You might as well have asked who among us won the lottery.
I've been struggling with this for years now; after 4 boring jobs I finally gave up even the expectation that what I'll be asked to do will be even remotely interesting (or socially useful). The chance of landing an interesting job is absolutely minuscule - the market rewards whatever it rewards at the moment, and that's where jobs flock. These days, one of the bigger thing the market rewards is writing a web-based CRUD that's 99% chrome, 1% of actual functionality. Extra points if you can get some user data to sell to adtech industry.
(My own criteria for "interesting" these days are a bit different. I'm not looking for "interesting technical problems", as in advanced CS stuff, but "interesting outcomes" - pushing the humanity forward, or alleviating a social problem for some group of people. I find it hard to even find companies that apparently work on something like that, and even then it seems they have to do lots of boring work as well.)
--
EDIT: Then again there's this topic that has been casting shadow on my happiness for a long time, that I finally seem to be able to define. Maybe our civilization has finally crushed my soul, and I noticed it just now. But it feels to me that the revealed goal of our market-driven world is to abstract everything away with money. The end-game is that as an individual, your responsibility in the society is to pick a skill - whatever skill - that makes you money, and then to use money to solve everything else with your life. It doesn't matter what you do, there is only one meaningful meta-skill - making money fall out of the system, into your bank account.
Maybe I'm just realizing something obvious that parents should have taught me when I was a kid. I don't know. Maybe it was wrong of me to seek meaning in the things one does? Maybe that approach is no longer supported by our civilization?
My father-in-law mentioned something I find quite interesting to my wife: Don't look for a job that will fulfill every aspect of your life - that's what your family is for. And if you do find one, your family life might not suffer.
Not all of us are raising families, but I think it highlights a bigger points. Work is not what builds societies (certain jobs do harm society I think, mostly by destroying it's moral virtues). People relationships are what build societies and build happiness.
And you're right - there are a lucky, select few who get jobs that can also influence society.
I'm not worried about that though (anymore - I was for a time though). With my job, I can provide and care for those around me (provide for my family and generally have positive, uplifting interactions with those around me).
I have resigned myself that it's not my job to fix society, it's our job to fix society, and I'm doing my part where I am. From my perspective I have more than enough to do locally anyway: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17176036
That's definitely something I need to think through more. And what your father-in-law said sounds wise. Thanks for sharing it.
The reason I ended up in tech is in part my fascination about tech, especially as applied to uplifting ourselves and solving our problems (yes, I watched way too much Star Trek: The Next Generation in my formative years). I never thought much about family - in fact, for the most of my life, I felt it's something of a side endeavour. I still feel it shouldn't be the sole focus of a person, though I definitely believe it's more important than I believed in the past.
Same for relationships. And small communities. I feel that maybe we overdid this globalization thing. Maybe global competition and centralization of various kinds of innovative work is more efficient, but it also doesn't seem healthy. Living in a city, there's no such thing as "local community" anymore. Not even neighbours.
> I have resigned myself that it's not my job to fix society, it's our job to fix society, and I'm doing my part where I am.
Still, I'd like to feel like I'm actually doing my part beyond just participating in the economy as consumer. I have specialized skills, I'm not dumb. But I have hard time finding opportunities to do things I'd know could help meaningfully and effectively. There must be something. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.
Your comment you linked to is golden. I'm favouriting it. Those are definitely words I'll try to remember from now on.
I've also thought about this a lot. My last years of work life have been quite boring as well. On the other hand I realize that, as you write in your first post, are scarce and precious.
A few years ago I applied for a really interesting jobs within Telematics - one of my favorite areas. So I called them, got the CTO on the phone and he had almost no time for me. Then I wrote a mail with my formal application to them. It was appealing and they replied with some coding riddles. I guess I did well enough and was one of 2 or 3 people to get invited. Of course before the in-person interview I studied some Algorithms & Data Structures book. At the same time I did Scala programming although it wasn't expected to know that but people worked with it.
Anyway, during the interview they made me sweat for at least 3 hours. Every now and then also reminding me how good the other people working there are - the one guy having worked 8 years at a company writing DBMS in London. So yeah, after leaving the communication was difficult but the CTO said the people said they liked me and they would hire me despite my shortcomings - I would have to unlearn stuff. The offer was really bad, in fact even the most senior people got below average salary.
At the end I started working at a company that worked on a moonshoot project involving a CAD program in the browser. Even some mathematician who worked in Japan on Robotics was there. Salary was good enough but the people were borderline insane. I quit after 3 months and landed a below average paid job, but with a lot of nice people. I don't regret that. Work was mostly boring but the environment was nice.
Anyways, not living in the Bay Area, I guess things are they different again.
For me, the most rewarding work is the volunteering I do. I coach various youth sports. I have no pressure to win so I can focus on letting the kids enjoy themselves, have positive interactions, and learn a little about the sports. Seeing them gain confidence and passionately work toward something is a major reward for me.
I still enjoy trying to match a user's expectations with the software I write. But, it's balanced by other aspects like coaching and being in a family.
How do you make it work? In the experience of every condo dweller I know personally, people know their neighbours mostly to the extent they bother being involved in their HOA meetings; otherwise, everyone walks their separate paths, only greeting (and maybe briefly chatting with) the neighbours as they meet them on the stairway.
It helps that it's shaped more like townhouses than an apartment building. We have a large interior carpark/garden where the kids play, which creates a lot of incidental contact and I think the kids are a huge factor in making a neighborhood feel, it creates an easy shared experience and proximity means you can easily help people out with eg shared babysitting. There's also a few people who make a dedicated effort to encourage community, like trick or treating, and it's a place where half the residents have been there over ten years. I joined the HOA in my first year which has definitely helped me get to know others.
I haven't given it a ton of thought because I have a job I enjoy from time to time, and enough downtime to pursue a hobby or two - I guess I'm in a pretty balanced situation and am okay with it.
In reading your post, I had to stop and think for a bit.
I agree with you but want to give the thought that family can be one's top priority without looking for it fill every aspect of one's life.
You are correct - no one is above great tragedy and loss.
If my family was taken from me unexpected, I don't I'd say that I wished for more time at the office, or working on personal hobbies. I do believe in balance, but the point I'm trying to make is that family can be the number one priority.
