Your Best Work Will Be Ignored
That's the Best Thing That Could Happen
You spend three weeks building something you’re genuinely proud of. Clean architecture. Well-tested code. Solves a real problem that’s been bugging you for months. You put it out there, expecting... something. Anything.
Crickets.
Meanwhile, some quick hack that barely works, the kind of code that makes you cringe when you look at it, goes viral. Suddenly everyone’s sharing it, praising it, acting like it’s the second coming of clean code principles. And you’re sitting there wondering what the hell just happened.
Yeah. That stings.
The Algorithm Doesn’t Care About Your Craft
Recognition has almost nothing to do with quality. Sometimes it’s timing. Sometimes it’s presentation. Sometimes it’s pure dumb luck that the algorithm gods smiled on someone else’s post and ignored yours. You can do everything right: write beautiful code, document it thoroughly, solve real problems. and still get completely overlooked.
The Stoics understood this about two thousand years ago. Marcus Aurelius spent his time reminding himself that external validation was meaningless. If anyone should have been swimming in recognition, it was him. But he knew something we keep forgetting: the world’s opinion of your work says absolutely nothing about its actual value.
And look, I get it. We’re developers in 2025. We’ve been conditioned to measure success in stars, likes, followers, and engagement metrics. The dopamine hit when someone shares your work feels amazing. The silence when nobody notices feels like failure. But that’s the trap, isn’t it? We’re letting an algorithm, a literal piece of code that doesn’t give a shit about craftsmanship, define whether our work matters.
When Great Work Goes Unnoticed
Think about the production systems running quietly in the background right now. The ones that haven’t gone down in three years. The carefully refactored codebases that make future development ten times easier. The elegant solutions to complex problems that nobody outside your team will ever see.
That’s the work that actually matters. But it doesn’t get retweeted.
I remember launching a website for a major pharmaceutical company once. Months of work. Dealing with compliance requirements, accessibility standards, performance optimization. The thing was solid. Fast, accessible, maintainable. We hit every deadline, stayed under budget, built something that just worked. Know how many people outside the project team noticed or cared? Zero. Know how I felt about it? Fucking proud. Because I knew that site was going to serve millions of users without breaking, and the next dev team wouldn’t curse my name when they had to maintain it.
That’s what the Stoics meant by focusing on what you control. Epictetus broke it down pretty simply: you control your effort, your choices, your standards. You don’t control whether anyone notices or cares. And when you tie your sense of accomplishment to things you don’t control, you’re setting yourself up for constant disappointment.
Your Internal Scorecard
So here’s the reframe: build for an audience of one first. You.
Did you learn something new? Did you solve a problem that was bothering you? Did you write code you can look at in six months without wanting to delete your GitHub account? Those are the questions that matter.
This isn’t about being a hermit who doesn’t care about feedback. Good feedback is valuable. Collaboration makes us better. But there’s a massive difference between seeking constructive input and needing external validation to feel like your work was worthwhile.
Seneca put it this way: “If you live in harmony with nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.” In developer terms: if you measure success by your own growth and craft, you’ll always be moving forward. If you measure it by likes and stars, you’ll always be chasing something you can’t control.
The Satisfaction of Craft
When you stop worrying about recognition and start focusing on craft, the work itself becomes the reward.
That moment when you finally understand a complex pattern you’ve been wrestling with? That’s yours. The satisfaction of a clean refactor that cuts 200 lines of code down to 50 without losing functionality? That’s yours. Fixing that bug that’s been haunting production for weeks? That’s yours.
These are the private wins that nobody follows you for. No one’s going to give you an award for finally grokking how async/await actually works under the hood. But that knowledge? That skill you developed? That’s permanent. That’s growth. That’s real.
And honestly, that stuff is more fulfilling than any viral post. Because it’s intrinsic. It doesn’t depend on whether the algorithm likes you today. It doesn’t evaporate when the next shiny thing comes along. It’s yours, and it makes you better at what you do.
Building Resilience Against Indifference
The world is mostly going to ignore your work. There are millions of developers out there, all building things, all hoping someone notices. Most of it fades into the background noise of the internet.
And that’s okay.
Marcus Aurelius used to remind himself that he’d be forgotten. The emperor of Rome, and he knew his accomplishments would eventually mean nothing to anyone. So he focused on living according to his principles, doing good work for its own sake, not for legacy or recognition.
We can take the same approach. Do the work because it’s worth doing. Build things that solve real problems. Write code you’re proud of. Learn and grow and get better at your craft. If recognition comes, great. If it doesn’t, that’s fine too. Because the work itself was the point.
This takes practice. The first few times you ship something and nobody cares, it’s going to sting. That’s normal. But over time, you build resilience. You start to separate outcome from self-worth. Low engagement doesn’t mean bad work. High engagement doesn’t validate quality. They’re just noise.
The question becomes: regardless of who’s watching, is this making me better?
The Bottom Line
The only person who needs to care about your work is you. If you’re not fulfilled by what you’re building, that’s the real problem that needs addressing. Not the lack of stars. Not the missing followers. The disconnect between what you’re doing and what actually matters to you.
But if you’re building things you’re proud of? If you’re learning and growing and getting better at your craft? If you can look at your work and think “yeah, that’s solid” regardless of who else notices?
Then you’re doing it right.
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