Ask HN: What is the most meaningful work you have done?

Commerce is commerce. Not all work has meaning.

Even in the non profit sector things get tricky. I have since changed my outlook into not causing net negative outcomes on the world. Sometimes you get lucky and can help people, sometimes you get to just make something pleasant and convenient. Sometimes you entertain.

Chasing that feeling like you're changing the world for the better is IMO a fools errand. Instead chase something you don't hate yourself for building.

I’ve worked on everything from back end enterprise apps used by day traders to building information retrieval systems for kiosks at airports to embedded software running on a particular eink device.

Everything was directly meaningful to me, insofar as it provided someone value, gave me money for sustenance, and/or was something I was personally extremely interested in.

Meaningful is a relative concept, and I sincerely hope people in this thread don’t fall in a trap of comparing what they’re doing so what others are or are not doing.

been working creating point of sale software to serve millions of orders in latam.

have seen who i am serving

those women depend on it for some electronic services we offer and their welfare depends on it. ten years later it became normal for them nation wide

all those people using it to earn a living. so proud of it.

I like saving lives. I sometimes find myself in a position to help my friends when they are sick, and when I find a sick person without adequate care I step in to help, cooking and cleaning and taking them to the doctor... seeing to it that the doctor responds appropriately. I call ambulances to avert suicides and hang out with those at risk to encourage them to live. The rewards are happiness and peace.

> So I want to know, how do people make software work meaningful, and how do you see it making the world better?

I think as long as what you build helps someone, it's meaningful. It can help many people or it can just help a friend. As long as it's a positive impact on others, it's meaningful.

Really I don't think software is different from anything else. Are you helping someone learn something? Are you helping someone put up fence? Are you helping someone fix a car? All of that is meaningful. Software can multiply it which is a plus, but you really only need to help one person.

Long time ago, I coded the form on Santa's official website [1] used to submit your Christmas wishes to Santa. Without that form children (and adults) wouldn't have been able to reach him using a computer. A lot of people used that form to submit their wishes for Christmas and hopes for the future. I guess in a really real sense that makes me Santa's little helper :)

(santa.gl / Greenland / does exist anymore)

I never thought I’d grow up creating label printer software but I just love making good hardware usable by average people. As my (electron) app’s revenue accelerates through 6-figure territory I think about how the money is a good measure of how much I’m helping people. I get emails every day about how users love my app - and sheeeesh, that feels good.

Read more at https://label.live

There are definitely ways to make value in software, the examples you give are about the technology, and not the end-product, so it's tough to gage from those details what impact you may have had.

I built an ML system for a drop-ship retailer which took over a miserable job which was done by 20 people, and turned it into a part-time job for 2 people. It was meaningful, not because of what it did directly, but because it took a horrible, and somewhat meaningless job for a human, and replaced it with a machine that could do it much quicker. The two people who stayed in part-time where really happy to not spend all day doing data-entry, and they picked-up other work in the company doing more interesting things. I don't know what happened to the people who were laid-off, but I hope they went on to more interesting things.

My co-founder and I come from a research oriented world (CSIRO) and my co-founder, in particular, is used to working on early deep-tech. We were working in telehealth years before that was a thing, but we're still feel that nobody really WANTS to do telehealth, so we're happy to not be in that field anymore.

At our startup SoundMind.co we're working on improve sleep performance for millions of people (though starting off with thousands). One of the things my co-founder says he loves about what we're doing is that he can see and measure the real-life impact we are having.

Of course, I've also worked on things that I don't make a difference, like an app for the local pizza chain, a scheduling app for shift-workers that never went anywhere, and more.

You also mention that "It's been a blast!" which is great. What percentage of people can say that about their job, and take home a good salary?

Software can definitely be more than just moving money from one person to another. Sometimes you also have to look at the bigger picture of how the software you're writing is being used. The janitor at the hospital isn't just cleaning the floors, he's making the hospital germ free so people don't get sick. Sometimes it's a bit about how you are framing the job.

I have found that working on making applications accessible is meaningful. It makes financial sense, as it opens up new business. Mostly though, it’s just the right thing to do. It gives access to groups of people that have historically, tragically, been overlooked. Personally I work on administrative software, so it helps open up job opportunities.

I'm creating automations for manual tasks that our operations team is responsible for. It feels great to be, not working (only) to take work out of their hands, but to make their work easier, more interesting, more fun.

I still want to do the earth-shattering stuff, but elevating others as a force multiplier is meaningful too.

I proved to the F500 that free software (now “open source”) was worth paying for at Cygnus.

I’ve worked on some other hard potentially world changing projects over the years, including right now, but maybe of less interest to HN. I am trying to remove all the human-generated methane from the atmosphere over the next few years; if we manage to pull that off it will cut the global temperature by about a half a degree Celsius.

I used to work in Search and Rescue, managing technical airworthiness risk on the aircraft. SAR really gets you out of bed in the morning, even if you fly a desk.

Helping make medical imaging ubiquitous, and easier to use, will save many lives.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/health/medical-scans-butt...

Before the pandemic, I was craving the opportunity to do more impactful work than I had come in the past, ideally on healthcare. But the pandemic gave me the opportunity to use my programming skills to help nearly 1 million people schedule appointments to get vaccinated.

That’s the most meaningful work I’ve ever done.

Helped the department chair by making a convenient tool to create schedules. Beats all years of commercial software development I've done since.

