31–40 of 125 posts
What you'll find is that most people you work with are honest people who share similar values to you.
Profit doesn’t exist if you’re not fulfilling customer needs.* Find a need that people pay for that to find fulfilling and go support it. *In theory. In practice, there are all types of companies that exist due to regulatory quirks / that customers are forced to interact with. If you flip it, technically people are forced to work with the government whether they like it or not and regardless of the quality of service…
That is not a realistic proposition, either. People are as forced to use private services as they are forced to use government ones. There might be a competitor, but even that does not necessarily provide cheaper or better service or products.
Then I ended up at my current company. Our mission is to improve supply chains by monitoring vaccines (mostly in Africa at the moment) and perishable goods with our sensor devices. Especially with the vaccines, our mission is literally to save lives. I LOVE it here.
So, the private companies you are looking for are out there, so maybe just stay patient until you find something that you can feel good about.
Any job where you're someone else's employee naturally means you're sacrificing autonomy and freedom over your work, probably in the name of private profit over social good, so will probably not be as enjoyable being able to work on one's own terms unless one feels they are accomplishing more through this arrangement than they could be otherwise.
For me what personally excites me most in the tech world right now is tech that is open source, modular, and decentralized (basically the goal of web3). The idea of building a decentralized, modular, open source sounds more interesting than golden handcuffs at (who IMO have also been fairly stagnant innovation wise outside of just performance and scaling under the old centralization paradigm).
I haven't made the jump though. And at the end of the day I'm still kind of a slave to money until I'm financially independent, and if I'm going to sell my labor to someone else, I might as well sell to the highest builder (assuming it ethically aligns). Haven't spent much time really looking though, with the crypto/web3 boom it may finally be reasonably possible to do that sort of work and still get paid handsomely.
Does anyone working in software honestly feel like their work gives them a strong sense of purpose? Honestly I'd imagine the far majority don't, working on proprietary code for companies driven solely by profit, within agile factories where a developer's sole role is to churn out tickets on an assembly line, and have no real ownership or stake in the company's success. Hence the high rate of burnout despite the job b…
The software I wrote saved two people's life last week.
So, yeah.
Purpose.
Does anyone working in software honestly feel like their work gives them a strong sense of purpose? Honestly I'd imagine the far majority don't, working on proprietary code for companies driven solely by profit, within agile factories where a developer's sole role is to churn out tickets on an assembly line, and have no real ownership or stake in the company's success. Hence the high rate of burnout despite the job b…