Ask HN: Where do you find your sense of purpose working in the private sector?
After almost 20 years working in the public sector, I've come to the realization that my passion for public service no longer outweighs my many day-to-day frustrations. A sense of purpose is what kept me in government for so long, but the bureaucracy, the aversion to change, and the outdated technology have made loving my work more and more difficult. I've been contemplating moving into the private sector for a long time now--I'm just worried that I'll end up feeling lost in a world that is driven by profit. I recognize however that my view is that of an outsider. I've never worked in business, and in truth, I don't really know what drives people. I'm hoping the good folks of HN can provide some insight. Where do you find your sense of purpose working in the private sector?
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadAs a software engineer, I like solving complex technical problems and learning software, management, and people skills. It doesn't matter to me what I'm doing as long as it's ethical and I can grow.
Now I'm in completely the wrong forum to say this, as this place obviously favors one view, but can you say that building companies just for the purpose of profits is actually ethical?
or increased efficiency which is important too. I work on software that makes factory and warehouse operations more power efficient, and that feels meaningful to me!
Ignoring broken markets like in the case of monopolies (and my company is a small one--definitely not a monopoly!), profit means you're creating value. People are willing to pay you more money than something costs to produce. That's a good thing for everyone involved. It creates jobs, customers are happy, and investors make money.
"Profit" isn't just a bunch of extra cash that gets buried in the ground. It goes back to shareholders (again, ignoring outliers like Apple which horde cash...) and gets reinvested in other profitable enterprises creating even more value.
Mind you, for me it's obvious my employers software is useful as it is used in large construction project globally. Hence, for me I can point at buildings and say our work helped in achieving them.
I also to like to work with other people - there is very nice sense of achievement when a team manages to ship the next version to happy customers.
Very reasonable people wonder how anyone can spend time in the public sector. They don't seem to get much done there, they waste a lot of people's hard earned money. They can be viewed as at best a necessary evil, and at worst downright corrupt. I don't agree 100% with those notions, but they aren't crazy either.
“Profit” in the public sector would indicate that too much tax money was collected, because there shouldn’t be a surplus at the end of a year. There shouldn’t be a deficit either, but that’s a different story.
I work in online payments right now. It's no Stripe - we're a smaller shop. But ultimately it feels good to know that many small businesses and mom-n-pop shops depend on us for their livelihood.
On the flip-side, I have a friend who spent many years working for this weird ponzi scheme / multi-level-marketing shop (overseas) that spent their insane earnings funding really bad movies starring the founder's adult kids. I have to imagine that person would have a much harder time finding a sense of purpose than I do at my current employer.
A) the ability to innovate through R&D. Perhaps this is egotistical but it brings a lot of purpose to my work.
B) developing people’s careers and offering a fair opportunity for success.
Yes, perhaps these purposes are not quite as altruistic but I am passionate about such a job and great people I work with.
On a more personal level as a programmer there's always some exciting problem to solve, something that can be optimised. Also, being in the games industry I get to interact with a lot of artists which is something I've always looked for.
Or (tongue-in-cheek) find a large non-tech Fortune 500 company, you'll feel like you're working for the government since they move slow and have lots of bureaucracy.
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.
*In theory. In practice, there are all types of companies that exist due to regulatory quirks / that customers are forced to interact with. If you flip it, technically people are forced to work with the government whether they like it or not and regardless of the quality of service. In the private sector they have a choice of using your company. At the extreme, if it is bad enough, they can start their own.
That is not a realistic proposition, either. People are as forced to use private services as they are forced to use government ones. There might be a competitor, but even that does not necessarily provide cheaper or better service or products.
And I've also found my most satisfying jobs are where I can bring up junior people, and shape their careers. Be the manager you wish you had and bring up your reports to be managers like that too, and to pass it on themselves - the good you do will keep on happening after you've left the scene, possibly for ever.
If the good people don't step up to manage, the bad ones will. Increasing the world's share of good ones is a worthy goal.
You’re more likely to find a decent trade of your time, skills, and social connections for money, stock options, bonuses, and a benefits plan.
Treat it like a mercenary and you’ll do okay.
Now that isn’t to say that you, an individual, cannot find you own passions and purpose. These come from within and you won’t find them validated in a capital market. Know what they are and try to align your opportunities with them when you can and you can go pretty far.
I work on improving the treatment of cancer through the application of deep learning. I am employed by a FAANG and work very closely with several leading nonprofit academic medical centres. Our primary driver is real-world patient impact (rather than, say, revenue or just academic publications).
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of downsides to working in this space but lacking a sense of purpose isn't one of them (for me).
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.
Would I be disappointed if my project got cancelled? Yes. I think it would be a missed opportunity for my employer to make a meaningful change in an important space.
Am I fearful of it being cancelled? Absolutely not. I'll just find a new gig and move on with my life.
Last time my (much more commercially-focussed) project got canned, I had four very exciting offers lined up within a few weeks. All of those internal and within my very tight geographic constraints (couple of cities in Europe). I didn't even bother interviewing with other companies as I felt no need.
In the end, the cancellation turned out to be a great thing for me personally as it forced me to move. In the process of that move I found the current -- much more fulfilling -- gig.
Much as I love it, at the end of the day it's just a job. There are plenty of other opportunities out there if I ever need to find a new one.
I don't lie to myself, either. What I create is not making the world a better place by much at all. I'm making industry software that helps create products. Nothing more, nothing less. I steer clear of miltech or creating software for police or secret services, but apart from that, all it does is create value for some shareholders somewhere while pumping out products that are probably unnecessary and wasteful.
It's an interior conflict that does not go away, and I won't say I have resolved any of it for me. I know that I'm not contributing to saving the world, and it sucks. But I'm also not really in a position to change that. Furthermore, I'm not in a field where governments usually look for talent, and I do enjoy the freedom of creating my own systems with the architecture I prefer and not being constrained by the tight requirements of gov systems.
The little purpose I do find is in creating quality software that kind of makes stuff more efficient and by extension, helps progress towards a more sustainable future with less manual labor. But, in a way, that's what everyone on Earth does, so it's not much.
- What influences your day to day experience is the size of the firm for which you work. Big gov and big corp have much more in common than a startup and a small charity group. Think about how the abundance of ressources, staff, speed of change, stability and reputation management will affect your job. Big firms often have two employees for the same role (in case one of them goes away), while small firm often have two roles for the same employee.
- For most people, ''vision'' is a buzzword. By construction, it should come out of your imagination ; it is a desired change on actual reality. This is why vision jobs are less secure than 'pragmatic' jobs. Sense of purpose is an experience where your action are aligned with your vision ; you understand how your work builds the vision. It gives fire in the belly!
- Money being a lag indicator of the state of affairs, profit or security seeking people (which are the same thing with a different name) often end up in big organizations. People with a strong sense of purpose would rather want to join a small group with an non-established business model which aims to change the world.
In other words :
Profit & Security => Established & working business model => big organization => hierarchy with redundance => low sense of purpose
Financial risk => Unproven business model => small firm => too much jobs for few people => high sense of purpose.