Same, I help writing systems to 'optimise advertisement effectiveness' == encourage consumerism and maybe creative negative value for society. It sucks but I have to support my family and extended family as the main bread earner.
On the other hands, I often donate to wikipedia, supporting local FOSS communities and mentoring young students. Currently helping my friend with his air pollution measurement station project too. All that I won't be able to do if I take a lower paying job but more meaningful job (previously I was working as a civil engineer, building bridge and stuff).
It's very hard to find one like that with all the VC money poured in, only those cool startups get all the money. I am making 3~5 times as much as friends who are working in civil/mechanical engineering.
Is there some reason they're mutually exclusive? Eating is necessary, but it can be meaningful even if the food is simple. Working in order to build your life can also be meaningful.
Well, meaning has scale, and on the human scale, what OP describes is extremely meaningful. On the local scale, raising good kids can do good things for the community. On the county level, things get fuzzy. It's probably better that his family is well looked after and tax money goes to the state. Net positive? Probably.
On a planetary scale? Universal Scale? Of course it doesn't matter, but what would be the point of caring about that except at length? We're not universal scale. I'm not a planet. I'm a human, and I care about other humans and the communities I'm part of.
Upvoted. And on the bigger scales, I have detailed views on what matters and why (because of a belief in God, with a long list of reasons for it all :) I wrote or linked to a bit of it here but there is more if interested:
Would you provide for your family at any cost? Forget about meaning. What if your work is causing harm to some people or a lot of people? Like the wall street or Cambridge Analytica or Palantir?
Are you pitching a TV show? Because where I live, no one has to choose between certain death and working on cool tech for corrupt spooks except in TV shows.
Providing my family, doesn't have "any cost". It costs at least 50K€/year around here and, if my LinkedIn feed and the official stats concerning my domain of expertise are to be believed, I could slam the door any day and start at another tech company within a week.
But, assuming we are in a TV show, yes. I would gladly harm tens of thousands of unnamed, faceless nobodies and please tens of thousands of others if it helped me keep my loved ones out of the gutter. Especially if it meant playing with the cool tech at Palantir :-)
I joined a small startup because they had a product I really wanted to use. Now the product is used by many people.
But, even though it's meaningful, and I love my job, I still look forward to figuring out how to move on to something else. I've come to accept that, unless I'm financially independent, there's always going to be ups and downs with my job. That's just the reality of life.
I've also come to see people who are financially independent stick with a "stressful" job because they emotionally need the stress and ups and downs. They would get board if they quit, and get directionless if they tried to run their own thing.
I used to think it wasn't. My jobs were, no matter how it was dressed up, trying to earn a massive retailer an extra percent or two on their already massive earnings over doing anything that impacted the consumer positively.
Since I started working for myself, I find it meaningful if only because I get to actually BUILD stuff.
But after all of the advertising I've done, I'd like for my next full-time job to be a net positive for society.
Why do you think you will have another full-time job? Why not pursue working for yourself and building things as a continuous lifestyle?
That's not me trying to be snide or anything, I'm in your exact position right now and whilst I can see a circumstance in which I end up in a full time job again, the goal is to make this the way I engage with the world and make money going forward.
I am pursuing that currently and would love to do so indefinitely. Maybe I'm just pessimistic and assume that it might take a try or two before I get it right?
I'm also not against joining a team that's building something really cool.
I'm working on a platform that uses spare change to pay off student loans. Both the savings itself for the user, and the educational angle about student loans feels more meaningful than most of the work I've done in other jobs at large corporations.
I have a personalized set of 'meaningful indicators' I use to help answer that question whenever I am job searching or feeling less than thrilled about my current work.
1) Does the work have a positive impact on people in my community? (this could be a literal local community, or a shared interest community)
2) Do I feel energized by the work that is happening around me at my company? Not just what I am personally responsible for.
3) If I were to leave, would I still care if the product/mission of the company succeeded?
4) Am I making enough to support my family and provide myself with a healthy/active lifestyle?
5) Have I ever felt like I have directly contributed to, or worked for a company that has, deceived or taken advantage of its customers for the sake of profit?
Outside of these questions, I feel like trying to attribute any other type of meaning to my work would leave me anxious, depressed, and perpetually stuck in the "grass is greener" situation.
I am lucky enough that my current work checks all the boxes (1-4 as yes, 5 as no). With the bonus of having learn a ton and been given the opportunity for career growth multiple times over.
This. My job provides the financial means of doing what I want to in my spare time.
