Ask HN: Is it just me or do 99% of SWE jobs offers seem completely pointless?

Unexplained labor still exists deep in the Amazon and elsewhere, but mining companies finding new traces of valuable minerals are extinguishing the last of the old free way.

Not only are many (most?) of SWE jobs quite questionable in their value, but they are also very inefficient in my experience, at least in bigger organizations. So you're not only dealing with the dissatisfaction of doing something that's pretty meh (at best), but also with the boredom of being super inefficient and knowing you could do so much more with your time.

Of course, we're all free to leave and do something else. But it's not easy to go against the current.

> People who work 8 hours a day, mostly for a paycheck, how do you cope without wanting to off yourself?

1. Living isn't free. Unless you own and operate your own farm, someone right now is doing work to make it possible for you and I to live. Cavemen since the dawn of time had to forage and fight to survive. (I regard millionaires and the like as exceptions to the rule, most of us don't have access to the factors that enable someone to become a millionaire.)

2. Work will set you free. Or rather, freedom is an illusion. You're constrained by society, nature, etc. no matter what you do. Not having the responsibility to work every day doesn't make you more free or your life more meaningful. Alternatively, money gives you a lot more options and choices.

3. You should want to live your best possible life, and working towards that requires effort. Nobody really wants to work for someone other than themselves, but building your own revenue streams is hard so trading labor is a decent compromise. Money is a means to an end.

4. Work is an outlet for you to feel useful. You may regard a given job as pointless, but someone is paying for it. Someone values you and your labor. It's nice to be payed and praised for it.

5. It's not all about work. It's possible to earn and still have a life you enjoy outside of that. Cultivating that balance takes effort.

6. We have it _really_ good compared to the other 99% of the labor market. My GF works in corporate law, which is a particularly nasty counter example. She earns about 10% more than me, but puts in about 60% more hours than I do. In fact, she's on her computer working right now.

7. Some amount of suffering in life is unavoidable. Working is hard, but so is being unemployed. Pain avoidance is a tough bias to overcome. Making peace with the inevitable gives some strength in facing it.

> People who have really great jobs(not talking about money ofc), how did you find them?

I said how I consider my current job boring + pointless.. but it's a hell of a lot better than my last job, and the job before that.

Big things start small.

As an example, think about Coke vs Pepsi vs everybody else who makes a cola. The products are very stable and basically equivalent. So billions get spent on manipulating customers. That means plenty of opportunity to create tools that aid in that manipulation. (Which is already an ethical grey zone, so it's no shock that people will go further.)

To me, and I'd imagine to you, this is absurdly pointless and wasteful. I'd be perfectly happy to ban most advertising, freeing up hundreds of billions per year, plus untold amounts of human time and attention. But for people who just want to make money, they seem willing to look past the vast waste.

I think the solution is to find work in areas beyond the markets where a few dominant companies are engaged in trench warfare over customers for stagnant, good-enough products.