Once these things are gone, what remains? Even if AI completely replaces software engineering, there will still be a physical world out there. Physics, chemistry, biology all deeply matter on a fundamental level. The next frontend framework just doesn’t, it’s a fact.

If you find joy in churning the wheel on the next JS library, then feel free by all means. But I plan to look beyond the incidental complexities of software engineering and try to find problems that will stand the test of time. I don’t want to waste any more of my time on random bullshit, to be completely honest.

An Email to Alan Kay

I think I’ll end by sharing a short email chain I had with Alan Kay. Alan is one of my heroes and one of the most inspiring speakers I’ve come across. In fact I think his speeches are part of what got me out of my head and wanting to focus on real problems. To some extent I feel like it’s a pipe dream to try and transition my career to the frontier of AI for Science, but I refuse to let that dictate my choices. I hope you do the same.

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Original email

Hello, Dr. Kay.

I’ve been writing and rewriting this email for weeks. Fair warning: I’m a very average software engineer trying to find a path to the future, and I’m very lost. Feel free to stop reading now.

My name is Ty. I’m a software engineer, or whatever passes for that in 2020, and a mostly unwilling participant in the pop culture of modern computing. I honestly don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. Building business applications is not it.

My first question: is incrementalism really so bad on an individual level? Some of us can’t do any better. Not everyone can be Einstein or a core member of Xerox PARC. Most of us have families, debt, responsibility, hobbies outside software. And everything is run by massive corporations fueled by incrementalism: they copy or acquire anyone who poses a threat. So even if true innovation happened, wouldn’t it just be swallowed by one of the giants? The “Instagram coder” fad has young people believing the end goal is to go work for Facebook or Google on some redundant web technology or data-harvesting service.

Modern engineers seem to fall into two camps: those just chasing a paycheck, complicit in the pop culture, and those who want to do better but lack the energy and guidance to get there. I do have the energy, and I’m in a position where I could influence change, if I had some vision of the future to show people.

And a related question about Smalltalk: what do you make of someone who says they’ve been in love with it and working on it for decades? Isn’t the whole point of innovation over incrementalism to seek the next level, the intersecting plane, not just to keep building on the existing language? Or maybe I still don’t understand Smalltalk.

So my final question is simple: what next? Think of all the energy wasted by people who could be doing something incredible. If you could organize everyone with spare energy into one big project to change the world, what would it be? How would you do it without millions or billions of dollars? And how would you keep the giant corporations from stealing or acquiring the idea? You once said people serious about software should make their own hardware, but I think we may have passed the point where the knowledge required exceeds what any one person can reasonably manage.

Alan’s response

Hi Tyler

Yes, I do think the general situation in computing is worse than it was — IBM and other large companies back then were very similar to how things are now, but (a) the field was smaller, and (b) there was a small amount of really good funding for “much much better”.

The big project that needs to be done above pretty much all others is a concerted large scale effort on the climate crisis. As with almost any crisis that isn’t out and out war, most people can’t see the problems or don’t want to.

If you’ve seen some of my talks, you will probably have seen a section on “our species has lots of ‘coping’ genes but essentially no ‘progress’ genes”. This is also a simple way to look at the large problem in computing and especially software.

If disasters (of any kind) can be postponed a bit by patching, how will a society — whether in the large or in a company — be able to decide to put forth a major effort to actually fix things before a large collapse?

Most things that have had an effect have been “under wraps skunkworks kind of projects” that are only revealed after they work and the powers that be can see an advantage for themselves. This has worked a number of times for both HW and SW, even in vendors (for example the IBM 1401 — which made their company in the transition to computers in the late 50s — was an outlaw backroom project). Even the Xerox Parc Alto had to start as a secret project …

One of the biggest problems with regard to SW in large companies is that they rarely try to have a company wide architecture to organize both their legacy and new systems. This can be done pretty secretly while the rest of the world is going on, and there are good principles that can be used. It is more than a one person project, but 5 or so people working part time can do something like this.

Best wishes

Alan

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I didn’t lead him there, but he answered my “what next” by pointing straight at science and the climate crisis, and naming our refusal to fix things before they collapse as the core human failure. That’s the same coping-over-progress trap I’d been describing in myself, just scaled to the whole species.

Footnotes

1. A weird delay between interview loops. I had assumed I wouldn’t hear back at that point, well before I took the job at Citrine. ↩

2. A bit cryptic, I know. I think you get what I’m saying. ↩