That said, to me the purpose of life isn't in work. It's more that I want to feel that the amount of effort I put into work isn't going to negative outcomes. So I find jobs that i believe are a net positive for society, but still only put in my 40ish hours a week and go to find my meaning in my personal life.
I'd say that no matter where you wish to find purpose my advice will be the same. Find a company that you believe is a net good to the world, and then put in however much effort you wish to that company. It does limit the amount of companies you are able to work for, but there are so many openings available for good people in software that you'll probably find plenty of opportunities regardless.
Any job where you're someone else's employee naturally means you're sacrificing autonomy and freedom over your work, probably in the name of private profit over social good, so will probably not be as enjoyable being able to work on one's own terms unless one feels they are accomplishing more through this arrangement than they could be otherwise.
For me what personally excites me most in the tech world right now is tech that is open source, modular, and decentralized (basically the goal of web3). The idea of building a decentralized, modular, open source I haven't made the jump though. And at the end of the day I'm still kind of a slave to money until I'm financially independent, and if I'm going to sell my labor to someone else, I might as well sell to the highest builder (assuming it ethically aligns). Haven't spent much time really looking though, with the crypto/web3 boom it may finally be reasonably possible to do that sort of work and still get paid handsomely.
- What influences your day to day experience is the size of the firm for which you work. Big gov and big corp have much more in common than a startup and a small charity group. Think about how the abundance of ressources, staff, speed of change, stability and reputation management will affect your job. Big firms often have two employees for the same role (in case one of them goes away), while small firm often have two roles for the same employee.
- For most people, ''vision'' is a buzzword. By construction, it should come out of your imagination ; it is a desired change on actual reality. This is why vision jobs are less secure than 'pragmatic' jobs. Sense of purpose is an experience where your action are aligned with your vision ; you understand how your work builds the vision. It gives fire in the belly!
- Money being a lag indicator of the state of affairs, profit or security seeking people (which are the same thing with a different name) often end up in big organizations. People with a strong sense of purpose would rather want to join a small group with an non-established business model which aims to change the world.
In other words :
Profit & Security => Established & working business model => big organization => hierarchy with redundance => low sense of purpose
Financial risk => Unproven business model => small firm => too much jobs for few people => high sense of purpose.
I don't lie to myself, either. What I create is not making the world a better place by much at all. I'm making industry software that helps create products. Nothing more, nothing less. I steer clear of miltech or creating software for police or secret services, but apart from that, all it does is create value for some shareholders somewhere while pumping out products that are probably unnecessary and wasteful.
It's an interior conflict that does not go away, and I won't say I have resolved any of it for me. I know that I'm not contributing to saving the world, and it sucks. But I'm also not really in a position to change that. Furthermore, I'm not in a field where governments usually look for talent, and I do enjoy the freedom of creating my own systems with the architecture I prefer and not being constrained by the tight requirements of gov systems.
The little purpose I do find is in creating quality software that kind of makes stuff more efficient and by extension, helps progress towards a more sustainable future with less manual labor. But, in a way, that's what everyone on Earth does, so it's not much.
I am religious so have given your question much thought over the years. For me purpose is found in my faith, my family, my church and my work. Whether you are religious or not I think the takeaway is that purpose is a combination of factors. My work enables to look after my family and do other things. I am happy if I get to use my skills at work. Don't put all your eggs in one basket :-)
In some sense, I don't.
At this point in my life, my tech job essentially funds my living expenses: a place to live, food, etc. That isn't to say that I don't like my job - I do, I am still passionate about doing a good job, and I know that my work helps other people - but my purpose doesn't involve work necessarily.
My sense of purpose lies outside all of that. I practice martial arts regularly. I volunteer as a crisis counselor for a local crisis center doing all sorts of things. I love getting outside on a cold day and just going for a walk. I love being with friends. Work provides me the money and the flexibility to do all of it.
I would suggest that, if you are moving into the private sector but still want to serve without worrying about profits, look for charities and other nonprofits in your area and get involved. Maybe even think about what fields of interest matter most to you (is it homelessness? LGBTQ issues? immigration-related issues? mental health?) and find resources near you that are addressing those things.
Working in private sector can provide you the foundation for doing other work elsewhere at the same time. Work doesn't have to provide everything.
1. Paycheck
2. People
3. Purpose
As a software engineer, I like solving complex technical problems and learning software, management, and people skills. It doesn't matter to me what I'm doing as long as it's ethical and I can grow.