The mindset of "I can be happy because I have x" (in this case where x = family), is indeed dangerous. And while the mindset of "I have chosen to be happy, and my top priority is my family" will bring sadness and pain if they are suddenly taken, I feel like that pain and sadness will have been worth it. Well, it is for me. That for others it might not is understandable.
Please note as well that I'm not advocating self-deprecation or letting your family take advantage or you, or throwing yourself under the bus for an uncaring family - it's a group effort and there a lot of ways to appear to put your family first in a way that's detrimental to one's self.
For me when I think of dedication in family life, I think of the story, "the gift of the magi". Nothing of true importance was sacrificed, and yet the others needs were prioritized.
I believe that the inability for business in our society to be socially aware or responsibile stems from the separation of private life and public life. I can't remember what book this was, but it looked at what war criminals were like in private life. Its main point was that, in private, war criminals were nice guys.
According to the book, the transition from being war criminals by day and family men by night, was possible through some rationalisation acrobatics or detachment from responsibility. As an example of detachment, the Nazi concentration camps didn't have an atypical ratio of psychopath to average joe. The predominant "average joes" would offload responsibility by telling themselves that this is not their decision, but that this is the _current policy of the organistation_, which is an interestingly complex statement, in the subconscious sense. It detaches the organisation participant from the organisation, and it detaches the organisation from their policy.
To come back to business v family, I think the old koan holds: separation isn't good. The rule of thumb in social situations is if detachment or separation is the easiest route, you're doing something wrong. Business is social action by necessity. So should we separate action from responsibility? What do we think of someone who is selfish and avoids responsibility?
> The predominant "average joes" would offload responsibility by telling themselves that this is not their decision, but that this is the _current policy of the organistation_, which is an interestingly complex statement, in the subconscious sense. It detaches the organisation participant from the organisation, and it detaches the organisation from their policy.
Yes, your job as the "average Joe" is to be loyal to the organization. That statement doesn't sound surprising to me, and it took me a few seconds to realize why. I've heard it before. I grew up in a religion where there was an organization, and your job was to be loyal to God by being loyal to the Organization. Only by being on the outside now I see how this is a neat way to release responsibility. See also: "Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.".
> The rule of thumb in social situations is if detachment or separation is the easiest route, you're doing something wrong. Business is social action by necessity. So should we separate action from responsibility?
It was easier back when you were naturally limited by geography to do business with people you also knew "after hours". These days, business and personal relationships are almost entirely non-overlapping. Hell, it's a common advice to avoid that overlap.
There should be a name to the phenomenon that humans seem to become crushingly depressed once they start to grasp the big picture dynamics of the system they're encapsulated within. I think it's an effect that we're not quite prepared for as we reach closer and closer to science dotting all its i's.
It's as if childhood primes us to think that life is all about figuring out what the heck is going on around us, and as a consequence some of us go into something science-y, but then we reach a certain stage in adulthood where we feel like we have a pretty good rough closed form solution to the problem, and now the journey all of a sudden seems empty and without purpose and we just keep going with the lives 16-year old selves planned out for us, with too much cost sunk to pivot. I almost suspect the end-state of science is not some sort of blissful state where we feel like we understand everything, but an utter dread and feeling of emptiness at no longer having a purpose.
I had a dream where I was in a coma for 20 years, woke up, and found that AI was now able to trivially answer even the most difficult research questions I could imagine. In my dream I visited my old workplace, and found that while the CEO was still there the ease at which questions could be answered made the humans more supervisers than researchers.
For some time in my dream I was lost, not sure what my value was as a human being without my skills that I've spent decades refining.
Then I remembered that humans have inherent value, that I am not my work, and went to a park to meditate and teach karate. It made me think, in my dream, how even if a machine could teach karate better, I was not doing it for society -- I was doing it for myself.
Realizing that you are not your work, and are not defined by your work; that humans have inherent value and you have every right to simply be happy when the opportunity arises; that the Puritan virtues of work are an illusion, and that humans should follow their passion; that the illusion of the necessity of work often prevents people from ever discovering their passion in the first place.
It was probably my best dream, and I approach life quite differently now. I think when I feel like I have a closed form solution, it is much the same spirit as an AI that will solve your problems for you.
Personally, understanding the "big picture dynamics" of systems is kind of an intellectual porn for me. I loved doing that for as long as I remembered. It always came with the sense of control - understanding the systems means you could tweak it to your liking, if you so desired.
Finally realizing that the system in which we live is basically uncontrollable by an individual within it has blindsided me. So many interesting things happening, so many interesting things that need to be done still, and yet all you and I get to be are observers and consumers of whatever the system happens to spit out.
The trick for me is realizing that P doesn't easily equal NP, which means that solving satisfaction problems is a challenging thing to do. But everyone knows when it has been solved. Lots of people have an idea of what should happen, few know how to do it. If you find that for some reason you're uniquely qualified to produce some process, you can figure out if it solves someone's problem. Then other people can share their resources which they are uniquely qualified to make, and their problems are then solvable in P time, while they would have to do the NP task of learning how you do your thing. Then you as an individual have a lot of leverage because any change you make to your system, everyone will have to use, provided it's a verifiable improvement.
I haven't given up on thinking I might be able to influence the system. Specifically, I hope my volunteer work on snowdrift.coop can move the needle a bit.
https://wiki.snowdrift.coop is probably the best introduction right now; the main site is in the process of being updated.
There should be a name to the phenomenon that humans seem to become crushingly depressed once they start to grasp the big picture dynamics of the system they're encapsulated within.
I don’t think “existential angst” fits. As the name implies, you get that just by existing and being trapped by the limitations of being a mortal human.
You’re talking about the specific meaninglessness of modern work. Marx suggests that capitalism affords us some real freedoms, but at the cost of our feeling of purpose and solidarity. And, Marxists would argue, this makes us easier to exploit.
Marx and his inheritors failed to produce systems that solved this problem, and maybe that indicates that the problem is deeper than just forms of ownership and control.
But as a problem description, I think he was onto something.
This feeling is because in our current stage of development, we are very primitive spiritually. Some of us don't even believe we have a soul. That it is all meaningless. Science in its current form also looks at our material world and concludes the same. Nasa tells us we are just a speck of crap in a giant space as well, with no beginning or end.
