Ashish KothariMake flourishing your competitive edge

We Must End Suffering at Work | Fixing #workplaceculture #mentalhealth #suffering #broken

26 May 2025 · 1 min

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1:16

A single-speaker excerpt in which the speaker describes personal unhappiness working in the software industry, recognizing that suffering is endemic across the field, and calling for ending suffering for workers, clients who pay for software, and end users. The speaker frames the ultimate goal as restoring joy to the profession of software design and development.

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When those people get frustrated, it actually steals a piece of our heart every single time. And eventually it becomes a job and a paycheck. And I was never wired like that. So there was a period of my career that was literally unhappy. And by my mid-30s, I wanted out. And my inner optimist kicked in. Because when I looked around, I found out it wasn't just me. It wasn't just the company I was working for. It was endemic to the whole industry. And so I thought, when there's endemic problems, there are great opportunities. We're very specific about this. We want to end suffering for the people who do the work. We want to end suffering for the people who pay for the work. And ultimately our highest goal is to end the suffering of the people who ultimately use the work. And if they're frustrated every single day, we have failed. What's the goal? And the goal is joy. The goal is to return joy to this wonderful profession of designing and developing software for other humans.