Finding Your Southern Cross: More Important Than Effort Is Knowing Why and for Whom You Strive

That day, I closed another ticket in Jira.

The PR was reviewed, the deployment succeeded, and there were no alerts in production. The project was on track, yet I felt no sense of accomplishment. Not even the satisfaction of "getting something done."

I stared blankly at the screen, my mind circling one question:

After all this effort, what is it for?

I suddenly realized that what I felt wasn't so much exhaustion as a loss of direction.

The Southern Cross Is Not a Destination, but a Sense of Direction

We were always taught to set goals, to be more ambitious, to climb the ladder, to have greater impact. But sometimes what really holds us back isn't the absence of goals—it's having too many goals, scattered in too many directions, until we no longer know what truly matters.

Eventually, I came to understand this:

The Southern Cross is not the endpoint you're heading toward. It's the light that helps you find your bearings when you're lost in the dark.

It may not be concrete, and it won't appear in your KPIs or promotion doc. But it lets you know, when you're making a decision, which path comes closer to what you believe in.

My Southern Cross is this sentence:

I have always believed that my Southern Cross is not a cooler architecture or higher performance, but making it easier for everyone who uses our product to accomplish what they truly want to do.

I didn't figure this out from the start. It settled in gradually, through rewriting documentation again and again, tweaking button labels, and debugging strange scenarios for users.

The Road to the Southern Cross Is Never Straight

In my first few years in the industry, I cared a lot about showing off my technical skills. Drawing lines on architecture diagrams, instantly answering low-level questions in group chats, writing code that "crushes high-concurrency interview questions"—these things made me feel valuable.

Until one day, a colleague from operations came to me and said he wanted to use our newly launched feature for a campaign, but "nothing happens no matter where I click."

I was a bit annoyed. "Did you refresh? What browser version are you using? I tested everything on my end."

He paused, then said nothing.

Later, I tried it myself and realized the feature was indeed too convoluted. Even I clicked the wrong thing three times.

At that moment, I felt deeply ashamed.

The technology wasn't wrong, but it didn't help anyone.

That was the first time I seriously asked myself: If technology only makes technical people feel superior, while leaving users confused, helpless, and failing, then who am I writing code for?

When You Have No Goal, Just Get Moving

There was a period when I was extremely anxious. Friends around me were transitioning to product management or diving into AI, and everyone kept talking about "finding your North Star."

But I wasn't interested in many directions. I'm not the kind of person with a strong "sense of mission."

At the time, I even doubted whether I was too mediocre to have an "ideal."

But now I want to say:

A vision is not an ideal reserved for the chosen few. It's a direction we create through our choices, one after another.

Like the Southern Cross, it doesn't shine the brightest or the biggest. But as long as you care about it and walk toward it, it will always be there.

So if you don't have a clear direction right now, don't rush to label yourself as "lost." Instead, look back: What have you done that made it genuinely easier for someone else to accomplish something?

That might be your own Southern Cross shining.

But a vision doesn't come as a sudden revelation. Its more common enemy isn't "not having one"—it's thinking you have one when it was actually given to you by someone else.

We can all fall into the trap of a "fake vision."

For a while, I envied the tech gurus on LinkedIn—young principal engineers who talk about architecture and vision, and every sentence sounds profound. After reading enough of their posts, I felt tempted: "Maybe I should push myself in that direction too?"

But when I thought about it carefully, I wasn't actually interested in what they did. I couldn't even finish reading their articles.

I only thought it was right because everyone else was liking it.

Social media shapes the person you want others to envy, not necessarily the person you truly want to become.

Some companies also talk big about "customer first" and "improving the world," making you feel at first that you're doing something meaningful.

But later you realize that slogans are just slogans, and the actual practices may be completely different. Sometimes, what you thought was your vision is actually the company's default "loyalty narrative" that you're expected to perform.

At that point, there's only one criterion:

Are you becoming more like the person who says, "I want to make this happen," or more like the person who says, "I have to convince myself to believe in this"?

A vision can't be forced through persuasion. It can only be walked into existence, step by step.

When You Feel Discouraged, Find Another Way to Keep Moving Closer

There were many times when I felt I had walked a long way without getting stronger, or done a lot without being seen. Especially when doing "invisible" optimization work, writing documentation that "only you can write," or patiently helping new colleagues get used to the system.

But later I started recording a small thing:

Whenever a colleague says, "Your design really helped a lot," I quietly note it down.

It's not praise—it's confirmation that I truly met a need and helped someone.

These pieces of feedback are like the Southern Cross still shining when you can't see the whole starry sky at night.

When you lose confidence, it reminds you: Don't be afraid of walking slowly, as long as you haven't strayed from your direction.

In Closing:

Sometimes, the reason technical people need a vision isn't that we lack value, but that we're too easily led astray by metrics that "look stronger."

A vision is a reminder.

It reminds us: Code isn't meant to be more complex, but to make things simpler for people; Documentation isn't meant to be thicker, but to help the right people understand faster; Every change, every release—the endpoint isn't us, it's them.

Your vision doesn't have to be grand, sweeping, or unique.

As long as it's something you truly believe in—even if it's just "wanting to make it easier for others to accomplish something"—that is your Southern Cross.

And as long as you keep moving toward it, you will never truly be lost.

At what moment did you feel, "This is what I want to do"?

Together, let's turn those invisible directions into lights we can recognize in each other.

Next, I'll be expanding on this with a series using the "4D Framework," including:

How to reverse-engineer your true vision from everyday complaints (Discover)
Why an engineer's epitaph should never read "Proficient in Java" (Define)
What to do when your code is perfect but users are still angry (Debug)