I'm not going to be a hypocrite and try to find deeper meaning in a job which basically means I'm making money for the business so that the shareholders can get their cut.
Well, it's matter of perspective. It's not very possible that in 200 years or so, people are going to remember and study my work. That's reserved for the Newtons and the Gausses of the world, and even then, they are acknowledged from a tiny percentage of the world's population.
But I'm very grateful to work in a setting where I can solve exciting problems, get to collaborate and learn from really smart and passionate people, try (and fail) in designing software, and then sometimes find time for a hobby or two.
The 'safe 9-5 job' exists, and as programmers, we always want a fresh challenge, but in many cases it's in our hands to create the opportunities so it's not 'meaningless'.
Unless you're a really good mathematician (I count hardcore CS as math) your work will likely not bring any advancement because it is low hanging fruit.
Sometimes you get lucky like Apple, but the hard work was done by inventor guys like Kendall or a selection of electrical engineers in 80s.
In short, if it's not academia, it's probably 10 years outdated already if not more... or just a minor tweak. (Like high end 10Gbit routing, hardly life changing. Or yet another ANN architecture.)
Companies do not want a gamble and deal with science, they want instant gratification. (Except the few super rich like Google and Microsoft having small but great real research teams.)
Yes, it is a high bar, but a big difference between feel-good and actually useful and life changing technologies.
It takes collaboration to make a difference, and from another perspective, computer science is worth just the paper it's written on until it's applied in the real world and actually changes something for the better.
You could write a simple program, with 10 year old technology, that changes an entire industry. Imagine if no one applied encryption to eCommerce. Or imagine if no one wrote a messaging application that works over telecommunication protocols.
Famously, the effects of penicillium mould had been known since the 19th century, the mould itself finally identified in 1928. But it wasn't until it was implemented by a team working on the practicalities of mass production that it began helping people, all the way ahead in 1940. Without the research paper we would have nothing, and without the implementors we would have something, but nothing useful.
Indeed. The point being you're supposed to implement the latest and/or proven and/or best techniques but we're reduced to sloppy work due to business requirements almost always.
Your point about encryption is misplaced. Do not imagine impossible stupidity - even ancient Romans sometimes encrypted tax and military information. The difference is between brewing your own (common in 90s, crackable even then in a day of math or so) and using actual research.
As for collaboration, it is overrated. Best work generally is done by a few actual geniuses in the specialty. (I can name a bunch in a few fields I'm interested in, like acoustics and audio algorithms.) They do need support staff of course.
Usually the real ones are tenured professors with long development of a singular technology over the years.
As for penicillin, it was one quite genius chemist (Pfizer; Erhardt was a comfectioneer so support) who developed means of mass producing it. (Among many other things later.) They worked for a company which got major government funding during wartime, which makes it almost like a tenure.
My company produces medical devices that help a lot of people enormously, including my girlfriend. Her life was unbearable before we got the device. In addition she probably got the device only because I knew about it through work.
So the work should be meaningful but somehow it doesn't feel that way to me. Between bad technical decisions, bureaucracy and a lot of schedule pressure I don't like my job. I think I would be happier working on a less meaningful product but in a more technically interesting and challenging environment.
There are other people who get a total kick out of helping people but somehow this doesn't work for me.
Maybe you can also still work in the same field but for a different company? Because it doesn't sound like you're mostly missing a challenge or interesting problems, it sounds more like your management / senior staff isn't making the right decisions for you / in your opinion..
Nope. I work in equity research and am lucky enough to be on the team that I'm on, but it doesn't seem meaningful or worthwhile. I generate investment ideas through industry, company-specific, and technology-specific research and then publish these ideas in reports for my client base. Most of my job is then debating investors on specific technology investments or trends.
Sell-side finance (e.g. investment bank) is broadly declining in my view. Companies are cutting many positions, technology is enabling downsizing while making certain areas more efficient, and there's fee compression across the board causing many public market facing roles to see substantial revenue declines.
The trade that existed in the 2000's of trading substantial hours of your life for $$$ has broadly disappeared. Instead positions tend to offer compensation that's similar to many tech roles, but requiring substantially more hours.
