[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How do you find meaningful jobs?
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Ask HN: How do you find meaningful jobs?
Happy to hear examples of a job you're currently at or recently
found that you find meaningful and satisfying. By itself, not
because of compensation. Please name a company or at least
specific market niche + geo or product, to understand what exactly
the company (or your team is producing).
Author : aristofun
Score : 21 points
Date : 2022-06-01 19:04 UTC (3 hours ago)
| nont wrote:
| 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.
| aristofun wrote:
| Can you please give an example of some of your jobs where you
| found meaning from within?
| nont wrote:
| I learn and I get more confident. People from my previous job
| looked down on me due to many reasons. I get excited that I
| have more capability to prove them wrong or be better than
| them day by day.
| randomluck040 wrote:
| Not the guy who you have asked but teaching, in my opinion,
| has meaning. You are teaching people how to get things done
| in one way or another. Or you teach a method, convey a
| message, something along those lines. Outside of that if
| working e.g. to solve something for a municipality, I think
| you have a more or less direct impact on peoples lives.
| akprasad wrote:
| 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
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| 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
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| HPC computing is a good one. Solve the world's major scientific
| problems
| 2snakes wrote:
| 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.
| kinow wrote:
| 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.
| bspear wrote:
| 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
| erellsworth wrote:
| I'll let you know if I ever find one. I wouldn't hold your
| breath.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| 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.
| aristofun wrote:
| Can you please give an example of some of your subjective job
| satisfactions?
| Matthias247 wrote:
| Devops work / oncall is one example that comes to mind. Some
| people really like - it's a fast paced environment where one
| can debug large systems, and apply fixes that make a lot of
| other people happy. Others can't stand it, and just want to
| write code.
|
| Some people get satisfaction from writing some low-level code
| that isn't really visible for the end-user in the form of any
| feature, but e.g. makes the system 10% more efficient - think
| about kernel optimization work for example. Others again
| mostly get satisfaction from delivering user-facing features.
|
| Then there's people who will get satisfaction from just being
| able to work with a certain set of technologies, who might
| not be happy about being asked to work with other pieces of
| technology.
| SebastianKumor wrote:
| 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.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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.
| als0 wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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
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(page generated 2022-06-01 23:02 UTC)