Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

Interesting technical problems are boring compared to meaningful problems - but there's hardly the money to improve society. Instead we get to put together software that shuffles money around or does the same thing as something else with some integration or blows up people in the middle east because that's what makes money.

At one of my previous jobs, "my customers" were the managers of some company who asked managers of the company I worked in to deliver some software that will be sold as a part of a software package, to be used by someone downstream. I don't know who ended up using my work and how, because we were isolated by several abstraction layers from that. I did care about the happiness of those people, little I knew about them. But I couldn't care less about the happiness of our customers - a company I didn't hold in high regard, with managers not being particularly helpful. I suppose I did get some small sense of satisfaction when their managers told my managers that the work is good. But that was it.

So, are we talking about happiness of customers, or happiness of people actually using the product? Those are very often different groups. Or, in other words, are we talking about finding happiness in generalized servitude, or making people's lives better?

I'm also working on an open source programming assistant to help automate that kind of joyless work so developers can focus on the novel parts of their projects. Hoping it helps people like you get back to what you value. https://github.com/opticdev

It's not that I don't care about my current job or that I don't do it well. It just doesn't involve anything even remotely interesting technically or socially. I work for a company that makes money. That's it. And I'm quite happy with that. I show up in the morning, do my job, and go home.

I don't have a wife or a family, but I do have me to take care of. And after years of neglecting myself physically and mentally, I'm taking the time to get some balance in my life. Get some exercise, spend more time with relatives and friends, more time with my girlfriend, and develop some of my own pet projects (both technical and musical) that I've been putting off for a long time.

You don't need an excuse to have a boring job that leaves you with extra time on your hands. It doesn't have to be because of a wife or husband or kids or a sick parent or anything. Taking care of yourself is a good enough reason to pull over into a slower lane or enjoy the one you're in now.

Most people are not really doing anything that interesting in the technology world. Many people who think they are doing interesting things are just hyped. The vast majority of the world's problems that can be solved by tech, have been solved. The only thing that's left is to implement them, and that's not super exciting a lot of the time.

If you feel the need to do more, you're going to find that need best met on your own or with a small group of friends working on projects. Most likely not at work.

I've also worked in situations you've described. My only interaction with the end user is through layers of middle management. I found that environment to be extremely demotivating and certainly no direct sense of satisfaction. One of the small benefits of being a Data Scientist right now is that a lot of managers don't really understand what it is I do so I get some interaction with the end-user from a requirements and solution validation standpoint. But I suspect in a few years Data Scientists will become invisible cogs (like everybody else) in the Enterprise IT machine.