One of the deepest tensions in my professional life has been the gap between what is valuable and what is visible. Few fields embody that tension more sharply than software and technology, where immense effort, skill, and intelligence often produce outcomes that are powerful yet largely invisible. I know that code runs banks, hospitals, logistics systems, communication platforms, and the infrastructure of everyday life, but because it cannot be held in the hand or displayed on a skyline, it is often treated as less real than the work of building something physical. That tension becomes even more charged when viewed through the eyes of an older generation shaped by industries in which labor announced itself in steel, concrete, machinery, and scale.
My father’s skepticism that software is not “real engineering” has always represented more than a personal opinion; for me, it reflects an entire worldview about legitimacy, usefulness, and permanence. In that worldview, engineering is something you can point to: a bridge that carries traffic, a dam that redirects force, a machine that occupies space and performs a visible function. Its authority comes from physical proof. By contrast, software appears abstract, weightless, and elusive. It lives behind screens, disappears into interfaces, and performs its labor silently. To someone trained to respect what can be measured in material terms, software can seem strangely insubstantial, even when it powers the very systems on which modern life depends.
This is where the conflict becomes psychological, not merely professional. For me, the desire to create something tangible has not simply been entrepreneurial curiosity. It has often been a longing for validation. A physical object seems capable of settling an argument that digital labor never quite resolves. A product on a shelf, a package in someone’s hand, a storefront, a machine, even something as modest as a handmade candle or a bag of herbs can feel more defensible than years spent designing systems no one sees. Tangibility becomes a form of evidence: proof that my labor exists, that I have made something real, that my work cannot be dismissed as invisible manipulation of symbols.
Yet this longing reveals a paradox at the heart of my life in technology. Software is among the most materially consequential forms of labor in the modern world. It shapes economies, mediates relationships, organizes governments, distributes resources, and increasingly structures human attention itself. It may not leave behind a monument in the traditional sense, but its effects are everywhere. The invisibility of software is not evidence of triviality; it is often evidence of integration. The more seamlessly software functions, the less visible it becomes. Its success lies in disappearing into the background of ordinary life.
And still, the emotional force of my father’s criticism persists because I do not live by logic alone. I live, as most people do, by symbols, inheritance, and the standards that formed me before I had language to resist them. Because I grew up hearing that real work must be concrete, measurable, and externally legible, even significant digital success has sometimes felt strangely hollow. No promotion, salary, or corporate prestige fully quiets the suspicion that I have built a life on abstractions. In that sense, my hunger for tangible creation has been an attempt to bridge two incompatible systems of value: the contemporary economy, which rewards scale, information, and code, and the older moral imagination, which equates worth with what can be touched.
What makes this tension so compelling to me is that it is not only about my father and me, or about tradition and modernity. It points to a broader crisis in how I understand work itself. In knowledge economies, much of the most important labor is intangible: analysis, design, strategy, care, coordination, writing, modeling, programming. These forms of work can be intellectually rigorous and socially indispensable, yet they remain vulnerable to dismissal because they do not produce a visible artifact. The result is a deep and often unspoken insecurity among people like me, whose work is real in every meaningful sense except the symbolic one.
To long for tangible creation, then, is not necessarily to reject technology. For me, it has often been a desire to reconnect labor with embodiment, process with presence, and effort with visible consequence. It is a yearning to make meaning in a form that can be witnessed without explanation. But perhaps the deeper resolution lies not in abandoning software for physical products, but in expanding my idea of what counts as real. Engineering is not made legitimate by concrete alone. It is made legitimate by problem-solving, precision, imagination, and usefulness. A bridge and a distributed system are not opposites; they are expressions of the same human impulse to build structures that help others cross from one point to another.
My father’s skepticism, then, exposes an old question inside a new economy: if a thing cannot be touched, can it still carry weight? I believe the answer, increasingly, is yes. But the emotional difficulty of accepting that answer explains why I, and so many people in tech, continue to crave the handmade, the physical, and the visibly constructed. We are not merely seeking a new hobby or a side business. We are searching for a form of creation that feels undeniable. In that search lies both the wound and the wisdom of modern work.
Listen to the full episode on the Diary of Cliches Podcast!
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