Ask HN: How do you find meaningful jobs?

I think satisfaction is largely subjective. There are people who can find satisfaction in the worst kind of shit. It's similar to how marathon runners and other endurance athletes "like" pain. That's one of the reasons companies look for people with athletic background and achievements - they're the ones who learned to embrace the suck.

I think meanings come from within and not really from jobs. All jobs have dreadful parts associated with them. You have to find your own meaning.

For me, I'm driven by rage :P.

I'll let you know if I ever find one. I wouldn't hold your breath.

I think, for me, a meaningful job implies at least a few basic things. One is that you’re doing work that someone else finds useful. Secondly, that you are not (consciously) screwing over your customer. Third thing is that you’re getting some sort of stimulation, whether that’s through intellectual problem solving, meeting people, travelling or the good fitness feeling after a physical workout. The final thing is feeling that your work is not taken for granted. This is without considering compensation. I don’t think I’ve worked anywhere that satisfied all of these things.

HPC computing is a good one. Solve the world’s major scientific problems

TBH, I've stopped believing that a job will give me meaning. I have to give meaning to the right job.

Learned that this is easier when: - company is small enough for me to be in direct contact with customers vs. seeing quotes from user research - time is spent mostly to help customers vs. show how smart we are to leadership - everyone can challenge each other to improve vs. stay stagnant - we have enough funding / cashflow to be able to look forward vs. worry about surviving today

Also a growing number of companies focused on sustainability, which is easier to project meaning onto: https://topstartups.io/?industries=Sustainability

I completely lost interest in the part of the software industry I worked in. I looked around to find what I thought needed doing (work with poverty and data at large scale [1]; and more recently radically more efficient circular food production systems with automation and data [2]). I ended up cofounding the organisations to do the work. I normally joke that nobody would let me run these organisations if they where hiring a CEO, but if I start them they won’t stop me.

[1] https://Akvo.org

[2] https://Johannas.org

I am slowly coming to understanding that a job where I am an employee will never give me satisfaction. Instead I focus on my family, hobbies and my own side projects hoping that one of them will male enough at some point so I do not have to work fulltime anymore. I am also gonna try to apply for university and finish my Masters to see if I can get job in something else than I do now.

The Ikigai image works out pretty well. I found working as a network engneer sysadmin at a MSP in a rural area pretty satisfying. It was kinda in keeping with 'get everyone connected' mission - not sure you can find that many other places than the developing world nowadays.

Often turning this sort of question around might provide some useful guidance. Say:

What do you consider to be interesting or meaningful work? (Not limiting it strictly to a "job").

Where or how do such organisations recruit or find talent or professionals?

I'm also increasingly of the view that the hiring problem has a MASSIVE "Market for Lemons" aspect to it, in which both candidates and opportunities have a tremendous problem in both accurately representing themselves and in being heard above the noise floor.

This exists for any sufficiently complex informational good (and both skilled labour and skilled labour gigs are informationally complex).

Re-reading the paper just now, I note that Akerlof makes several comments and observations, several of which which I'd not recalled though they've been central to much of my own thinking:

- That a direct consequence is that both high-quality buyers and sellers tend to exit the market. The buyers can't find what they're looking for, the sellers can't find a suitable buyer (or price).

- That hiring is a specific case Akerlof discusses, though he discusses the case of minority hiring. Ethical and senior-level hiring would have similar dynamics.

- That trust (or its absence) is a key factor.

There aren't any clear solutions, though generally greater transparency is a suggested approach. Services such as CarFaX, for example, have greatly improved efficiency and reduced deadweight losses in the used-car market.

https://viterbi-web.usc.edu/~shaddin/cs590fa13/papers/Akerlo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

I work at Evergrow [1] on climate fintech for regulated carbon markets.

If meaning in your career is an issue you're wrestling with, I empathize. I know how difficult it can be to do work that you no longer find meaningful. Many of my friends and family are able to treat their work as just a job, but for whatever reason, I haven't been able to do so.

So I quit my job in January to take a step back and think about what I wanted to do with my career. And I decided that as long as the comp was reasonable, I'd be willing to work on any technical problem connected with climate change.

I was surprised at how many interesting tech opportunities were available -- no end of ML and computer vision companies, for example, on everything from recycling robots to weather modeling. And that's leaving aside more traditional full-stack SWE work for collecting and presenting data. If you're interested in climate work specifically, I strongly recommend reaching out to Work on Climate [2] or ClimatePeople [3].

Ultimately, I joined Evergrow because I thought that understanding the capital dynamics in these markets would be most critical. I also thought the team was outstanding -- pragmatic, driven, and very high-integrity.

And if you want to consider different sectors more broadly, I've heard good things about 80000 Hours [4].

[1]: evergrow.com [2]: workonclimate.org [3]: climatepeople.com [4]: 80000hours.org

I'm in the same boat. My plan is to stay at $company and learn as much as possible about cloud, devops and data Governance and maybe try to find a position in the Astronomy society. Not sure if it pans out.

I found a job as research software engineer (there was a thread about it here on HN yesterday) in a national research institute in New Zealand (NIWA). After some years I was paid by the institute to help maintain an Open Source tool used to run the numerical weather prediction models in UK/Au/NZ.

Now I am working on another workflow engine, CWL, used in life sciences and getting more popular. I find it a lot more enjoyable these types of projects used in research, where anyone can contribute via an open source community. My current work is sponsored by Curii in the USA.

