3-2-1 Impact!
You need to strive to have good impact, but as a software developer in industry you will have impact. It will be felt by hundreds or thousdands or millions of people. It is a scary thought. Going to college, I had never written a program that more than a few other people would use and none whose code would be read and maintained by others. I suspect that is the case for most students graduating college who have no industry experience yet. The first time you realize you are writing code that many people will depend upon can be a bit daunting.
As an example, the first month I started my job at Microsoft I made a change to PowerPoint. I made the change and went on with work. It wasn't until we got close to shipping Beta 1 of Office 12 that I realized that all of a sudden many people were going to be using the code I had just written. Considering past projects where I was the only user or the smaller scope of projects I worked on as an intern, this was a huge change. At some point we discovered a certain situation in which the code misbehaved and crashed. For a while I panicked, could I have just ruined the product thanks to my inexperience?
Fortunately, the world kept spinning and the bug was very hard to come across. My need to have everything fixed and be perfect was replaced by the realization that bugs are an inevitable and unavoidable part of writing software. You rely on good software quality processes so that you spend time on the real important issues and less on the obscure, infrequent and easily avoidable bugs. (And plus it was the first beta, a small amount of instability was expected).
Once Beta 1 shipped I was able to immediately see the impact of my code on people. Screenshots of my feature showed up on the Internet, I read feedback on what people loved and hated about it, I heard how this was making a difference in how people did work.
To me that's the thrill of the software industry, impact. I sat down at a keyboard, made a change to a textual file and within seconds affected the trillion executions that function will receive over the next 10 years. What other industry has that kind of impact?