You guys talk about boxes. Well there are huge ones for the mind, carefully constructed to be believable for the masses. Too complicated to understand, they require you to put beliefs in people with credentials, who will repeat to you what they found in the books they were given, or the math they got shown.
If you want to understand your purpose here, you have to step outside of scientific thinking to start with, and that's a huge problem for almost everybody. You have to look at origins of the matrix we are living in, the illuminati, the Egyptians, book of the dead, the occult.
The Aeon of Horus is here: and its first flower may well be this: that, freed of the obsession of the doom of the Ego in Death, and of the limitation of the Mind by Reason, the best men again set out with eager eyes upon the Path of the Wise, the mountain track of the goat, and then the untrodden Ridge, that leads to the ice-gleaming pinnacles of Mastery!
You have found the boundaries of the box, and anything you find outside the box will be judged against everything inside the box. There are a lot of people inside the box, and the box is small, so they make a lot of noise. When you get outside of the box you need to also get away from the box so that you can't hear the judging.
> ...also get away from [the people in] the box...
This may be the harder part. I consider some of the people in the box to be friends. But then again, if I think about it... maybe they're outside the box too, but we're on opposite faces, and so close to it that we are still looking at each other _through_ the box.
So here I am, with the map of the boundaries of the box finally taking shape. Now the question is, how do I exit the box? I'd like to walk around on the outside and check it out.
Also, is leaving this box even a good idea? What if everyone left the box at the same time? Would the world collapse then? (I can't help myself, I tend to be interested in the global view as well.)
Well, that's where universal basic income has some validity.
It's a very nice idea.
It does have the potential to create localized unimpressedness though; the question is how powerful the temporarily-put-out groups would be, and whether the backlash would remove your power as well.
In my mid twenties this was hard for me to grasp. I was working as an electronics design engineer for a company that made low-end industrial controls. We had a customer who had what seemed like the dream company to me: he made robots for animatronics and lab applications. One day I was talking to him about how exciting the work was and his answer surprised me: it used to be fun in the beginning but after doing it for a few years, it was just another job.
I work with wireless sensors now. Yes, it's technically interesting, but it's pretty boring.
Why? I've discovered over the years that I am far more excited by making customers happy than by doing technically interesting work. I've come to see the technology as a means to an end, not the end in itself.
I wonder if there are some people who are exceptions.
I worked with an software developer at my last job who was incredible. He seemed to have a strong interest for the technology, no matter what technology that was. At the time, it was iOS, and he was an absolute master of iOS. I was constantly impressed by his attention to detail and emphasis on quality, well written, technically challenging code.
I've loosely followed him since, and he seems to be absolutely crushing it wherever he goes. He's spanned many different roles and seems to do enjoy taking on new challenges in the form of different programming languages / platforms.
When I think back to him, I remember someone who seemed to just love programming. In a way, he was like a Robot. It doesn't appear to matter much to him what he's working on, or if it's "fulfilling" in the ethical sense.... He just enjoys the process of coding, and being damn good at it.
>I've loosely followed him since, and he seems to be absolutely crushing it wherever he goes.
Question - is his management crushing it as well or are they crushing him? Is he good at standing up for himself and not letting management crush him?
I think a lot of enthusiastic and brilliant people get destroyed by their managers exploiting them. So the individual goes from crushing it to getting crushed. Management really has to enable that kind of person to succeed.
> Is he good at standing up for himself and not letting management crush him?
Yes. This. He was very, very good at standing his ground and asserting that his time and effort was being spent well.
Multiple times I witnessed management clashing with him over something. Usually he felt like more time and effort needed to go into a certain part of code. Rather than just "get it done" he took pride in his work and wanted it done RIGHT.
In general he was so good / fast that he could get it done "RIGHT" within management's expectations. But occasionally he would take on a big chunk of work, and management would try and shut him down. 9/10 they failed, he would do the work, and a damn good job of it.
I can tell you that for this particular person he needed to be silo'd and given time.
A good manager would realize that his quality of work was top notch but that he was at times difficult to get along with. He was a perfectionist who held those around him to the same standards, and that often clashed with the business needs and even sometimes other teammates. A business generally isn't concerned with the product being perfect, they're more concerned with it getting to market on time.
So my suggestion to any manager that has an employee like this: Value him for what he is. Put him on MISSION CRITICAL tasks, where you need a rock solid implementation. Let him work for 2 weeks without interruption.
For other tasks that are perhaps not as "critical", throw other team mates at them.
It's always case specific, but it usually involves the manager supporting them by providing time and/or space. rubicon33's example and response is a great one. Put them in a situation where their strengths can be well utilized and the effect of their weaknesses minimized.
Also, not everybody has the personality or energy to constantly stand up for themselves. A lot of people will eventually crumble or leave. Don't make it so the only way the employee can do their best (e.g. what rubicon33 describes) is if they put their foot down and scream.
>Why? I've discovered over the years that I am far more excited by making customers happy than by doing technically interesting work. I've come to see the technology as a means to an end, not the end in itself.
100% agree. I'm a Data Scientist and I'm supposed to have one of the most exciting and sexiest jobs in tech. But after many years of doing this I've come to realize that working with good customers and seeing them happy is much more rewarding than playing with the latest machine learning thing. New tech is just the thing that makes it easier to tackle a customer use case.
There's a strong relationship between the quality of the people I'm working for and my sense of the work being interesting. If the people I'm working for are unrealistic a-holes no amount of technical novelty can make up for that.
I've seen this sentiment many times here on HN. I wonder, who are your customers exactly?
At one of my previous jobs, "my customers" were the managers of some company who asked managers of the company I worked in to deliver some software that will be sold as a part of a software package, to be used by someone downstream. I don't know who ended up using my work and how, because we were isolated by several abstraction layers from that. I did care about the happiness of those people, little I knew about them. But I couldn't care less about the happiness of our customers - a company I didn't hold in high regard, with managers not being particularly helpful. I suppose I did get some small sense of satisfaction when their managers told my managers that the work is good. But that was it.
So, are we talking about happiness of customers, or happiness of people actually using the product? Those are very often different groups. Or, in other words, are we talking about finding happiness in generalized servitude, or making people's lives better?