It is a pathway into buyside research analyst seats, and I have a number of colleagues who attempt that path. I just don’t see that as something I’m interested in doing. There’s less opportunity to move into areas like private equity, which tends to recruit from banking, though I firmly believe networking effectively can change the odds. In terms of compensation, sell side research associates tend to work 60+ hour weeks for total comp around $120-$170k depending on where you’re at. Senior research analysts may tend towards $250k-$1mn+ depending on sector, seniority, following, and relationships with potential banking clients (though I need to stress this side of the business is highly regulated). On the buyside comp skews higher, and those that perform at good shops make good money, but it’s far more competitive now. I’ve seen a number of buy siders move into industry or back to the sell side recently as their funds cut headcount. There’s also almost no end of young and hungry bankers looking to move to the buyside and grind. Pressures include lower fee investment vehicles putting pressure on all sidies of the industry, as well as problems including widespread hedge fund underperformance.
After 20 years in recruiting for tech startups I decided to launch a resume writing and career coaching business. In recruiting I was often helping candidates to fix their resumes and teaching them how to get jobs, but I was working on behalf of companies and my incentives weren't always to the benefit of candidates.
Now I focus 100% on helping people get jobs and build careers. Much of my coaching work involves convincing people that they are qualified for roles they felt were beyond their reach, or helping write a resume that will open doors that had previously been closed.
Sometimes my clients come back and send me a thank you note about how they have been offered their dream job or a raise that will change the lives of their family. Sometimes I just see a LinkedIn notification that shows a past client took a new job.
Being a resume writer is an odd career choice. It's not glamorous like writing novels or screenplays. But I can point to thousands of people that have benefitted from my work. That feels meaningful to me.
Do you now? Have real data to back this up or is it just a feel good guess?
It is easy to deceive oneself that an app or a tracker equals health... better than pen and paper and minor instruction manual.
Now if you're actually working on safety critical health devices (say, insulin pump or oxygen meter or maybe a CPAP or perhaps heart monitor), then I hope you're working on cutting the price tag as they're super expensive for not really any good reason...
We were trying to figure out a reliable way to track sugar levels relatively nonincasively but found out that it was less accurate than a chart and simple alarm...
Sometimes being actually rational sucks, you see that your junk does not work or that you have to be smarter than super well funded geniuses at MIT or Stanford to matter. And have comparable fabrication and chemical analysis facilities and biolabs to even attempt anything.
Research is expensive. As in really expensive now in terms of hardware. As in some big universities not in USA being too poor to afford hardware.
That's not even counting lab space to actually house it.
Working in Healthcare/Education is pretty rewarding knowing the products we put out are helping people (both improving education for new doctors and improving clinical care).
Sometimes working in Healthcare is annoying (Changes are slow and there are legal restrictions everywhere, e.g. any time you mention the word "cloud" the C-level folks yell "but HIPAA!" and refuse to listen), but it's still good to know we're doing meaningful work.
We're in healthcare and we're going to the cloud! (still on-prem for a couple of years, but it's in the pipeline. My tests are all in the cloud nowadays)
I agree that it is rewarding, and it doesn't feel that slow where I work. We cover more than half the hospitals in our country, and a couple of university-hospitals. There's plenty of change they want - and (surely the university ones) - have plenty of ideas of what they'd like to see.
For us "but HIPAA!" is "but GDPR!" for quite some time though. But we're hardly unique in that.
It's definitely a nice industry if you want to have a meaningful job. But it does come with some stress as well though.
"e.g. any time you mention the word "cloud" the C-level folks yell "but HIPAA!"
I worked for a former healthcare project manager in a completely unrelated industry and I would say 80% of her time was spend worrying about our industry's version of HIPAA. She viewed all new tech projects and software releases through the lens of "How does this violate our industry security standard?". The results were stagnated project releases and high developer turnover.
That's true - I guess every industry has their version of HIPAA that can frustrate developers/stagnate projects.
I don't think that HIPAA or these other regulations are a bad thing, just that maybe the way that some (older, entrenched) management approaches how projects work with those regulations is poor.
"e.g. any time you mention the word "cloud" the C-level folks yell "but HIPAA!" and refuse to listen"
Same here. Instead of working through the issues management just panics and comes up with some weird approach that delivers less at higher cost and effort.
Why would meaningless and 9-5 be synonyms? Why does late evening imply meaning and regular managed schedule lack of it? Why would a company on edge of crash implied more meaning then the stable one?
For whatever it is worth, position I have now is a lot of what I was looking for professionally and I can be 9-5. Thankfully, they want output and not butt in seat. It is not saving world and have no such illusions. But my work is occasionally useful to real people I know personally and I work in team of people I trust.
