I’ve been struggling with something for a while now and ironically a sitcom from the 80’s finally helped me pinpoint the problem. My TV was on for background noise and I noticed that it was an episode of Family Ties. In the episode, Elyse Keaton was having a problem. A prominent building that she designed was being torn down and replaced by a cookie cutter mini-mall. She was struggling with her “legacy” - her mark on the world - disappearing. After the building was gone, what evidence would there be that Elyse Keaton was there?
I’m facing a similar issue. I don’t like getting into my day job too much online (for various reasons), but suffice it to say that applications that I developed for decades are being sunset/replaced. I’ve developed quite a lot over the decades, but eventually it would all be replaced. Once it is, what will I have as “proof that TechyDad was here”?
How do you handle the existential crisis of our works being digital and transient versus having an actual, physical product?
How did your contributions impact the world? I’m not talking about Wikipedia worthy projects or products. If you didn’t do what you did, how would the world be different? Let’s say you worked on data validation tools in tax software for the IRS. Maybe you prevented thousands of people from the stress and struggle of bogus audits. Or maybe you worked on compilers for a defunct architecture, and your optimizer saved billions of watt-hours of energy in wasted cycles over the years
I can look back at my career and point to moments where I’ve made a small dent in the history of the technologies I worked with, yet my name isn’t attached to any. I’ve also worked on personal projects that are mostly defunct but had thousands of users in their heyday, but because I used a handle for many of them (for reasons) the people who might remember what I did will never know my name when I’m gone.
I’m good with knowing I made some sort of difference without being personally remembered. But that’s just me, and I think it’s important to recognize the ways you want to be recognized.
With that said, name recognition on for-pay work is rare. You’re probably out of luck getting that recognition for your previous work, but there are things you can do now. If you have personal projects, post them on GitHub and advertise them on relevant forums. If you don’t, consider contributing to an OSS project. With Github’s Arctic vault program, your PRs to a major project may outlive humanity. If you don’t want to work on personal projects at all, consider finding a job where you can be paid to contribute to OSS, or ask your employer if you can spend 20% time giving back to libraries your company depends on.
My contributions definitely had an impact, but it was more local than global. Like I said in my post, I don’t like talking about my day job online, but over the years thousands of people have used the applications that I’ve written. I’ve had many people compliment me saying that the applications helped them out. (As a side note, I wish my Imposter Syndrome would remember those praises when it tries to tell me that I don’t know what I’m doing.)
I guess it’s just hard to see a lot of the things that you’ve worked so hard on over years being taken down one after another.