In different ways, most things I've done have been meaningful. I learnt to code through cofounding a massive non-profit fanfic website with my friends and that build helped... me! I was living in poverty on welfare and had no way to go to school as I was the sole carer for my quadriplegic family member. Then I took what I'd learned and worked on a new project, connecting profoundly disabled people and roboticists to explore the world through drones. Nowadays I run a free code school for refugees and other people living in poverty, where professional developers volunteer to teach and mentor the learners so they can get good jobs in tech and start their own lives in this country.

Interspersed with those three big projects I've done contracting and agency work, mainly in Accessibility FE, and that has been a bit less motivating to work on, though it's useful, I think, to make all sites and apps work properly for as many people as possible. I've always stayed in the arts or academia for those contracts. I've never worked at a megacorp or for any kind of prestigious employer, so I've never really had to worry about the ethics of an employer. (Obviously I've never been paid loads either. :D )

I count myself so lucky to be able to spend my days like this. I leap out of bed to go to work in the morning. I recommend it!

Wrote software to help people catch the bus on time, at NextBus.

We were the first to equip buses with real-time gps reporting and have that tied into digital displays at stops, and on the web.

I still see lots of my frontend stuff (backbone/js) still used after I left 8 years ago, which of course makes me happy that it's providing service to people who have to ride the bus (which I did extensively on purpose at the time - they paid me okay)

Feels like a bit of a shameless plug but...we're building a bionic eye to restore a sense of vision for people with blindness.

https://bionicvis.com

The work i do can be pretty boring and behind the scenes for the most part, but i figured i'd share a few tidbits nonetheless...

I'd have to say that probably developing the page over at https://apturicovid.lv/#en

Back when vaccinations hadn't even started properly, contact tracing was viewed as one of the ways slow down the spread of COVID, so around 100 professionals in my country got together and worked on developing the Latvian contact tracing application "Apturi Covid" ("Stop Covid"), in which i also got to partake in.

Sure, creating the site wasn't anywhere nearly as impressive as working on the actual back end which some other people got to do, but i'd say that it was still pretty useful, since it served as the first point of contact towards getting to know the initiative for hundreds of thousands of people, allowed embedding the ToS and Privacy Policy in a web view for the mobile apps and also allowed various companies and media organizations to access visual and audio materials to inform their clients about the app.

On a more personal level, it was proof that you can leverage modern technologies pretty effectively when you're not dealing with projects that are in maintenance hell and that have endless amounts of technical debt, or a restrictive governance structure.

Furthermore, it was proof that a team of capable people can work together pretty efficiently, in stark contrast to the "e-health" system in Latvia, which has cost about 15 million euros to develop to date, and still doesn't even work: https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/latvija/par-e...

I guess it also got recognized in the local industry somewhat, since the app itself received an award as well: https://likta-lv.translate.goog/pieskirtas-ikt-nozares-balva...

Well, it's either that, or fixing production issues that block the work of healthcare organizations. I actually once went to visit one such institution to get an idea about what the problems with their system were in person and saw the queues of people forming, none of which could receive the services that they needed.

Fixing those issues by ripping out the neglected components of that outsourced project and replacing them with something that actually worked was satisfying, since i had a direct experience with the problem that i was solving by doing so. That "boots on the ground" experience was pretty humbling.

I've had a 20 year career spanning 15 companies and in retrospect none of the work I did for any of those companies strikes me as meaningful. In most cases, if the work had not been done, project not implemented, things would have carried on regardless with no one much affected either way. Some large companies might have spent money differently - that's all.

My current contract is in the running for least meaningful ever. If the entire long running project I'm a part of didn't exist, the only effect would be that the people who work on it would work elsewhere. The 400,000 users would actually gain time that they are currently obliged to spend using what this project offers.

I have a few side projects in the creative writing space that added real value for real users over the past 15 years and probably changed and improved the way they worked, so there was meaning there, but that's pretty much in the past now.

I'm currently working on some dev tools for the healthcare sector - a side project that I have high hopes for - and if that completes I feel it has the potential to be meaningful and add real value down the chain to the lives of real people.

I once worked on a science lab automation to do the simulation/analysis work to process the asteriod samples. I think that's my meaningful work.

Interesting topic.

I used to work in a payday loan company for couple years, and while my collegues were awesome, the business itself was/is absolute bullshit. Meaningful? Far away from it.

I decided to try my own wings, and that has been one of the best decisions of my life. Software work has become more and more meaningful because for one, I get to decide what's done and when.

When I see a problem in my world, I ask myself if this problem would concern other people's worlds too. If it's a yes, I'll start working on it.

Fundamentally, if I can solve a pain point for others, doesn't it make the world a better place?

My latest meaningful (hobby) project has been working on the General Index published by Carl Malamud couple months ago. Science should be free, and accessible so mr. Malamud released a dump with over 107 million academic papers. I've been building a public search layer on top of this, with my angle being to find connections between scientists.

There's only a 1/6th of a dump, and very very POC phase but it works: https://spider.clousby.com/

I worked on an application that helps prevent train collisions. And another application to detect faulty doors on older trains to prevent passenger accidents.

For the longest time I was someone who relied on external validation of whether my work was meaningful or not. Outside of saving lives or delivering children, most of the jobs that most people do are probably not that 'meaningful'.

I spent the last three years working for a narcissist, which meant that I got minimal external validation, even when I knew the work I was doing was valuable. I learned to reframe and appreciate the intrinsic value of my effort, especially when I knew that my effort was of high quality. It's an approach that works for me and I recommend it to other people.

Probably a tool that I built for the local education department. It's used by public servants to work out where new schools need to be built, helps manage demand between schools etc. It's used every day by dozens of people. I don't have direct contact with them but I hear indirectly how valuable they find it.