> How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world?
I think meaningful work often leads to very interesting discussions because people always imagine stuff like humanitarian aid, etc as meaningful. While certainly true, it’s not limited to jobs like those.
In my experience work can be meaningful for something as simple as being a positive change in someone’s job, customer experience or whatever. I personally spent quite a while in a job where a lot of project have been cancelled midway through or were objectively useless to begin with (busywork). This feeling of spending substantial time in my life to work on something that nobody will ever see or perceive as something positive burned me out terribly. And no amount of work life balance and good pay could make that up.
I now have a different job (Fullstack Developer) at the same company. I work more focused and it is more challenging, my salary hasn’t changed substantially beyond inflation. But customers use our product and are satisfied with it, plus it brings revenue to the company. This job is so much more meaningful in a practical sense than the one before.
And there is quite a lot of jobs like my first one. And if you actually believe in a market working as intended, this begs the question: why?
As a developer, there's a huge difference between those two :
- working on something where, outside of your peers, you can only interact with a project manager who doesn't have a clue about what they are doing and are asking for features that are clearly dark patterns in the hope of making more money
- working on something where you interact directly with the end users, knowing their issues/needs, and trying to find ways to help them while keeping management happy
Sure, the _why_ can be important (I would not work on something designed to harm directly anyone) but the _who_ is what matter the most IMHO.
Knowing that you are working to help people is where the meaningfulness relies.
Don't care if those people are people with special need, doctors and greedy lawyers.
Sometimes the optimal solution involves failure and cancelation. Im not saying the cancelations you experienced were correct, but unless you have a crystal ball, some strategy change and failure is expected. Of course that isn't an excuse for frivolous strategy, but the line is finer than most ICs understand.
I think meaningful work often leads to very interesting discussions because people always imagine stuff like humanitarian aid, etc as meaningful. While certainly true, it’s not limited to jobs like those.
In my experience work can be meaningful for something as simple as being a positive change in someone’s job, customer experience or whatever. I personally spent quite a while in a job where a lot of project have been cancelled midway through or were objectively useless to begin with (busywork). This feeling of spending substantial time in my life to work on something that nobody will ever see or perceive as something positive burned me out terribly. And no amount of work life balance and good pay could make that up.
I now have a different job (Fullstack Developer) at the same company. I work more focused and it is more challenging, my salary hasn’t changed substantially beyond inflation. But customers use our product and are satisfied with it, plus it brings revenue to the company. This job is so much more meaningful in a practical sense than the one before.
And there is quite a lot of jobs like my first one. And if you actually believe in a market working as intended, this begs the question: why?