Ask HN: Is it just me or do 99% of SWE jobs offers seem completely pointless?

I'm doing pretty good mentally without a job.

> “Instead of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.”

OP is not finding work dissatisfying because they are depressed, if they ever were depressed it is because software engineering today is a meaningless, valueless trudge ultimately to shift around some investor's money.

If the situation doesn't depress you it's only because you don't see it, but seeing it and reacting to it as the OP does is the only reasonable reaction. It is not a symptom of the sickness of the individual but of sickness of the larger system manifested in the individual.

To the OP: as a general rule I wouldn't seek out advice like this on HN, more comments will be undermining you and your observation of reality than will give you any meaningful advice.

What has worked for me is finding work that isn't repulsive (e.g. not actively and directly contributing to individual or ecological harm, of course they all do in some sense but many do it so directly you can't even look away without extreme cognitive dissonance), for a team of people that treat you as a human (no company will do this, but there are teams). No work is meaningful because we are in a bubble (not just finance) of unimaginable scale, in some capitalist fantasy land detached from reality (we aren't even really generating profits any more rather than shuffling around surplus value).

Acknowledge that you need a job to provide income, not meaning. Find other sources of meaning in your life (think Candide's garden), and try to keep sane.

Seriously I had more positive impact on more people's lives as a poverty wages barista than I do as a six figures software dev. That is depressing.

Did you fill out the HAM-D questionnaire in your head based off his post?

I'll take OP's assessment on its own merits and validate it and say the screwy work situation out there can be depressing.

Another interesting thing with replier is how he is trying to isolate you. You are alone in his view, or at least marginal, and have some deeply rooted defective aspect. The truth is OP is not alone in his thinking, as other posts in this thread can attest, and link to places like /r/antiwork where you can find more who think like this. You can see the move here to try to keep you isolated, and dull you on organizing together with others of a like mind.

Capitalism has it's faults, but just complaining, without a constructive alternative can lead to way worse outcomes.

As an example, think about Coke vs Pepsi vs everybody else who makes a cola. The products are very stable and basically equivalent. So billions get spent on manipulating customers. That means plenty of opportunity to create tools that aid in that manipulation. (Which is already an ethical grey zone, so it's no shock that people will go further.)

To me, and I'd imagine to you, this is absurdly pointless and wasteful. I'd be perfectly happy to ban most advertising, freeing up hundreds of billions per year, plus untold amounts of human time and attention. But for people who just want to make money, they seem willing to look past the vast waste.

I think the solution is to find work in areas beyond the markets where a few dominant companies are engaged in trench warfare over customers for stagnant, good-enough products.

Not only are many (most?) of SWE jobs quite questionable in their value, but they are also very inefficient in my experience, at least in bigger organizations. So you're not only dealing with the dissatisfaction of doing something that's pretty meh (at best), but also with the boredom of being super inefficient and knowing you could do so much more with your time.

Of course, we're all free to leave and do something else. But it's not easy to go against the current.

Not being able to work at 99% of the companies that employ your profession is arguably something that harms your ability to live happily.

I think there were some helpful ideas in that book, but also the author took a lot of liberty in the interpretation of data he cited.

For example, he spends a lot of time discussing lower rates of reported suicide at wartime, as if people go around attributing suicide as a cause of death to bodies they discover in a war zone. Or that someone who loses their life acting reckless in battle must be is inherently a happier person than someone who takes their own life some other way.

That's not all we know about OP though.

I remember interviewing one very sharp engineer who was desperate to get out of Facebook. He had been attracted by the exciting problems, but after a few years he was entirely sick of spending most of his time trying to shift metrics by fractions of a percent. Metrics whose only real meaning was, at best, increasing the money flowing into Facebook. And all of that was years before the recent revelations on the dangers FB poses and how little they care about that.

My current solution to this problem has been to work for an effective not-for-profit. It still has its problems, but my colleagues at least care about actual impact, and I'm still excited for the chance to make a dent in problems I care about.

(As an aside, I'll note that it's also possible to find meaning in commercial work. I love building things for users, and I'm happy to charge for them when we're creating real value. But given American managerial culture, user benefit is often at best a side effect at many companies.)