I don't think late evening is the alternative. 9-5 links to "corporate" and "corporate" links to "meaningless job" for many reasons: first of all if you work for a company, the profit will come before the interests of your customers. If the company is big and profitable, it will be able to support more and more mechanism to detach its profit from the actual value brought to the customer or society or both. Also the bigger the company, the less relevant is the impact of most individuals inside the company.
I dunno. I think you can find companies that are more or less sociopathic. And while the fast growing big ones are likely taking advantage of something, I don't really have ethical problem with what I do.
I know employed people who in past refused this or that job due to ethical considerations and who I am pretty sure that would not cheat. Cause they refused to cheat in the past.
> first of all if you work for a company, the profit will come before the interests of your customers
I don't understand that. That seems largely to be a generalization - I've work for non publicly traded companies, and we live and die and profit based upon the interests of our customers. Also, as we're publicly traded we don't have that impetus for profit - there's been discussions about starting up a pseudo-skunkworks to try and solve problems that may be dead ends without the pressure of needing to produce.
I work in IT at a large insurance company. Most days, I get to cheer someone up and help them with a tech thing they are stuck on. I'm not curing cancer, I'm not fixing the atmosphere, but at least I can detect when I helped someone out. It's mixed bag, but it definitely puts the needle over 50%.
I'm web engineering manager and front-end contributor for a small team inside a small pharma. I love solving business problems, but I witness a lot of self-inflicted issues outside my department that we are then tasked to fix.
So my knee-jerk answer would be, "no." However the salary + bonus + benefits from this job are providing me resources that will enable my family to be nearly debt-free in a year or two (mortgage notwithstanding). The pay is above tech start-up grade, even well-funded ones.
Is it meaningful? Not that much. We probably enable many use cases that won't really change much. Nonetheless the kind of expertise we are building might be applied to other fields with more meaningful impact. Will my company pursue these other fields? Probably not in the short term.
At least I'm not actively harming anybody and today in IT this is a huge privilege.
I'm writing a project that will allow executives and business architects more insight into the structure of their company. Meaningful? For them, I certainly hope so. It's not something that a lot of people will see though.
For me, it's mostly a nice opportunity to learn about the structure of this company, about how to model and represent this data, and I'm doing it in a new framework. It's fun, and I've got tons of freedom. There are more fulfilling jobs out there, but this isn't bad.
I work at a company with one of the catchy "changing the world" slogans that everyone likes to make fun of, but I actually feel like we are making an impact.
We provide tools for educators to get more actionable data about their students and then facilitate conversations between educators and parents, and it's a pretty great combination. If even a few students end up with a better life because of a teacher being able to reach out more easily, then I'd say that's meaningful.
No, I work in a gigantic company on the frontend of applications used for businesses to pay for their services. I could not care less about what I'm working on to be honest, at least the pay is good.
Whether the result of my work is meaningful for me or someone else, is a different story. But on the smaller and bigger picture of the whole universe, everything we do is meaningless at some point, so who cares.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadOn the other hands, I often donate to wikipedia, supporting local FOSS communities and mentoring young students. Currently helping my friend with his air pollution measurement station project too. All that I won't be able to do if I take a lower paying job but more meaningful job (previously I was working as a civil engineer, building bridge and stuff).
May be you can find a different work which may pay a bit less but doesn’t create negative value for the society?
All other "meaningfulness" is just pure bonus. And no: I am not unhappy, nor unfulfilled.
On a planetary scale? Universal Scale? Of course it doesn't matter, but what would be the point of caring about that except at length? We're not universal scale. I'm not a planet. I'm a human, and I care about other humans and the communities I'm part of.
http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854618453.html
http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854618449.html
Providing my family, doesn't have "any cost". It costs at least 50K€/year around here and, if my LinkedIn feed and the official stats concerning my domain of expertise are to be believed, I could slam the door any day and start at another tech company within a week.
But, assuming we are in a TV show, yes. I would gladly harm tens of thousands of unnamed, faceless nobodies and please tens of thousands of others if it helped me keep my loved ones out of the gutter. Especially if it meant playing with the cool tech at Palantir :-)
It’s an amazing feeling and I reflect daily that I’m blessed for having a career that I excel at, pays well, and whole heartedly enjoy.
But gratz anyway
I joined a small startup because they had a product I really wanted to use. Now the product is used by many people.
But, even though it's meaningful, and I love my job, I still look forward to figuring out how to move on to something else. I've come to accept that, unless I'm financially independent, there's always going to be ups and downs with my job. That's just the reality of life.