*In theory. In practice, there are all types of companies that exist due to regulatory quirks / that customers are forced to interact with. If you flip it, technically people are forced to work with the government whether they like it or not and regardless of the quality of service. In the private sector they have a choice of using your company. At the extreme, if it is bad enough, they can start their own.
On a more personal level as a programmer there's always some exciting problem to solve, something that can be optimised. Also, being in the games industry I get to interact with a lot of artists which is something I've always looked for.
I work on improving the treatment of cancer through the application of deep learning. I am employed by a FAANG and work very closely with several leading nonprofit academic medical centres. Our primary driver is real-world patient impact (rather than, say, revenue or just academic publications).
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of downsides to working in this space but lacking a sense of purpose isn't one of them (for me).
My advice is to find meaning outside of work, and then go work in the private sector.
One of the things I miss the most about public sector work was you can actually spend time worrying about what's the "good" thing to do, rather than just optimizing a KPI. However, in practice I saw what it sounds like you are seeing now: you don't really serve the public you serve the bureaucracy.
At this point in my career I'm making close to triple what I would have if I stayed in the public sector, and my work life balance is better than it was back then. This means that I have time to work on projects and things I find meaningful and actively contribute to communities I care about. Ultimately I have a bigger impact on people's lives with extra income and free time than I did when I was supposedly working full time to help people.
One caveat: try not to work for any direct to consumer companies, especially startups. It's okay if private sector work isn't meaningful, but when you are actively working to rip people off while your PM cheers about how you're making the world a better place, it feels gross. B2B, in my experience, tends to have less repulsive practices.
Currently I work on a mid-size corporation (when I joined it was a small startup). At the end of the day, the main outcome of the time I invest at work is making some already-rich investor potentially richer. I don't find that part particularly motivating.
I have also worked on the public sector. I encountered resistance to change, and outdated technology. It helped a little bit when someone I really disliked was voted and took power. I understood better what they were up against :) . But yes, during my time at the public sector I was really motivated. It took a lot of effort and it didn't always pan out, but sometimes I would really feel that my work was benefitting society as a whole. I'm not going to lie, I often miss that.
The problem with that public sector job I got: there was no project manager. Politicians with very little project management experience were directing the developers. It was ... intense. The project sort of worked at the end, but it almost costed me my sanity. I got an offer in the private sector and I quit before the term was done.
My current job has project managers. And product owners. Things are planned. The world sends us curveballs. We reprioritize. There is little drama. My team is international, so I get to interact with lots of interesting people from all around the world. And we do open source work, which helps the world a little bit. And yes, the pay is better. I wouldn't say that I have "found purpose" on this work, but I have found other things that the other job didn't offer.
(By the way, if someone is looking for work, I currently work at Kong. I am personally looking for people in Europe with experience in Nginx/Openresty in particular. If that's you, I really want to talk to you! If not, we have many open positions[1] all around the world, remote, with several technologies)
I work in online payments right now. It's no Stripe - we're a smaller shop. But ultimately it feels good to know that many small businesses and mom-n-pop shops depend on us for their livelihood.
On the flip-side, I have a friend who spent many years working for this weird ponzi scheme / multi-level-marketing shop (overseas) that spent their insane earnings funding really bad movies starring the founder's adult kids. I have to imagine that person would have a much harder time finding a sense of purpose than I do at my current employer.
Mind you, for me it's obvious my employers software is useful as it is used in large construction project globally. Hence, for me I can point at buildings and say our work helped in achieving them.
I also to like to work with other people - there is very nice sense of achievement when a team manages to ship the next version to happy customers.
And I've also found my most satisfying jobs are where I can bring up junior people, and shape their careers. Be the manager you wish you had and bring up your reports to be managers like that too, and to pass it on themselves - the good you do will keep on happening after you've left the scene, possibly for ever.
If the good people don't step up to manage, the bad ones will. Increasing the world's share of good ones is a worthy goal.
In the end, a business either makes customers lives better, or it dies.
I feel good about improving the lives of my employer's customers, as well as about helping my team and my employer do well.
I'm not saving the world, sure. But I don't think that's a particularly sane goal for an individual.
Having said all that, what really makes a job good for me is the people I work with.
