How do you find meaningful work?

Question

Before I go further - let me clarify what I mean by "meaningful". There are two criteria that I consider, internal value and external value.External value is what fundamental value or service is the company I'm working for providing for the world? Is our net impact helping or hurting people? How severe is that impact? Etc. For a job to be meaningful the external value has to be such that there is a substantial, positive impact in the lives of our customers or community .Internal value is how meaningful the day to day labor is to myself. Am I being challenged? Am I solving problems? Do I wake up and want to work? Etc.If either of these values are significantly lacking, I don't consider the work meaningful. I'm still relatively early on in my SW career, but I've thus far had a difficult time finding work that meets my definition of meaningful. I'd happily take a pay-cut or work longer hours if I felt what I was doing was meaningful, but I just can't find it and I'm not sure if perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places or if it just doesn't exist.So, to those of you who work jobs you consider to be meaningful, how did you find that position? What advice would you impart to a young engineer who doesn't want to spend his career working on things he doesn't really care about?

PaulHoule · Accepted Answer

If you go down the road of looking for meaning from outside I'm pretty certain that 20 years from now you are going to ask the same question on this forum or some other forum. You will be just as lost but you'll be 20 years older and maybe you worked another 20 jobs you thought were meaningless.
I am so certain because I've seen it happen to many people, such as a hippie couple that went to every countercultural spot in the U.S. hoping that somewhere they were going to find a special community.
I look for meaning right where I am. I have certain times when I really am bothered by work inhibition, maybe every five years or so, and sometimes I have found the answer in a new job but usually it's been a side project.

Winterflow3r · Answer

I compartmentalise. At work, I am satisfied by solving problems (with or without code) - this gives me some level of intrinsic satisfaction (internal value) even though it might not have a lot of external value (in the traditional "save the world sense"). I then use the funds I made from my day job to work on things that have external and internal value such as planting pollinator friendly gardens, cleaning my neighbourhood from trash, trying to get side projects profitable etc. At this point, I've kind of given up on finding a day job that has a lot of external value, has interesting problems and pays enough to allow for at least some savings.

steve_g · Answer

There's a lot to unwrap in your questions, so I won't answer them fully. But I work in a job/industry that I consider to be meaningful and have done so for about 36 years. I work in the environmental industry, specifically waste management and air pollution control.
When I graduated with a ChemE degree, I decided that I wanted to do something positive for the environment. I didn't know how to start, so I just applied to companies with "environmental" in the name. That's how I got into the air pollution control field. Note: back then the internet was called "books", so I spent a lot of time in the library looking up companies.
Most companies have internal IT departments that write and manage line-of-business software. Find companies that do something _you_ find meaningful and try to get into their IT departments. Once you're in, recognize that no job is going to be seventh heaven every day. Make the best of whatever you're doing. It's a lot easier to do that if you're in tune with the company's mission.
My way is not the only way, of course, but that's what works for me. Good luck.

tdr2d · Answer

As long as you're an employee, your job is to produce monetizable value for you employer. You can be asked to do whatever your manager decides you to do, even if it's boring work. As long as you don't share a common vision with your company, you'll always find something to say about the decisions it made. This can be called frustration..What to do is up to you. Bear with it, or work on other projects that you believe will make more sense to you.