I've also come to see people who are financially independent stick with a "stressful" job because they emotionally need the stress and ups and downs. They would get board if they quit, and get directionless if they tried to run their own thing.
Since I started working for myself, I find it meaningful if only because I get to actually BUILD stuff.
But after all of the advertising I've done, I'd like for my next full-time job to be a net positive for society.
That's not me trying to be snide or anything, I'm in your exact position right now and whilst I can see a circumstance in which I end up in a full time job again, the goal is to make this the way I engage with the world and make money going forward.
I'm also not against joining a team that's building something really cool.
1) Does the work have a positive impact on people in my community? (this could be a literal local community, or a shared interest community)
2) Do I feel energized by the work that is happening around me at my company? Not just what I am personally responsible for.
3) If I were to leave, would I still care if the product/mission of the company succeeded?
4) Am I making enough to support my family and provide myself with a healthy/active lifestyle?
5) Have I ever felt like I have directly contributed to, or worked for a company that has, deceived or taken advantage of its customers for the sake of profit?
Outside of these questions, I feel like trying to attribute any other type of meaning to my work would leave me anxious, depressed, and perpetually stuck in the "grass is greener" situation.
I am lucky enough that my current work checks all the boxes (1-4 as yes, 5 as no). With the bonus of having learn a ton and been given the opportunity for career growth multiple times over.
I'm not going to be a hypocrite and try to find deeper meaning in a job which basically means I'm making money for the business so that the shareholders can get their cut.
But I'm very grateful to work in a setting where I can solve exciting problems, get to collaborate and learn from really smart and passionate people, try (and fail) in designing software, and then sometimes find time for a hobby or two.
The 'safe 9-5 job' exists, and as programmers, we always want a fresh challenge, but in many cases it's in our hands to create the opportunities so it's not 'meaningless'.
Sometimes you get lucky like Apple, but the hard work was done by inventor guys like Kendall or a selection of electrical engineers in 80s.
In short, if it's not academia, it's probably 10 years outdated already if not more... or just a minor tweak. (Like high end 10Gbit routing, hardly life changing. Or yet another ANN architecture.)
Companies do not want a gamble and deal with science, they want instant gratification. (Except the few super rich like Google and Microsoft having small but great real research teams.)
Yes, it is a high bar, but a big difference between feel-good and actually useful and life changing technologies.
You could write a simple program, with 10 year old technology, that changes an entire industry. Imagine if no one applied encryption to eCommerce. Or imagine if no one wrote a messaging application that works over telecommunication protocols.
Famously, the effects of penicillium mould had been known since the 19th century, the mould itself finally identified in 1928. But it wasn't until it was implemented by a team working on the practicalities of mass production that it began helping people, all the way ahead in 1940. Without the research paper we would have nothing, and without the implementors we would have something, but nothing useful.
Your point about encryption is misplaced. Do not imagine impossible stupidity - even ancient Romans sometimes encrypted tax and military information. The difference is between brewing your own (common in 90s, crackable even then in a day of math or so) and using actual research.
As for collaboration, it is overrated. Best work generally is done by a few actual geniuses in the specialty. (I can name a bunch in a few fields I'm interested in, like acoustics and audio algorithms.) They do need support staff of course. Usually the real ones are tenured professors with long development of a singular technology over the years.
As for penicillin, it was one quite genius chemist (Pfizer; Erhardt was a comfectioneer so support) who developed means of mass producing it. (Among many other things later.) They worked for a company which got major government funding during wartime, which makes it almost like a tenure.
So the work should be meaningful but somehow it doesn't feel that way to me. Between bad technical decisions, bureaucracy and a lot of schedule pressure I don't like my job. I think I would be happier working on a less meaningful product but in a more technically interesting and challenging environment.
There are other people who get a total kick out of helping people but somehow this doesn't work for me.
We build a machine that shaves of pennies from donations to orphanages and funnels them directly into hedge funds.
To do so we have to build a neural network! and in Tensorflow no less!
And here is the real kicker: I rewrote the interface in Haskell. If that isn't meaningful, I don't know what is!
Sell-side finance (e.g. investment bank) is broadly declining in my view. Companies are cutting many positions, technology is enabling downsizing while making certain areas more efficient, and there's fee compression across the board causing many public market facing roles to see substantial revenue declines.
The trade that existed in the 2000's of trading substantial hours of your life for $$$ has broadly disappeared. Instead positions tend to offer compensation that's similar to many tech roles, but requiring substantially more hours.