On the downsides, the team is small and ownership is often siloed which can ramp up pressure. Also, races happen on Friday thru Sunday typically so those of us working on live software trade some weekdays for weekends (remote work has made this way less of an issue). The pay is above average, but we can't compete with Big Tech Co. in the same state, so retaining ambitious people can be difficult. Finally, we move quickly and often don't really have time to go back and refactor/restructure old projects on official hours, which can make transitions difficult.
Motorsports may not be my passion, and it may have taken awhile to get here, but I'm really quite happy here.
When I was older, I wrote software that kept power plans safe by making sure that the fire protection equipment was inspected.
Then I ran an Internet Service, back in the days of dial up. I helped hundreds of people get on the internet back in the 1990s. I wrote the software the used to install WinSock.
At the same time with the internet, I also repaired industrial control electronics, which were used by industry in mighty rolling mills that stretched steel like taffy.
After that, I was the computer guy "Manager of IT" at a company that did marketing campaigns for large corporations at trade shows, like CES, etc. They would come to us way too late, and we would scramble like mad to make sure they were able to deliver their message to the world. My little part was to make sure that about 50 people could use their computers and the servers I managed, to get everything done, regardless of where they were in the world.
Then I worked in a job shop, where we made gears. If you have a Marvel 8" bandsaw made between 2015 and 2019, I ran the Gleason Bevel gear cutter that cut the teeth on the lower band wheel and the pinion that drives it. I also learned a boat load about the process of production, and the culture.
I've never worked for government, all of those jobs helped other people, directly, or indirectly. Made them safer, happier, more well informed, in some fashion.
My mid-size (140) well-run company is as healthy a human environment as I'm likely to find. Toxic bicycle associations I've been part of, or sleepy public sector workplaces I've known, have helped set my expectations. So I've absolutely no problem that my company makes a wholesome profit for it's founders. I see a little bit of it, and I'd much rather be coding than doing what they do.
Developer culture, as it's matured, is fairly remarkable for it's openess and flatness, and I'm mostly very happy with the company of developers and their weird hobbies. More women would be nice.
Despite the predictions that it would all move to India, developers have been constantly in demand since I started doing this 25 years ago. It's let me travel and work wherever I want, and now it's going to let me work remotely so I can spend time with ageing parents on the other side of the world. WTF. I must have been very good in a past life.
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Point #2 - I do not understand how anyone could have a sense of purpose working in the public sector. Around me, every level of government is filled with low levels of corruption. Our municipal workers do things like "buy 15 years of service" for $3,600 to jack up their retirement benefits by $40,000 per year. Or they work 120 hours per week overtime in the last year before retirement. All legal because it's approved by the managers. One manager of a municipality near me embezzled $3.6 million over about a decade. She's in jail now. Failed project after failed project, no accountability for money spent. I once worked for a company who had a local municipality as a customer. One municipal employee called me saying their printer wasn't working. I figured I'd walk her through some basic troubleshooting tasks but before I got the first one out she said, "Can you just come out?" Her printer power cord was unplugged. The entire office was sitting around talking like they had nothing to do while I plugged the printer in and it worked right away.
Yes, this is an idealized view and there are business that profit from shady or fraudulent practices or rent seeking behavior. Over time, businesses that treat customers or workers unfairly will fail as fewer and fewer will want to do business with them or work for them, assuming the existence of competition or the possibility of new competition which has yet to be created. By all means, if a company you join is doing something unethical you should follow your conscience and consider leaving.
Maybe I'm lucky to have never been part of a team that focuses solely on profit for profit's sake. Profit should be the reward for having a well run business. We always focused on creating products that were helpful to customers, controlling costs, and reducing risk. Profit naturally follows from that.
As others have stated, big companies can be slow moving and bureaucratic as well but even at that level it might be an improvement over government. It also varies a lot based on the company and the team.
I know the 'crusade' attitude of many non-profits, but it wears and eventually leaves you. You need to have a sense of purpose that won't fade nor leave you. So many folks have decided not to invest in family or friends that only work is left.
WHO do you want serve? Think potential end-users or clients.
Is there a community or market niche that might best benefit from your experience and expertise?
The portfolio companies at Lowercarbon Capital are doing interesting mission-driven work. > https://lowercarboncapital.com/companies/
Personally - I gave up on the non-profit/do-something-holy mission after I got out of college and I realized no government or university was going to hire me for some mundane reason. (I had been employed at a university before) So I went with private options - doing startups, enterprise, seeing a company to IPO, joining large public tech companies, etc.