I was referring to people who were actually using the product. I've had a number of jobs in my life, including being in the services division of a product company and also in an internal consulting team of an extremely large non-tech company. I would typically interact directly with the people who are using what we were building. So I could see exactly what they needed and did not need (despite what they said they wanted) and manage that so they were happy with the end product.
I've also worked in situations you've described. My only interaction with the end user is through layers of middle management. I found that environment to be extremely demotivating and certainly no direct sense of satisfaction. One of the small benefits of being a Data Scientist right now is that a lot of managers don't really understand what it is I do so I get some interaction with the end-user from a requirements and solution validation standpoint. But I suspect in a few years Data Scientists will become invisible cogs (like everybody else) in the Enterprise IT machine.
Personally I work in the health tech space - specifically a pharmacy. Our customers are people who are able to get cheaper medications and better health help and pharmacy technicians who are more productive due to our software. The job is technically just Django/CRUD with some integrations, but the impact can be fulfilling.
I don't think you can get that kind of satisfaction in B2B software as a developer (only a salesperson/exec).
What are the thing that is intresting ( as per your opinion, if you are willing to share? )? I mean not everybody will get the job they like and it will be the boring thing to do ( but, still we have to do this boring job! ). But, life shouldn't be boring and it should be beautiful and enjoying.
The interesting thing isn't the technology, it's what the users/customers are doing with it. It's how it improves their lives, simplifies their business, enables them to build other products and increase profits, etc.
I personally think the people working on things like database and filesystem performance are doing really cool work. Any time you're taking conference papers and turning it into code to solve a particularly hairy problem... that's pretty cool.
Two kinds of "work": work that gives you money, and work that gives you value. They are not necessarily the same one.
Most people have to work for money. The best we can do is to gather more "money" (or resources). So that you can dedicate more of your time to generate, as you said, "interesting outcomes".
I recommend the book "Your Money or Your Life" by Vicki Robin. I learnt a lot relevant ideas from it.
> Maybe I'm just realizing something obvious that parents should have taught me when I was a kid. I don't know. Maybe it was wrong of me to seek meaning in the things one does? Maybe that approach is no longer supported by our civilization?
Ouch, this resonated. I've been walking this path with you.
Sometimes I make my own food. Or grow it. Or pickle it. It would be more "efficient" to buy such food in many cases. But if it gives me pleasure, I trade my time to do it.
My opinion: the point of life is not to acquire so much money that you can avoid doing any difficult things and wrap yourself in a cocoon of comfort. The point of life is to find your own good life and live it. That will entail some difficulties (at a minimum the difficulty of seeking your own definition of the good life, which is hard!). You may find that in your work (lucky you!) or you may have to work to support yourself and find this good life in other areas.
I've favorited more comments in this thread than anything else on HN ever. Thanks for the great thoughts. I can add tangentially that these questions, these considerations, were pursued almost maniacally by David Foster Wallace, especially later in his life. You may find satisfaction especially in his last, unfinished novel, The Pale King, which purports especially to treat the immense spiritual gravity that he thought pertained to boredom itself, the awful tedium that so many of us have to suffer in the modern marketplace. Not, like, the boredom of having nothing to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon, which I don't think exists anymore; more the ugly struggle to, as you say, find a meaningful life amid meaningless work and interactions.
When I wrote my edit to the comment, I didn't expect much reaction to my confused ranting. I was surprised to discover it resonates so strongly with people here. I guess I'm nowhere near alone in thinking those thoughts, and going through this process.
This is the lens through which von Neumann and Morgenstern saw all of human behavior, and their "rational" economics has been hugely influential in public policy. I use scare quotes because I disagree that the approach is rational -- many things in life can't be measured in dollars, not even dollars! (E.g. you can't compare a dollar today with a dollar ten years from now. Regardless of your discounting strategy, that money is going to mean something different to you in ten years.)
Your position is a great example of this phenomenon -- there's not really any amount of money that can compensate for a lack of inspiration at work. You might be willing to give up on interesting work for enough dollars, and the rational economist would say that this is the measure of how valuable interesting work is. But there's a long history of studies, notably by Kahneman and Tversky among many others, showing that framing human motivation this way leads to all sorts of paradoxes.
So yes, we have a strong tendency to measure everything with money -- this outlook is deeply embedded in our economic and political systems -- and it makes people miserable because it's a terrible way to account for human happiness.
"I use scare quotes because I disagree that the approach is rational"
Agreed. For the most part, going to church is not economically rational. For the most part, having children is not economically rational. For the most part, being monogamous to one's spouse is not economically rational. For the most part, patriotism to one's country is not economically rational.
In a slightly different sense, going to space, or colonizing Mars, would all be economically irrational.
I'm wary of a definition of "rational" that tends take all of the things that humans hold dear, and declares much of it "irrational".
We do innovate. What we don't do however, is giving everybody a job in innovation.
These days, one of the bigger thing the market rewards is writing a web-based CRUD that's 99% chrome, 1% of actual functionality. Extra points if you can get some user data to sell to adtech industry.
I don't think they are rewarded on the grand scheme of things. Software has always showed a winner-takes-all structure and most software disappear. Take for example the game industry. 15 years ago, you would have talk to anybody, they would have told you the market is mature and they are making money on making movie-based games. Today, most players (publishers, studios, etc) of that era have disappeared (Im too lazy to get the long list of publishers that are gone).
Also innovation can act in a subtle way. Take the iphone for example. People are more productive because of it. That means that hospital, universities, research labs, non-profits, etc, all are doing better jobs which means we cure more disease, teach, help and study better, etc. because of the iphone.
But yeah, if you dont work in innovation, then you work for the current "government", the current group-thinked direction made by some smart "politicians" (by "politician" I mean that guy who lick asses all day long, who goes always in the direction that's well accepted and who use words to seduce people and get what he wants). It's either innovate (rare) or maintain.
Maybe our civilisation has finally crushed my soul, and I noticed it just now. But it feels to me that the revealed goal of our market-driven world is to abstract everything away with money.
There is a passage in the movie "1492: Conquest of Paradise" by Ridley Scott that I love:
"Look outside, what do you see?" ask Colombus to some royal acolyte
"I see towers, I see palaces, I see steeples, I see civilisation. And I see spires that reach to the sky!" answer the politician contrasting with the wild america of that time.
