48 yo here, started coding when I was 14, so that's 34 years of building things.
Here's where I'm at.
I look back at my career and I can tell you about great projects that I got to be part of, awards and plaudits that I won, big paybacks from projects that went well and literally saved the company. That's all nice to have war stories.
But I can't point to any of it and say, "I made that" because - and here's the kicker - it's all gone.
Software is ephemeral. One day your client does an upgrade, and then the thing that you spent years building and curating like a baby disappears. It isn't mothballed and put in the basement where visitors can walk by and see it. There's no photo of you standing by the thing that you can hang in the hallway and see every day. Your creation just completely vanishes without a trace.
All those years I've also been a musician and recording engineer. I've made a few dozen records none of which amount to anything that anyone else would care about. And all told I'm sure that I earned more money in one year of my IT work than my entire music career.
However, here is a collection of my work that I can point to and say, "I made that." It's a creation that I can reflect on years and years down the road.
I take much more satisfaction in my musical creations than from my software creations, even though I was much more famous and valued as a software architect.
Torvalds, 46, can point to Linux and say "I made that, over half a lifetime ago".
Stallman, 63, can point to GNU Emacs or GCC and say "I made that in the 1980's". Not necessarily the most recent version of it, but that hardly matters.
Gerald Sussman and Guy Steele can point to Scheme and say, "we made that".
John MacCarthy was able to point to Lisp and say "I made that", right to the day he died and we can continue to say it for him.
Make the right stuff; then you can bask in it for longer and be a kind of living saint to a few generations after you.
That's like saying da Vinci is representative of artists or Prince is representative of musicians. The average person who doesn't achieve software legend status will see their creations vanish as the previous commenter described.
I've worked in this industry for a long time as well, but I'm not someone you've heard of. I too have built some very cool things that I'm proud of, a number of which no longer exist. Meanwhile, a shed that I built myself 30 years ago still stands, and I can still point to that and say I made it.
If you make something when you're 20, and just keep maintaining it until you die at the TTY prompt at 85, then all your life you were able to point to it and say "I made that (and am still making it better)". This is the case even if that work isn't well known. Perhaps nobody else will point to it for you after you're gone, but while you are here, you can say that.
Things you hacked up in the past are gone because they solved a narrowly defined problem which no longer exists, and even before that happened, you already abandoned those programs.
That this happens is almost inevitable, as part of making a living. All those programming DaVinci's who are known for something also worked on lots of things that are now dust.
Why are you concerned about longevity of your creations? Surely impact matters more than the time they exist? Your software might only last a few years, but it it's used thousands of times, that changes the world more than another record heard a few times per year but lasts decades.
Nope, it'll live on and the code will be available for all to see and study which means it'll end up being a case study or research material in a textbook or Masters or Phd thesis.
One day someone may try to make an emulator for IE5 and ES4 just to run jQuery (like we've seen done with the 6502 and C64).
That can indeed be part of a legacy, but many companies are not comfortable with open sourcing their proprietary software. A lot of exciting work happens in that space as well.
I'm 46, and I totally get this. My other thing is I'm a painter (though I make all my money from software).
I imagine when I kick the bucket all my software will be long gone, but I will leave a bunch of artwork that will survive for anything from days to centuries, mostly on its own merits.
I also took up painting. 10 years of writing software and most of it is was replaced, deleted. Weekends of learning a new tech that is obsolete in 5 years are gone too.
On the other hand my paintings will stay forever on my walls and my children's walls.
Impermanence. Everything goes away. As software developers we often just get to see the whole lifespan of a project more often. Not many other professions get the privilege of building something from nothing, watching it grow and change, then get to slowly pull it down and retire it.
I like this aspect of software development. I've not seen the permanence and ephemeral aspects of things so cleanly expressed in any other field. The fundamentals don't change but the software artifacts expressing those fundamentals do. Not sure why I enjoy that dichotomy but it tickles my brain the right way.
Here's where I'm at.
I look back at my career and I can tell you about great projects that I got to be part of, awards and plaudits that I won, big paybacks from projects that went well and literally saved the company. That's all nice to have war stories.
But I can't point to any of it and say, "I made that" because - and here's the kicker - it's all gone.
Software is ephemeral. One day your client does an upgrade, and then the thing that you spent years building and curating like a baby disappears. It isn't mothballed and put in the basement where visitors can walk by and see it. There's no photo of you standing by the thing that you can hang in the hallway and see every day. Your creation just completely vanishes without a trace.
All those years I've also been a musician and recording engineer. I've made a few dozen records none of which amount to anything that anyone else would care about. And all told I'm sure that I earned more money in one year of my IT work than my entire music career.
However, here is a collection of my work that I can point to and say, "I made that." It's a creation that I can reflect on years and years down the road.
I take much more satisfaction in my musical creations than from my software creations, even though I was much more famous and valued as a software architect.