Ask HN: Where do you find your sense of purpose working in the private sector?

For the past 6 years I've been doing data work for government contractors. I feel no sense of purpose with the work I produce and I'm happier in my life than at most any point.

My partner works for a pharmaceutical lab and does world changing work. They work on cancer drugs, COVID vaccines, etc. It's a meat grinder and she and all her coworkers hate it.

The first question you need to answer for yourself is what is your purpose in life, what makes you happy, how do you want to spend the days you have. Then ask yourself how to structure your work and life to serve those goals. For me that means not having to care about work, and I'm much happier with my life now that I don't.

I've found this to be really important for my satisfaction. My current employer ships food to people who otherwise would have a tough time getting nutritious food (largely Medicare patients). This helps people age in their homes and delays the need and cost of nursing homes. It improves people's health outcomes significantly.

The work I do every day helps that happen more efficiently. This helps us offer the services in more areas, remain competitive, and help more people. It's a for-profit company, but we get lots of amazing feedback about how much of a difference we make in people's lives.

The team you end up with is also incredibly important. I have a great team, and have found other teams I work with to share a similar passion and mission driven focus. This is the first company I've worked with that has a really strong "feel good" aspect to it, so I'm not sure if the mission focus comes with these types of employers, or if that's something my employer specifically focuses on.

This isn't necessarily the case in the public sector. You don't have the same price signals to give a real metric on whether the work you are doing is actually productive. For all you know, it could be a giant waste of taxpayer money. Because the government usually monopolizes whatever product or service it is providing, there is often nothing to compare it to to inform you whether the capital is being used effectively, and the money itself is sourced involuntarily from taxpayers. Would your creditors really want to pay for what you are doing, if given the choice, and are you certain that the private sector could not provide it in a more cost-effective way for the taxpayer if they weren't prevented by regulation?

Profit should not be looked upon negatively. If you are profiting, and you are not a tax cheat, you are contributing positively to the public purse. In the public sector, you may not be contributing to the public purse, but subtracting from it. While the work you do MAY be worth this subtraction (strong MAY here because it certainly isn't given or even measurable), it is markedly different from adding to public funding, whilst at the same time providing a good or service that people voluntarily pay for and which can improve their standard of living.

Consider a $50k earner paying 20% income tax. In government, this earner is taking $40k from the public purse. They pay $10k tax, but this payment is a bit of a gimmick because it was sourced from the public purse to begin with. It didn't increase the public purse. In the private sector, the $50k earner is adding $10k to the public purse. Thus, for every $50k earner in government, it takes the entire income tax of four $50k earners in the private sector just to pay the salary (and that's without the layers of bureaucracy which skim from that amount first).

Consider how this feels from the perspective of the private sector worker. They have a higher job risk than the government worker. This is because the private sector worker must be productive enough and provide services that people voluntarily pay for to make profit, whereas there exists no such requirement in government because there is a perpetual supply of money regardless of 'results'. On top of that, a big portion of their earnings are then taken away to pay just 1/4 of the salary for the government worker with the cushy, secure job and a nice pension, whose work it is not even possible to determine is cost-effective and beneficial to society.

Imagine you are on a deserted island with 4 other people, you can each catch an average of 5 fish per day. One person declares themselves to be "island boss". You and your 3 other survivors must give the boss one of your 5 fish every day. As a consequence of you feeding "boss", he gets to decide everything you are allowed or not allowed to do on the island, with increasingly restrictive rules, some of which make your task of catching 5 fish every day more difficult. Because you each need to eat 4 fish a day, you cannot build up capital which would afford you time to do things other than fishing. You are merely surviving.

I dunno, but my moral compass thinks work-for-profit is very ethical and work-from-profit-of-others much less. It may be the case that the public sector job is worth the money, but I would much rather voluntarily pay for things than be forced to pay for many things which I find distasteful.

Maybe I'm overly cynical at this point in my life, or maybe it's just because I'm just unfamiliar with this stuff, but it seems like if places really wanted to prioritize something other than raw profit they'd do so. All this other stuff seems like rationalizations to me sometimes.

I don't want to come across the wrong way; I think there's a lot of good that can come from focusing on the bottom line. I just sometimes feel like greater diversity of organizational mechanisms would make the world a better place.