"All of them created by people like me" say Colombus
As a Mechanical Engineer with solid math and physics background, using Machine Learning and Numeric Methods to substantially engage and improve product performance, I really feel like I won the lottery.
I handicapped myself by going into CS instead of graduating some hard engineering degree (or biology). See also matte_black's comment elsewhere in this discussion. Programming alone is a tool in search of problems to solve, and the interesting problems are elsewhere.
> pushing the humanity forward, or alleviating a social problem for some group of people
Isn't this what humans like to strive for? Making an impact, being remembered after death, thus living forever. That's one of the things a family (with kids) helps you get over, you know, the whole "living on through your kids" thing. If they don't end up as homeless drug addicts, it probably kinda works.
I've taken a job at a university two years ago. Pay is much lower than before. Haven't felt anywhere close to overworked or burnt out ever since, even though I've stayed until late at night occasionally when we fucked something up by deploying without any proper testing again, because hey, it's such a tiny change. I'm not doing frontier science or anything, we're just working on a custom netbooted Linux distro that also runs windows vms via qemu-kvm, for teaching environments. A lot of what we do could be dismissed as NiH-syndrome or creating solutions to problems that have already been solved by big companies, but as long as someone is paying for it I'm good with this job. Because there pop up a lot of problems or requirements that are just interesting to solve by yourself, actually not just for fun but for actual use cases. Nothing game changing for humanity, not for millions of people, but for some. And I will interact with them directly, and sometimes they tell you that they like the system you helped develop. That, and the fact that you're not in competition with your coworkers or another team or anything really makes for a great work atmosphere that I'm currently really enjoying. I don't know how long I can/want to stay, but for now I can say it greatly improved my overall happiness.
> Isn't this what humans like to strive for? Making an impact, being remembered after death, thus living forever. That's one of the things a family (with kids) helps you get over, you know, the whole "living on through your kids" thing. If they don't end up as homeless drug addicts, it probably kinda works.
I don't know. Everyone has kids. Having kids is technically making an impact, but I think that when most people say they want to make an impact, or to accomplish something great, or to change the world, they don't mean by doing something that almost everyone else does.
> I don't know. Everyone has kids. Having kids is technically making an impact, but I think that when most people say they want to make an impact, or to accomplish something great, or to change the world, they don't mean by doing something that almost everyone else does.
I guess that's what the "help getting over it" part was referring to. In your teens/early twenties you dream of changing the world, and after reality sank in, you do the next best thing and go for kids because you shape them and so live on through them, mission accomplished, impact has been made. Humans are great at bullshitting themselves. (Not trying to sound harsh or implying kids are worthless or anything, but it really seems to be a fallback plan for a lot of people)
Yup. Having a child seems to be the lowest common denominator of "having an impact", and it terms of improving anything around you, it's simply re-rolling the dice, hoping that your kid will end up in a position of greater influence than you. Having offspring is probably the best way to make (some of) your way of thinking outlive you, but you need to work on creating opportunities for your children if you want your way of thinking to impact anything around them.
> hoping that your kid will end up in a position of greater influence than you.
No, it's hoping that you plus your kid(s) will have more impact than you alone. Or that your kid will magnify your impact just by existing (which there is some evidence for if your chosen venue of impact is electoral politics, at least.)
Meaning is a process of its own creation, not a measuring stick. Often when people speak of meaning as though it were quantitative, they usually are referring to how much they help other people. Meaning is also interactive, it rarely happens in total isolation. If everyone around is constantly conflating meaning with monetary success, it's easy to feel confused and despair. Don't blame money, but rather look for bits of beauty in life and share them with people you care for. At least that's what seems to work for me
> alleviating a social problem for some group of people
Not sure what you mean by "social" problems specifically, but when you alleviate a problem for a group of people, they pay you, and that's what a business is.
I realized recently what a useful abstraction money is, because when money came about we didn't have the ability to create a massive blockchain keeping track of who did favors for who, and when. So it's a reasonable proxy for reputation and social credits.
What I meant by social problem for some people are things impacting their happiness and quality-of-life, reducing suffering, etc. Some examples to narrow down the possibility space:
- Make it so that people in your community have access to clean water. Surprisingly, it's a problem even in the most advanced countries.
- Contribute to something in healthcare that reduces costs, improves availability, or makes more people survive a procedure, an illness, etc.
- Make firefighting safer, or more efficient. Make it less needed in the first place.
- Make the air clearer. Make the energy cheaper. Make the roads better and safer. Etc.
- (Meta) make the market less ennui-generating.
I found that "what pays" is not a good proxy, because often what pays best is solving problems for a group of people, which also generate further problems for other groups of people. Usually, the benefits for the first group are purely financial.
To use a simple example - advertising. There's lots of people who would pay you for your work in this space, because your work will earn them more money. What your work will do downstream, however, is most likely one of those:
- It'll create more work for someone else to cancel the effects of your work; a lot of advertising is playing a zero-sum game, i.e. simply wasting natural resources and human time. (Conversely, often your work is only needed to cancel out the effect of someone else's efforts.)
- It'll disturb the market, promoting a worse solution over a better solution, leading customers to make wrong choices, and thus lose some amount of money and/or happiness.
- It'll add to the noise we all have to endure, also slowly eroding happiness.
Occasionally, you might end up promoting the right thing to the right crowd for the right reasons, but I doubt that happens very often ;).
Conversely to all of that, I feel that solving what I see as "social problems" pays less, if at all, again making "what pays" a bad proxy towards finding ways to address those problems.
It's a somewhat serious, somewhat tongue-in-cheek question. But if you need to clean your room, maybe you should do that first. Instead of having grandiose visions of improving things at large scale, prove to yourself you can improve things at a local scale and keep them that way.
If that sort of thinking is interesting, there's a whole book of it in https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-life/ Though I'll say I got out of the existential and nihilistic mindsets differently, I don't feel like I have to wrestle with meaningness like I used to, before I ever heard of the author, I've just read good-sounding things from people who have read that book or have otherwise gotten themselves invested in the author's doings.
I suspect you've read this before but if not, point 5 might resonate with you: http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Lisp/comp.lang.lisp/2006... If you fit the mold and can't change your mindset then you'll forever be unhappy unless you manage to get one of those "interesting" jobs.
