Most things we do are a little pointless in the end.  In the long run, the universe will cool to uniformly distributed inert matter, and all of our efforts will scarcely affect the distribution.<p>I currently work at big company X doing cutting edge work on the latest rewrite of big system Y, used by millions of people each day.  In five years, the next rewrite will begin, and probably within ten years every last line of code I&#x27;ve written will be deprecated and deleted.