And isn't the work very interesting? (at least for the first 8 hours)
Now I focus 100% on helping people get jobs and build careers. Much of my coaching work involves convincing people that they are qualified for roles they felt were beyond their reach, or helping write a resume that will open doors that had previously been closed.
Sometimes my clients come back and send me a thank you note about how they have been offered their dream job or a raise that will change the lives of their family. Sometimes I just see a LinkedIn notification that shows a past client took a new job.
Being a resume writer is an odd career choice. It's not glamorous like writing novels or screenplays. But I can point to thousands of people that have benefitted from my work. That feels meaningful to me.
It is easy to deceive oneself that an app or a tracker equals health... better than pen and paper and minor instruction manual.
Now if you're actually working on safety critical health devices (say, insulin pump or oxygen meter or maybe a CPAP or perhaps heart monitor), then I hope you're working on cutting the price tag as they're super expensive for not really any good reason...
We were trying to figure out a reliable way to track sugar levels relatively nonincasively but found out that it was less accurate than a chart and simple alarm...
Sometimes being actually rational sucks, you see that your junk does not work or that you have to be smarter than super well funded geniuses at MIT or Stanford to matter. And have comparable fabrication and chemical analysis facilities and biolabs to even attempt anything.
Research is expensive. As in really expensive now in terms of hardware. As in some big universities not in USA being too poor to afford hardware. That's not even counting lab space to actually house it.
Well, the program I work for is fully recognized by the CDC.
This thread is about finding your work meaningful, which I do. I'm not sure why you're being so condescending and hostile.
Sometimes working in Healthcare is annoying (Changes are slow and there are legal restrictions everywhere, e.g. any time you mention the word "cloud" the C-level folks yell "but HIPAA!" and refuse to listen), but it's still good to know we're doing meaningful work.
I agree that it is rewarding, and it doesn't feel that slow where I work. We cover more than half the hospitals in our country, and a couple of university-hospitals. There's plenty of change they want - and (surely the university ones) - have plenty of ideas of what they'd like to see.
For us "but HIPAA!" is "but GDPR!" for quite some time though. But we're hardly unique in that.
It's definitely a nice industry if you want to have a meaningful job. But it does come with some stress as well though.
EDIT: Fix my English :D
I worked for a former healthcare project manager in a completely unrelated industry and I would say 80% of her time was spend worrying about our industry's version of HIPAA. She viewed all new tech projects and software releases through the lens of "How does this violate our industry security standard?". The results were stagnated project releases and high developer turnover.
I don't think that HIPAA or these other regulations are a bad thing, just that maybe the way that some (older, entrenched) management approaches how projects work with those regulations is poor.
Same here. Instead of working through the issues management just panics and comes up with some weird approach that delivers less at higher cost and effort.
For whatever it is worth, position I have now is a lot of what I was looking for professionally and I can be 9-5. Thankfully, they want output and not butt in seat. It is not saving world and have no such illusions. But my work is occasionally useful to real people I know personally and I work in team of people I trust.
I know employed people who in past refused this or that job due to ethical considerations and who I am pretty sure that would not cheat. Cause they refused to cheat in the past.
I don't understand that. That seems largely to be a generalization - I've work for non publicly traded companies, and we live and die and profit based upon the interests of our customers. Also, as we're publicly traded we don't have that impetus for profit - there's been discussions about starting up a pseudo-skunkworks to try and solve problems that may be dead ends without the pressure of needing to produce.
So my knee-jerk answer would be, "no." However the salary + bonus + benefits from this job are providing me resources that will enable my family to be nearly debt-free in a year or two (mortgage notwithstanding). The pay is above tech start-up grade, even well-funded ones.
At least I'm not actively harming anybody and today in IT this is a huge privilege.
I make rent and have something left over to invest. Can you ask for much more?
For me, it's mostly a nice opportunity to learn about the structure of this company, about how to model and represent this data, and I'm doing it in a new framework. It's fun, and I've got tons of freedom. There are more fulfilling jobs out there, but this isn't bad.
We provide tools for educators to get more actionable data about their students and then facilitate conversations between educators and parents, and it's a pretty great combination. If even a few students end up with a better life because of a teacher being able to reach out more easily, then I'd say that's meaningful.
If that sounds neat, check out https://schoolstatus.com
Whether the result of my work is meaningful for me or someone else, is a different story. But on the smaller and bigger picture of the whole universe, everything we do is meaningless at some point, so who cares.