Solving them at scale can still lead to money. Sometimes they are willing to give you a little money, sometimes others are (governments, or even businesses if it can lead to profit for them. I.e., low income training + job search with recruiter fee could be profitable). Or if you're addressing the problem of they have little money, by giving them skills or opportunities, you can charge after you help them (i.e., many coding bootcamps that delay costs until you land something)
Payday loan revenue in the rich burbs roughly-zero, Payday loan revenue nation wide mysteriously between $6B and $46B depending on data source
Now can you get a cool and trendy very high social status hipster job to brag about on social media in the coolest office with only the best "personality fit" coworkers helping poor people, oh heck no you'd be savaged here if you admitted to working for McD, but the market of poor people products, at least in some areas of business, is about ten times as large as rich people products.
There are a hell of a lot more poor people than there are rich people.
It’s also a hell of a lot easier to take advantage of them, given they generally lack the education or resources to protect themselves from predatory businesses. I struggle to think of McDonald’s as “helping” poor people. It’s putting food in their mouths, yes, but if McDonald’s were more concerned with the health and financial wellbeing of their customers as opposed to exploiting psychology to get as many people to impulse buy as much junk food as possible it would be an incredibly different company.
The goal of a company is not “help” its customers, the goal of a company is to exploit any and every untapped source of wealth. If it can do that by hurting someone who doesn’t know better, it is going to.
Your first statement seems to imply that the market is flawed (because, obviously, the willingness to pay for something is going to be higher for someone with lots of money than someone with little), the second seems to imply that there is something inherently beneficial in focusing on 'market solutions' as you define them. These views are rather at odds with each other.
But, I'm not trying to comment on either of those, just that you can create utility for a poor person and still have a viable business. If it relies on government for funding, because society has decided it's worth funding that sort of work, so what? We have an entire defense industry in the US based on that idea. Most of our education is too. Other countries have their entire healthcare systems based on that idea. You can decide you don't want to be paid directly by taxed money, but that's on you, not on the viability of such a model.
To be clear, I’m criticizing the common notion that the market is inherently beneficial or that it contains the solutions to all problems (though I don’t mean to accuse you of holding such views). Some problems necessarily require non-market solutions.
That's not the only way to make money, though. A big problem with modern corporate capitalism is how abstract everything is: you're rarely getting paid directly by someone you're doing a favor for. Now it's more like, the corporation you work for holds money in investments, which gain value as the stock prices of an actively managed portfolio of other corporations changes, and a portion of that value is paid out as salaries to employees, who work to raise the stock price, so other corporations will buy more shares of your corporation, which raises the stock price of your corporation…
I admit that - given my life situation - I'm biased towards jobs that at least have a chance of also letting me put bread on the table ;).
That said, I'm also having hard time separating academic work that helps things from that which just adds to the noise - grant-chasing, paper-generating studies. Any advice on that?
Well there's some noise like in everything else in life, but I don't think there's any empty studies (okay there's even a few cases of lying which is sad beyond words but thankfully they are very few i think).
Why does this noise bother you? Besides, keep in mind that the grant-chasing doesn't happen because of greed, it happens because people want to continue doing science and that's the only way to maintain an active lab.
I could shit on the state of academic publishing for days, but at the end of the day, there is an overall positive direction in this 'academic endeavor': the creation of knowledge.
I find this direction much lighter on my consciousness than "generate value for the shareholders"
The noise bothers me for two reasons. One, because grant-chasing to keep the lights on means you end up having to prioritize busy work over important problems, which wastes lives of researchers and slows the scientific endeavour. Two, because high noise makes it more difficult to find interesting/important results of other people's research.
Maybe I'm just wishing for unachievable perfection in this space.
> I could shit on the state of academic publishing for days, but at the end of the day, there is an overall positive direction in this 'academic endeavor': the creation of knowledge.
That I agree with, and I definitely complain more about the private market than scientific research because of that :).
> I find this direction much lighter on my consciousness than "generate value for the shareholders"
Funny thing- I'm a bioinformatics making 70k and with a family. I'm ready to leave the space to make money. I'm at the point where I wouldn't mind something less altruistic -it's all the same uninteresting work. Crazy to read your stories of wanting to go the opposite direction.
Crazy indeed. Grass is always greener then? Your 70k in bioinformatics is something I'd drop my current job in a heartbeat for!
I'm very interesting in knowing what are your motivations to switch towards "something less altruistic". Could you share some more details? Maybe it really is that no matter what you do, no matter how meaningful, it'll always become a boring chore? Maybe I didn't have an meaningful job yet, so I'm not disillusioned?
I think the best way to describe the issue is to consider why people claim being in healthcare is bad (try googling around for whether it's worth being a doctor because you feel called to help people). Healthcare (and biotech feeds into healthcare) is very heirarchial, so advancement gets blocked. There are better ways to find meaning than the field you work in. Like all technology jobs it's viewed as grunt work compared to MD/PI/regulation visionaries. My main motivation is cash and experience that are difficult to get in an underfunded and sinking industry; genomics is really struggling to float as science progresses to new fields not out of the ninety's. I feel like someone stuck in a third world country watching America glitter into the sunset. Sure I make very interesting products but it is boiled down into the same day to day mundane work, but for less pay. We might get a thank you letter from someone thanking us for extending their life and that is awesome for someone like me who is not their doc. But I'm like a firefighter- utterly unappreciated by everyone else no matter what interesting piece I work on. And it's hard to save much for retirement. I haven't felt the void you feel. I would rather make a less drastic but equally important impacts on people in my spare time like as a coach- think of Maslow's heirarchy of needs and how healthcare inverts parts of it.
I see in this thread lots of people who have their security level established and are now looking to fill their social level. I feel inverted on the subject and let's just say Maslow's order matters.
I’ve been out of the genome-sequencing space for quite a few years now, but that seems a pretty strong assertion and I’m curious about your rationale. Is it that the analysis will need to be re-done in future? Or do you think the space is saturated?
I left the game in 2015, but even then third generation sequencing could close bacterial genomes for < $1k. Long reads make it trivial to detect all sorts of stuff (sample mixup, contamination, phage activity, in vitro evolution) that goes unnoticed with short reads. Since the conclusion of large scale draft genome sequencing papers always seems to be 'we need a bigger sample size' anyway, I feel the money would be better spent on studying individual strains of bacteria.
