The Case for Caring in Tech

It’s easy to become apathetic when working in tech.

In a start-up environment, things are always urgent, always high priority, always an emergency. As you can imagine, that mindset can be grating. Eventually you realize that if everything is an emergency, nothing is.

However, there is a balance between that apathy and caring for the craft. It comes with having a healthy work-life balance, and it isn’t easy, but one of the most important things you can do in the tech industry - in any industry - is to set boundaries. When managers and individual contributors can align on that, it makes for a wonderful work environment. It allows for things like caring.

You can care for yourself.

You can care for your fellow coworker.

You can care for your manager.

And you can care for the code that you write.

When you take a second to really think about what you’re writing, and whether you’re proud of the solution you’ve come up with, then you have a stake in the process that no amount of team happy hours and pizza parties can equate to. It won’t always be like that. Sometimes you really do need something quick and dirty. But it can make a world of difference when you care about what you write.

I like to think of it in terms of caring for your future self.

In three months, when I’m revisiting some code, trying to hunt down a bug, what do I want to see? Do I want to see some unreadable garbage, with variable names like i and var, or do I want to be able read my work like I would a book?

Will my future self be having a good day? Will they be overworked, feeling the heat of a deadline? Will this code just make them more upset as they try to untangle it?

I want to care for my future self like I would for a loved one. With empathy.

If you’ve ever read code written by a coworker and struggled to understand what it did, then you might understand where I’m coming from. Doubly so if you’ve made the realization halfway through that it’s code that you wrote. It’s happened to me plenty of times.

Just as the code you write impacts your future self, it also impacts every single person that comes after you. That if-statement you’re writing might last longer than your tenure at the company. So write it like you won’t be there to explain it.

Write it like you care.