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Ask HN: How do I find meaningful work?

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Ask HN: How do I find meaningful work?

#1

Post by throwawaybs »

I look around and I feel like all the startups are either bullshit or making the world worse off. I've been a software engineer and data scientist. I've worked with machine learning. What should I do next?

I'm sick of working with advertising-based businesses because I believe advertising is convincing people to buy useless shit. I don't want to work in health, because the government and insurance have fucked up the healthcare system, and I don't want to be part of it. I kinda like fin-tech, but it seems at the end of the day about make rich people richer and/or getting poor people to pollute more. I've thought about heading more towards pure research, but I want to know I'm doing something for a good purpose.

I'm also totally sick of the ideological crap at lots of startups. I don't want to have to drink the kool-aid. Neither do I want to work for some large corporate machine.

I want there to be real values behind what I'm working on that I can believe in. Despite claims to contrary, I find the entire business culture rotten to the core. What should I do?

Re: Ask HN: How do I find meaningful work?

#3

Post by Top19 »

One suggestion might be to just work 35 hours a week at a business you find “passable”. The other 35 hours can be dedicated to something that really makes a difference. In fact it’s really hard to find a job that does serious good. Good agencies throughout the world are so low on funds they need volunteers, not workers for the time being.

Since you hate advertising, a not-immediately similar path might be anti-corruption. These guys advertised for help from data scientists a while ago on HN: https://www.occrp.org/

Also Open-EMR, which is a free end-end software for hospitals is also an option. By implementing this software, hospitals save immediately $1 M+ compared to systems like Center or Epic, it’s almost comical. There are lots of statistical packages, so your help could be useful there: www.opem-emr.org

Re: Ask HN: How do I find meaningful work?

#4

Post by sebg »

1) Go to your local job board. Here in the us, I recommend indeed.com or https://angel.co/jobs

2) For your local and particular interest get a list of potential jobs

3) Do a pairwise comparison between first two jobs. For these two jobs and only these two jobs, which you would prefer to do in your current state. Ignore qualifications or everything else, if you were given the choice of starting only one of those two jobs tomorrow, which would you choose.

4) Then do a pairwise comparison between second two jobs

5) Keep doing this for at least 10 minutes

6) Now you have a list of potentially attractive jobs for you.

7) For this list you compiled, do this process again.

8) Then once you've made it through all of those, do it once more.

9) By the third time, you will have chosen some jobs 3 times over other jobs. So you're task now is to look deeply at all of these jobs that won 3 times and try to figure out what is in common between all of them.

10) Once you have some of those clues, go back to step 2 and try searching for more jobs that have those key-words and/or criteria you found in step 9.

What you are doing here is to force some sort of revealed preferences for your self based on currently available jobs. You aren't trying to solve the "what you should do next", you are trying to solve the what interests me enough that I would do it over something else. With enough research you'll have a few more ideas of what roads you should be exploring.

Re: Ask HN: How do I find meaningful work?

#5

Post by mrburton »

Find someone who’s vision is inline with what you want.

What type of work do you like? What type of business would you like to build?

Fuck it, what’s your feeling on building solutions for people just like you? That’s what I’m looking to do.

Re: Ask HN: How do I find meaningful work?

#6

Post by kevinconroy »

Try the nonprofit world: http://idealist.org/

I used to say "Nonprofits? They aren't doing anything interesting with tech!!"

One day, my wife convinced me to try searching on Idealist just to see if there were any nonprofits doing anything interested with tech. I feel in love with the very first result, got the job, worked my way up the ranks, and am now Chief Product Officer at GlobalGiving.org and I couldn't be happier.

Looking for a shortlist of orgs that I'd recommend? Try any one of the orgs at https://www.ctosforgood.org

Re: Ask HN: How do I find meaningful work?

#8

Post by rvijapurapu »

I moved from being in a software only world where I couldn't see the benefit of my work, to one where I see my work being used on a daily basis. I find the sense of helping people and improving their lives oddly satisfying.

I do acknowledge working with non-technie teams is frustrating to start with, but once you bring them to learn the benefits it becomes pleasurable.

Re: Ask HN: How do I find meaningful work?

#9

Post by throwawaybs »

Top19 wrote: post #3

One suggestion might be to just work 35 hours a week at a business you find “passable”. The other 35 hours can be dedicated to something that really makes a difference. In fact it’s really hard to find a job that does serious good. Good agencies throughout the world are so low on funds they need volunteers, not workers for the time being. Since you hate advertising, a not-immediately similar path might be anti-corrup…

I'd be up for volunteering. I'm not quite sure how to find a good group to volunteer for.

Occrp looks interesting, but it looks working there involves going to Kosovo. Open-emr looks potentially interesting, but I'm not sure how much I care about hospitals being able to make more money. I'm not convinced electronic medical record are actually a good idea.

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