Ah yes, I was mostly out of it before short-reads-only genomes were a common thing. “Draft” meant a slightly different thing in the Sanger sequencing days.
This is HN, assuming you can code, you have the ability to alleviate social problems through coding either through your own startup or side projects. Don't let that fire die inside of you that wants to give back and help push humanity forward, life is too short to be miserable working for someone else (as a programmer that's in demand).
I'm not very clear on what you think a job is for. I understand a job as a way to trade your service for money and the point of money is to exchange it for other people's goods and services, like the kinds of goods and services we need to not die starving in the street, and are incredibly inefficient to provide all by ourselves. Or to send our kids to college. Or to pay our taxes so that the government can continue to provide its services. Etc.
I mean if you're a programmer and want a job fighting cancer, maybe pick up some ML skills and find a way into that industry. But short of getting your PhD in medicine or a law degree fighting injustice, we're all just a different sort of coal miner providing the things society needs to keep chugging along. And there's no shame in simply being a productive member of society. As far as societies go, we're better than all that have come before.
ML isn't really what's being used since it's too unreliable. The reigning models are all differential equations based, using ODEs and PDEs along with the clinical side using PBPK with maximum-likelihood estimation.
But this is what kills me when companies get so hellbent in their IP assignment/agreements when bringing in a new employee that I might create something. Provide me the environment to do so at work or allow me to do so on my own time. The former isn't happening, so…
The reality of the situation is that, if I'm not so drained from the mind-numbing soul-crushing CRUD work that I feel like doing more when I get home, I'm sure as hell not going to work on anything remotely related to my employer's line of work. I get quite enough of that at work. I'm going to work on problems that matter to me, and that seems to be stuff that really doesn't matter to my employer.
Boring problems are quite manageable when they are also important and meaningful. The general lack of purpose most of us find in our jobs (apart from 'earning money') is the real problem.
In my experience it starts with relationships. Co workers, partner, parents etc. Then sometimes you crush an interview at a place that already has scale and you are offered a pool of problems to work on, and you pick the most important but also probably scariest one. The types of multi year results that come from that make for cool stories.
For instance, patient outcomes from a feature you built in an electronic medical record get published in major newspapers.
Who wants to work on monetizing open source by working hard to create a reliable way of paying the project creators to do the interesting work as what they get paid for?
Now that sounds meaningful. Email me if you agree.
Would you mind elaborating on what you had in mind?
It's a good idea. There should be an easy way for a small team to capture the value that their open source project creates. There are a variety of crowdfunding platforms like Patreon that are doing something similar. CodeMill and Bountysource are paying developers directly for adding features.
Maybe a software repository site, where users must watch a 30 second commercial, before they can download the software. Then a percentage of the profits made from selling that commercial is shared with the programmer.
Sounds like sourceforge, but I don't know how that site is monetized, or if they share the revenues with the project creators.
My overall happiness was so much better when I was working for my university's pharmacy school making websites about where to find Naloxone and heroin overdose info than currently at my huge engineering firm company making twice as much. I'd love to find a job doing simple web development for a nonprofit.
Split time. Get a side gig. I have a friend who spends 4 days a week at the dental school fixing catastrophic oral pathology problems for the uninsured, and gets paid a pittence. He spends one day a week at a posh private clinic and pays all the bills for the month in the first week of the month. The following 3-4 days of posh work in the month fund everything else.
I was in the same place 5 years ago. I've decided to quit and find something worth doing not just making more money. Since then I'm working in a support role in cancer research for not exactly faang salary but it's definitely worth it.
While I can certainly understand your sentiment, I would encourage you to not give up so easily... while it might not be so easy as to stumble upon meaningful jobs there are certainly opportunities that can be created and developed. For example, if you go an entrepreneurial route you can find interesting and meaningful challenges and start to work on them in your free time and see how to push these forward over time.
Another recommendation is to have a look at 80000hours.org which is a great resource for finding the best work opportunities out there! I think they even provide some coaching :)
While I don't agree with Marx, your sense of ennui seems to reasonably represent what I understand to have been his concepts of reification and alienation.
One might ask: what does the alternative look like? From what I can tell Marx is a bit wishy-washy on that point.
Hayek more helpfully explained that the market provides a mechanism for determining value, not virtue. That it works, but doesn't uplift. And that trying to force it to will leave with neither -- you will need to find your meaning in something else.
> the market provides a mechanism for determining value
The market's notion of value is weighted by wealth: making coffee for the rich is "valuable", meeting the basic needs of the poor is not "valuable." This makes the market notion of "value" very different from just about any other notion of value in the world. If you muddy the distinction, or let someone else muddy the distinction, markets become almost tautologically awesome, because the market notion of "value" is something that markets are very good at optimizing.
There's a lot of privilege talking about what is and is not valuable, but its worth pointing out that its only a very recent, probably very temporary, phenomena that coffee is all about rich people massively overpaying in public as an act of conspicuous consumption at Starbucks, for some decades previous McDonalds and other fast food sellers made more total money selling coffee than hipster coffee shops.
There are some market bifurcation events going on, as relates to income inequality only increasing over time. For example the number of independent bicycle shops has been dropping for decades while average revenue and profit increase... thats because the market for $2000 adult bikes is extremely high social status but also very small, leading to the inaccurate observation that "there's no money selling bikes to poor people". However, sales and revenue for poor people bikes at department stores, walmart, etc, are really pretty good, its just that you can't buy a poor person bike at a cool trendy rich hipster independent bicycle store, only from extremely uncool mass retailers. There are absolute tons and boatloads of money in selling bicycles to poor people; the money is inaccessible to the "cool kids" is the only problem.
Food deserts are a similar thing; the point of talking about food deserts is to point out the individual noticing them is a really cool person.
Perhaps a HN car analogy where nothing could be cooler on social media and more valuable than bragging about selling Tesla cars to very rich people, but you won't make even a tiny fraction as much total revenue as the incredibly uncool act of selling commuter SUVs to suburbanites.
Being cool and trendy on twitter is important, but you can make many times as much money by being very uncool. To some extent the whole meta overall topic is conspicuous consumption at its finest, along the lines of I'm rich enough and privileged enough to pretend deeply uncool (as defined on social media) market opportunities literally don't exist.