I don’t regret it. It certainly pays much better. I know the troubles with government/public positions and I handsomely prefer the quality of life improvements I’ve been afforded that come with working in the private sector.
Truth is - government often uses a lot of the private sector anyway. I worked at a company that had government contracts. So, in some ways, I was a public worker as much as anyone else. I just got paid better than if I was in the government. The government pays like it’s 1950 and you live in a LCOL area.
I was always someone more interested in the ends, the ideas, and immediately lose interest when it came to the prospect of implementation. To an extent it's still in my nature, but I've learned the hard way you have to start appreciating the means for their own sake; the abstractions to justify them don't necessarily matter. If you dwell on them long enough you'll convince yourself they're bs anyway and not necessary. Nothing is "necessary".
If you are of the hacker mindset, you could also hunt bugs through any number of programs—you make a living and software gets safer.
There are an almost limitless charities that all need quality staff to help their missions; technical or otherwise. You did not say what you were looking to to but charity organizations typically have horrible tech.
Then there are the nonprofits that work in the public interest. Great options in health, policy, environment, etc.
Also foundations and think tanks that tend to be purpose-driven and less motivated by profits.
You could start a foundation, nonprofit, charity or other mission-driven organization! Never before has there been so much capital and so many great tools to form and run your own thing. Leverage your public sector network (after your cooling off period, if applicable).
I feel your pain working in the public sector, but you have options and there is purpose and mission out there! Good luck.
I just need the money and found the least-soul-crushing way to get it, while I find my purpose in life elsewhere.
I read of Wil Reynolds and Seer Interactive[1] yesterday. It's inspiring.
Other than suggesting you apply for a job there, one thing to consider is starting your own business. Never having worked in business is not an issue: you need a basic nose for marketing / advertising, a willingness to work hard, and something you think people will spend money for. Find a sense of purpose by doing what you want: what you find fulfilling. What would you spend money on? Then organise your business to fit your ethics.
[1] https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/wil-reynolds-seer-interac...
If I weren't working for the school, I would want to work for a company whose core competency makes the world a better place in some way. I felt fulfilled working for a test prep company because I could help people take the next step in their education. I've also worked for a consumer-facing electronics company and felt very little motivation to go above and beyond because ultimately I was helping sell crap to people who didn't need it.
A) the ability to innovate through R&D. Perhaps this is egotistical but it brings a lot of purpose to my work.
B) developing people’s careers and offering a fair opportunity for success.
Yes, perhaps these purposes are not quite as altruistic but I am passionate about such a job and great people I work with.
If I were to work for Meta, my sense of purpose would probably be that we help connect people around the world. Billions of people love and enjoy our product.
If I worked for Uber, I would feel pride how we've helped many people move around especially these without a lot of means.
If I worked for Amazon I'd be proud how we increase productivity across the world.
And on and on...
So for me at least it is the other way around, how can you feel purpose when you know your work can be done xN times more efficient? When you see through empty claims and politics to fight for budget.
I don't think I could ever do a meaningless job. (That is to say, I don't think I could ever write for Hollywood Tabloids -- utterly devoid of meaning!)
But meaningful is different to me than my purpose. I could engineer the signage for a fast food restaurant and be decently content. But my purpose in life is not to improve a company's bottom line, or engineer signage. My purpose in life is found outside employment. Mainly in things I volunteer at, but also as a husband.
- Working for an organization that provides some service or product that you believe is valuable and under appreciated
- If like protecting people, you may find purpose in security, fraud prevention, etc
- If you value privacy, you may find purpose with encryption techologies, etc
Don't rely on the company to give you a sense of purpose. Decide what is valuable to you and find a way to fill it.
I've spent time working for a company that made software for churches, working for a special needs therapy practice and working to advance DMARC adoption. All of these roles have been very fulfilling in different ways.
I'm just glad that a big stable company is willing to pay me to do it, I don't really care that we're not curing cancer. Taking personal pride in a business you don't own invites heartbreak anyway...
I am not what I do for money. I am what I do with it.
But you can use that knowledge to find a good home - look at the SaaS products your public sector orgs use, find one that is still small, and see what help they need. There are some great groups, and great people in this niche.
I regularly hear stories or see posts online about people going from low wage jobs to a web dev career within a year using Pluralsight. Making an annual income nobody in their family has ever gotten close to making before. Transformative.
