Lately I’ve been having some serious set downs at my work, a certain chain of small and unfortunate events of the kind that really leaves you totally without any steam or motivation.

A small prelude:

I consider myself a very motivated person who puts a lot of effort and time into my professional life, and in most cases I enjoy giving more than is expected.

I started as a technical support in the company I work in, and thanks to the open minded people at my company, I moved up to R&D after a while, which in my mind was totally amazing.

Finally a chance to not only to do programming patches and “make it work”  fixes for customers, I now had the chance of not only writing software, but to do that for the users I personally knew, could enjoy and find useful.

The projects I worked with were a joy for me, as they allowed me to improve applications that I’ve been using before for a rather long while. Furthermore, I was involved with creating new applications that solved problems that I used to solve for customers. As a special treat I was able to add features dedicated to support, solving and helping to solve the daily problems that usually arises and tackles our great support crew.

Again, a really positive thing for me. Especially seeing the software in use.

Not all went perfect, the were quite a few bugs and set backs, but it was a very good experience for me, and hopefully for the software users as well.

Whoa, that was a long prelude!

Anyhow, lately all my efforts to give more have kind of backfired at me.

Lot’s of what I had planned (and often also implemented) were cancelled over and over again.

Each time it bothered me a bit, but I kept trying to get the most of the situation, and as I usually do, and see the bright side of things.

For some reason today something simply broke.

I had a small argument about a certain small feature that I thought was worth having to improve the user experience, which in my mind could be implemented in a matter of minutes.

I got a negative response, and although I tried to explain what I thought was a simple as__can be solution, I kept getting negative answers.

It was something I simply couldn’t understand, why not improve something when you have the chance to do that? I do understand time constrains and risk managements, but I simply couldn’t get it with this case due to the simplicity of the matter.

For some reason it totally got to me. it sort of pissed me off in a way that caused all the latest set backs to come back to my mind again.

I started thinking if it’s really worth it, all this effort and “do good wanting”, perhaps it’s simply something naive about me that will change as I get more experience.

Should I just become a bolt small in the system? Do only as I’ve been told? Where’s the joy in that?

Will the people that don’t use the software really be able to design something that the actual users will find useful? Is it really my place to question things like that?

Anyhow, to summarize things:

I still think it’s worth it to invest that extra time to make things better, and although I might rant about it and write #bah tweets (and way too long posts as this),

Getting crappy feelings about set backs is really nothing compared to the feeling when someone that actually uses the software tells you it’s a joy to use it.