Hayek understood that what we think about prices and what we think about ethics are distinct things. He didn't see rightness as flowing from markets. He saw it as a discovery process for allocations of resources.
> One might ask: what does the alternative look like? From what I can tell Marx is a bit wishy-washy on that point.
I have no clue either. But it feels to me as if we're turning humanity into a single superorganism, with each one of us being just a cell, except all those cells have brains capable of wishing they'd play on the same level as the superorganism.
Related: I've never had a libertarian bent. I'm known to argue for coordination over individual freedoms. I frequently wondered, just what is it that makes many people say that we're in chains, and (here in the West) we have so little freedoms left. I think I finally realized where this could be coming from.
I've been spending some time recently going, in my head, through a list of activities I'd find exciting. I quickly discovered that most of them are either impossible or illegal, especially when living in a city. Someone (I think pg) wrote that as we entered the industrialized age, we had to invent the whole fake, hollow thing called "exercise" to replace what we've lost in the change of lifestyles. I'm starting to see it as more general pattern - we're losing many more things we could do, and replacing them with structured activities available on the market. They're similar, but also feel fake to me.
> Hayek more helpfully explained that the market provides a mechanism for determining value, not virtue. That it works, but doesn't uplift.
That sounds about right (I suppose I should start reading the foundational texts of economic thought at some point). I do not deny that the scheme I described, in which your only role in society is to pick something profitable to do, doesn't work. It generally does (with all coordination problem caveats of the market in mind). But the meaningful work, the virtuous work, the uplifting work, seems to be distributed scarcely and randomly throughout the market space. Much like in the past, you got to be a king or a peasant depending on the lottery of birth, nowadays you can be involved in civilization-changing work, or forever toil on the margin, depending on random chance. Is there even a place for fining meaning in contributing to society? Is there any agency left as to how to contribute? Are we supposed to seek either of it?
I have no answers here. Only a topic I'm trying to think my way through, hoping to find some meaning on the other end.
Have you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? You might enjoy it. A thoughtful book (semi-autobiographical) about a man searching for meaning, thinking-through-it-all while riding his motorcycle across the country with his son.
Long time ago, I dropped it somewhere near the end (random life circumstances). Thanks for reminding me of it - I recall it as being pretty insightful. I'll read it again.
The Japanese have some takes on this subject. I'm far from an expert, I only have a passing understanding, and I also have no answers, but if you were curious you might look in to Ikigai.
For some Marxist readings on the alternative, I recommend Marx's own Critique of the Gotha Program and Cockshott and Cotrill's Towards a New Socialism, which seeks to develop a basis for a post-capitalism society with a cybernetically planned economy and direct democracy.
Marx is vague and rightly so. I think the situationists took a similar approach, which is also their main criticism. They do not describe what the utopia would be not really the steps, they instead say that it's a state that occurs when people live according to their desires. That to me sounds like "do what thou wilt" where the task is to find out what our desire, our will is.
Interestingly, I remember 'Eliezer having some good insights about "how to build an utopia" in his "fun theory sequence". I read it years ago, but I started re-reading it last weekend:
If Kołakowski is to be believed, Marx's view of the post-revolutionary world has a somewhat mystical flavour stemming mostly from Hegel. It is the immediate roots in Hegelian philosophy that makes it, in practical terms, wishy-washy.
What has always tied Marxism in knots has been the tension between waiting for the inexorable laws of history on the one hand (and sometimes trying to give them a hurry up) versus on the other hand agitating for reforms. The former see the latter as delaying the revolution. The latter see the former as something between dreamers and jerks.
I think that history, having been somewhat lawless after all, makes the reformers look better.
Do you think that the more left-accelerationist factions have any meaningful influence compared to more reformist organizations like the DSA? Is it different outside the states?
Not to sound cliché but that is resoundingly the primary symptom of late stage capitalism. Commodification of all; nothing is sacred, not even your own life. This has actually been the state of affairs for quite some time (at least from 18th century) but the ever increasing creep of wages, which previously shielded high wage positions from this reality, are becoming increasingly transparent as information technology becomes more prolific.
The thesis of capitalism is that acting only in self interest is good for the collective, i.e. your own capital is all, i.e. we can abstract everything away with money.
I think you're completely right about the problems with above dogma and hope that you don't stop looking for a way to do something you find meaningful.
I'm you from the future. I built a time machine out of sheer desperation in hopes of putting your (mine) brain on this topic earlier, so that we can find a way out of this state.
> Step 1. Tell more people about this. As more people realize the sheer banality of the system, we may find better, interesting solutions
I do that a lot on HN. I've been considering blogging on this topic, but I feel I suck at writing, and people may not want to listen to confused ramblings of a random programmer -.-
> Step 2. Push for creating more and more social infrastructure. So if people want to, they can choose to not be part of the box
Joining NGOs in your area is a good start. Many of these folks have good intent but lacks tech know how. You be surprised, how little can make a big difference
I've been struggling with this for years now; after 4 boring jobs I finally gave up even the expectation that what I'll be asked to do will be even remotely interesting (or socially useful). The chance of landing an interesting job is absolutely minuscule - the market rewards whatever it rewards at the moment, and that's where jobs flock. These days, one of the bigger thing the market rewards is writing a web-based CRUD that's 99% chrome, 1% of actual functionality. Extra points if you can get some user data to sell to adtech industry.
(My own criteria for "interesting" these days are a bit different. I'm not looking for "interesting technical problems", as in advanced CS stuff, but "interesting outcomes" - pushing the humanity forward, or alleviating a social problem for some group of people. I find it hard to even find companies that apparently work on something like that, and even then it seems they have to do lots of boring work as well.)
--
EDIT: Then again there's this topic that has been casting shadow on my happiness for a long time, that I finally seem to be able to define. Maybe our civilization has finally crushed my soul, and I noticed it just now. But it feels to me that the revealed goal of our market-driven world is to abstract everything away with money. The end-game is that as an individual, your responsibility in the society is to pick a skill - whatever skill - that makes you money, and then to use money to solve everything else with your life. It doesn't matter what you do, there is only one meaningful meta-skill - making money fall out of the system, into your bank account.
Maybe I'm just realizing something obvious that parents should have taught me when I was a kid. I don't know. Maybe it was wrong of me to seek meaning in the things one does? Maybe that approach is no longer supported by our civilization?