I wish more engineers thought this way. As someone who works in infrastructure it’s the story I tell myself to justify/rationalize my place in the world. When I ship big infrastructure performance improvements it’s not about the speed or money saved per se, it’s less CO2 in the atmosphere and more human life (amortized over millions of people) spent on something other than waiting for a computer to respond.

We aren’t doctors saving individuals’ lives but what we can do is give people fractions of their lives back. Some software is used by hundreds of millions or billions of people, so small changes there can save many “lives” worth of time.