Or (tongue-in-cheek) find a large non-tech Fortune 500 company, you'll feel like you're working for the government since they move slow and have lots of bureaucracy.
I think people who work 40 hours a week in actual jobs are kind of insane. Like yeah, do it for a few years, get the money, get out. Why anyone would spend their entire life in a job job is beyond me (unless they're being paid minimum wage and actually trapped).
Edit: I worked for the govt for all of 2 weeks— a mistake I won’t make again. I hope you find satisfaction with whatever you choose.
What you'll find is that most people you work with are honest people who share similar values to you.
I don't. Probably best to look at your personal life rather than professional.
Also, the frustration, bureaucracy, etc is also present in the private sector. At least that's my experience. If anything, you'll have less worker protection than working as a civilian for the government.
The fact that most businesses aren't saving the world, they are just making money is why so many pretend to be about saving the world. See: Silicon Valley's episode in season 1 about TechCrunch Disrupt.
It's funny, I read this question and thought back to my time working for the government (military). One thing I really hated about it was the waste-- especially watching money being spent just to ensure the budget grew annually. I like the efficiency of the private sector.
I work at https://payitgov.com. Would be happy to chat more about it
Helping people is what works for me. You can help people at different scales and in different ways in the private sector. These people could be your teammates or your customers.
Then I ended up at my current company. Our mission is to improve supply chains by monitoring vaccines (mostly in Africa at the moment) and perishable goods with our sensor devices. Especially with the vaccines, our mission is literally to save lives. I LOVE it here.
So, the private companies you are looking for are out there, so maybe just stay patient until you find something that you can feel good about.
You’re more likely to find a decent trade of your time, skills, and social connections for money, stock options, bonuses, and a benefits plan.
Treat it like a mercenary and you’ll do okay.
Now that isn’t to say that you, an individual, cannot find you own passions and purpose. These come from within and you won’t find them validated in a capital market. Know what they are and try to align your opportunities with them when you can and you can go pretty far.
Next I worked for a manufacturing automation outfit. Our solutions helped streamline manufacturing operations and made it quick and easy to reconfigure a line to manufacture a variant. One of our more well-known customers who makes diapers used our system to manufacture several different diaper varieties off the same line. This improved manufacturing efficiency which lowered manufacturing costs and the savings in turn were split between the investors and the customers. Your diapers are cheaper to buy, investors are making more money, manufacturing is staying in the United States and local communities are getting more tax revenue. It's a win all the way around.
For the past couple of decades I've been working for a public utility providing electricity. While my work doesn't directly involve the generation of electricity, I do work to make sure that electricity is generated as efficiently as possible. Being a regulated utility those savings are split between the investors and the customers (the regulators manage that). I also work to inform customers of any abnormal situations with their service, which is typically an outage. We now provide customers the means to determine what's going on and when their power will be restored. Seeing how electrical power is the bedrock of modern civilization I see this as very important work.
Bottom line - I've worked in private industry my entire 30+ year career and I've always been working to improve people's lives. Yes, it is profit-driven but the goal is to improve efficiencies and split the savings with the customer. Everybody wins.
THAT is what you're looking for - opportunities to save people time or especially save them money or provide them a service they've never had before. Remember, making money isn't the point of a business anymore than breathing is the point of living. Yes, a business must make money to stay in business just as you must breath in order to stay alive, but the point of living isn't just to breath. When you interview see if your business understands this and if they don't, move on. Don't waste your time with people thinking the whole point of being in business is to make money.
I work in order to provide for them. Otherwise I’d be off running around the woods or something fun.
One person = one vote. All benefits each year are split into 3 equal parts. 1 for bonus, 1 kept to prevent difficult times ahead, 1 for investment.
The bonus is optional, for example if a majority agrees that a large investment is necessary or because there is economic incertitudes (covid-related by example).
The general assembly works like shareholders. Democracy prevails but a firm still needs leadership and a structure. Each cooperative mist chose the one the want and/or need. It can be a classic hierarchy or a holacracy, just a matter of efficiently and preferences.
Meaning: the day-to-day operations are not the matter of the general assembly, which meets once or twice a year - more if really urgent, superior necessity.
Salaries are public but they don't have to be the same. When everyone understands the economics of the firm, the salary is far less an issue. If one feels that one's work is unrecognized, eg underpaid, it can be discussed openly. That one may leave the coop of the disagreement persists.