The salary is definitely a lot less than FAANG's, but I stopped worrying about that a long time ago, and decided to focus on what I had fun and felt realized. There are lots of groups and companies looking for RSE's, you can find some in the Who's Hiring thread, some times, but ResearchGate and Google will probably give you a lot more options.

p.s.: if you get a job in a research institute, chances are that it is also related to government, so they might be able to sponsor your visa if you'd like to move somewhere else as well.

Is there something inherently wrong with finding meaning (or perhaps motivation) from compensation? Particularly if you're using money for worthwhile reasons? You might be surprised at how motivating a big bag of stock options in a unicorn startup can be (ok, maybe not so much in recent times :-)).

I changed industry at a significant pay cut (30%) to work in construction of public transport. Sure the day to day still often sucks but you at least know you’re building a good thing which meaningfully improves my city, especially for those who cannot travel by car, financially or because of a disability.

It required research into the industry and real consideration of how my skills transfer so I could convey that during interviews, and I started in a quite junior role. But once I proved myself I have risen fairly quickly. It doesn’t pay anything like the monster salaries I see here, but it’s more than enough for me to live on.

design manager for a toy brand, bounced around a little in the company.

the job itself is fun but the most consistent ingredients for satisfaction (other than compensation) have been: flexibility in projects to choose from, autonomy/lack of micromanagement(!), time flexibility, having a boss I respect or at least tolerate positively, and emotionally mature team members. It's been a pretty obvious 1:1 in change of happiness when one or more of those elements change, and I tend to correct it in a hurry.

Years ago I switched from a development engineer track to a support engineer track. I find the work very meaningful because a customer comes to you with a technical issue that needs to be solved. In the end, you're helping a person to succeed. It's a short-term challenge with a concrete, measurable goal. This path has taken me everywhere up and down the stack from Wireshark to data warehouses! I love coming to work, there's always someone to help, a new skill to learn, a tool or monitor that needs building...

Put in your résumé or cover letter that you're looking for meaningful jobs. Some will throw it away, some will prioritize it. Continue the interview with whoever makes it through the filter. If the interviewer has been paying attention, they'll feel compelled to explain what makes the job meaningful.

I'm working at a fintech company. The tagline here is building digital infrastructure. Generally, digital transactions are a lot harder in countries with higher corruption, because they have to go through a lot more red tape. It's not a low hanging fruit; Silicon Valley will make the tech but they won't deal with the cultural issues. There's also a higher level of fraud. Many payment gateways will freeze your account if you sell tickets or perfumes, because they don't want to deal with that.

So digital infrastructure is a fitting term. Taking the analogy, we do have dirt roads and small roads, but it's a bottleneck for economic growth. We're building the digital highways and bridges and rails for the big and small companies so they can focus on what they do best.

Esri makes mapping software, with a focus on business-oriented mapping; the stuff militaries and corporations and governments of all scales rely on.

My own contribution is small but there is flexibility to shape outcomes and push for improvements to the user experience. The big picture contribution to society is large and it is rewarding seeing the software used to make governments and organizations more efficient. The opportunities for open data and citizen engagement are huge, and the public is getting more exposure as climate change, natural disasters, and epidemics drive a need for informational maps.

It is gratifying seeing the growth of awareness of GIS and geospatial tech, but I continue to believe it is wildly underutilized, and I try to contribute to changing that.

It helps that I can use the software in my free time and do really cool stuff with it. That and meeting customers at our annual events is deeply rewarding - we have really cool, awesome users.

I work as a graphics programmer at a big AAA game company

Really interesting since there is a lot of math involved and you’re pushing the hardware to its absolute limits

Also really satisfying to see people playing the game and see your own changes visually in it

The learning curve is very steep though

Examples:

- University labs, where they hire full time staff (not just students) to support ongoing projects.

- Non-profits, who usually handle lots of data, or political parties (usually crazy and fast-paced, but can be fun)

I work in a small company (co-op) co-founded with colleagues of previous gigs. Our clients are mostly nonprofits and political parties. Our clients do really nice things and most are fun to work with (as long as one can stomach that most orgs have their baggage). It wasn't easy to start, but now we have way too much work and it pays well.

I always chose meaningful, interesting work over higher pay. I regret it.

Advice to my younger self would be: get rich (financially independent) first, then follow your passion.

there's a recent video by Louis Rossmann on "the myth of passion" that I think is very relevant to this: IBP3ZF2ljGU

personally, I think the meaning is in the relationships you form, not in the work itself (unless it's charity? haven't done that, wouldn't know), or maybe on what the compensation allows you to do (in your personal life)

as an example, I met a guy who was one of the top software engineers in a startup (he might have been one of the first members), he was in it purely for the money, so he could afford to pay for aviation classes/certifications, from the beginning he wasn't interested in the work, but it allowed him a [financially] comfortable life, and the aviation stuff

Certainly not because of compensantion, but I switched to academia after 10 years as a consultant by doing a PhD in bioinformatics. I now work in a cancer research centre.

There is a serious lack of people with computational background in the field, very hard to compete with the market in terms of compensation. So we are left with the rare cases where the motivation of the type of work beats that, or the few places (e.g. Broad in the US) that actually have special consideration in terms of salary for computational biologists.

Going through a PhD is probably the one thing that would scare people away as compensation is usually dowright ridiculous, but as someone else mentioned you can find plenty of positions that will but require it. Pretty much all of the students from our Master's degree who don't even have a PhD find jobs in the sector.