In all cases, by moral principle, the lowest salary must be decent in regard to cost of livings. And the top salary can't psychologically go beyond three or four fold the lowest.
The gain in spirit is huge. People are happy and motivated both by the shared challenge and the prospect of equal sharing of the profits each year.
However, it's not a magical panacea. It implies a mandatory non-violent communication course far all, ponctual intervention of external mediator and ... getting rid of unfit personalities (or pathological ones such as pervert-narcissist, unredeemable self-entitled, misogynists, racists...).
Well, if one is deeply conservative, one can join an conservative coop, at least in theory. => this is the whole point of coops: join people you will be happy to work with.
I'm rather intellectual and I need interesting-to-me work, otherwise I get bored and hop to another job. Still, the coop way of working provide a lot of satisfaction and can be super interesting if you invest in working on yourself on how to communicate well with others and going further into understanding of psychology of a group.
Maybe at some point, one will want to go back to cutting-edge technology: that's totally understandable.
Whatever the newly-joinef firm, classic or coop, what one will have learnt in the coop will be super helpful, both in career (which will be accelerated) and joy in life. Even at home, non-violent communication and democratic decision-making with leadership (here as a parent) will help.
There are some true coops working on cutting-edge technologies. Many of them don't advertise it though, because of prejudices of potential clients. A client doesn't need to know of your coop way of working.
Having a prior experience in a coop makes you much more likely to be hired by another coop, evidently.
People grow up in coops ; the sense of belonging give meaning ; sharing profits instead of fuelling the capture of wealth by the richests too.
For liberal spirits as well as true-Christian spirits (eg not Tea Party Evangelical reactionary but rather influenced by St-Francis of Assisi), the principle of limiting the gap of salaries, equally sharing the profits, and democracy in general assemblies) provide a huge amount of meaning to work.
It's like two friends helping each other painting their own houses rather than doing it alone. Happiness and bonding instead of a pain in loneliness.
This isn't necessarily the case in the public sector. You don't have the same price signals to give a real metric on whether the work you are doing is actually productive. For all you know, it could be a giant waste of taxpayer money. Because the government usually monopolizes whatever product or service it is providing, there is often nothing to compare it to to inform you whether the capital is being used effectively, and the money itself is sourced involuntarily from taxpayers. Would your creditors really want to pay for what you are doing, if given the choice, and are you certain that the private sector could not provide it in a more cost-effective way for the taxpayer if they weren't prevented by regulation?
Profit should not be looked upon negatively. If you are profiting, and you are not a tax cheat, you are contributing positively to the public purse. In the public sector, you may not be contributing to the public purse, but subtracting from it. While the work you do MAY be worth this subtraction (strong MAY here because it certainly isn't given or even measurable), it is markedly different from adding to public funding, whilst at the same time providing a good or service that people voluntarily pay for and which can improve their standard of living.
Consider a $50k earner paying 20% income tax. In government, this earner is taking $40k from the public purse. They pay $10k tax, but this payment is a bit of a gimmick because it was sourced from the public purse to begin with. It didn't increase the public purse. In the private sector, the $50k earner is adding $10k to the public purse. Thus, for every $50k earner in government, it takes the entire income tax of four $50k earners in the private sector just to pay the salary (and that's without the layers of bureaucracy which skim from that amount first).
Consider how this feels from the perspective of the private sector worker. They have a higher job risk than the government worker. This is because the private sector worker must be productive enough and provide services that people voluntarily pay for to make profit, whereas there exists no such requirement in government because there is a perpetual supply of money regardless of 'results'. On top of that, a big portion of their earnings are then taken away to pay just 1/4 of the salary for the government worker with the cushy, secure job and a nice pension, whose work it is not even possible to determine is cost-effective and beneficial to society.
Imagine you are on a deserted island with 4 other people, you can each catch an average of 5 fish per day. One person declares themselves to be "island boss". You and your 3 other survivors must give the boss one of your 5 fish every day. As a consequence of you feeding "boss", he gets to decide everything you are allowed or not allowed to do on the island, with increasingly restrictive rules, some of which make your task of catching 5 fish every day more difficult. Because you each need to eat 4 fish a day, you cannot build up capital which would afford you time to do things other than fishing. You are merely surviving.
I dunno, but my moral compass thinks work-for-profit is very ethical and work-from-profit-of-others much less. It may be the case that the public sector job is worth the money, but I would much rather voluntarily pay for things than be forced to pay for many things which I find distasteful.