Where would you feel proud to work?

I stopped working in the tech industry and moved to Sydney to work on a phage therapy clinical trial as a research software engineer. We're doing really cool, impactful work, and we're actually treating real-life patients!

Pay is not nearly as good as tech (I make less than at my first job), but it's rewarding and not nearly as high stress either, and we're doing something really unique in the world. Not sure if this is something I want in the really long term, but loving it for now.

It depends what your motivation is.

Personally, I'm proud to work for the UK Civil Service. I get to see how the work I do helps keep people safe. I don't have to care about the "mission" - or agree with every decision made by every team in every department - but I can look at the positive impact my team is having on the world.

I've also worked for the NHS. Again, a big organisation with a lot of flaws. But being able to "nudge the oil tanker in the right direction" feels great.

I once worked for my local council. That allowed me to contribute to my local community.

For me, it's about making the world better rather than making someone else richer.

The only time I have ever been "proud" of my work is when I began making money on a service I built as a side project.

Knowing I built something people found useful and were willing to pay for was a big moment for me. The day I quit my full time job and worked on my own service full time was a big moment in my life.

Personally, NASA, ESA or similar organization advancing science that will benefit scientific discovery and further development and understanding of current models, with a goal of sustainability for ethical social growth. I suppose the goal is more important than company/place/org etc. I just want to find somewhere I can make a difference, even if it's in the background. I'm at a personal point in my life where titles don't matter to me, only the positive changes I can bolster or create. Money is transient, I'd be happier with stability, i.e. healthcare, food and safe sustainable housing, general quality of life and the ability to interact with like minded folk. Titles and locations are great for representing my pride to others but for me that does not reflect my own personal pride in what I'm working on.

Once my kids were out of the nest, I left a long career with an SV megacorp that sold to many dubious countries/companies because business.

Now I run a non-profit that is focused on helping people. My income is around 1/5, but my pride and general job satisfaction is 100x.

I work for the Air Force right now. As far as I can tell, much of the Hacker News "meta" seems to be in agreement that the US and especially its military are more or less a force for evil, but given the type of world I prefer to see personally, I still believe air supremacy on the part of a western liberal superpower is better than the plausible near-term alternatives. So I am sufficiently proud right now of the overall mission, though as a fairly low-level software platform guy, I'm pretty disconnected from it.

But if you take money completely out of the picture and let me do anything at all, I would definitely be a youth athletic coach and teacher.

I work in a big tech company in a group that has a relatively good reputation :) What I enjoy most is getting to contribute and have meaningful impact on products which are used by millions+ of people. It is cool seeing articles in HN or other places (Ars, Verge, etc) about our work.

I am thinking closer to retirement I'd like to shift gears and work on electronics/IoT type projects with a social startup. I've seen some interesting companies doing things like deploying low-cost educational computers, fresh water systems, and so on to benefit people who don't have access to those things.

Honestly, there are two parts to this. Pride in my work, and pride in the organisation as a whole.

For the former, it'd be anywhere that respects the value of the stuff I'm working on, lets me solve technical issues in a responsible, well tested, thought out way and has a decent engineering culture in general. I wouldn't feel proud to work somewhere with no source control where changes are done live without backups and no one has any idea what they're doing.

Meanwhile for the latter, anywhere that doesn't:

1. Support authoritarian governments, or other questionable organisations (like cults and extremist groups)

2. Sell a product that is knowingly harmful to their customers (like cigarettes, some types of drugs, etc)

3. Knowingly sow discord and promote false information for financial or political gain (NewsCorp, InfoWars, etc)

4. Try to undermine society and destroy people's privacy, ala Facebook.

Honestly, every company I've worked at so far was trying their best to provide a good product/service/experience to their customers, and I've been proud of working there.

K-12 education.

It's thankless and there's relatively limited budget. The median IT worker warms a chair, so there's plenty of challenges to tackle.

But, if you regularly engage with teachers and students, you can see the impact that smoothly operating technology and applications has on education.

I've been able to find pride in a lot of places I've worked even if they aren't the most obvious.

When I worked in retail IT, I found I could help and comfort people through some of the scariest moments. Tech and data are some of the most personal things for many people. I felt like a therapist half the time.

Now, Im a software developer working at a bank writing code for handling fraud. Even though banks are usually seen as evil, the work I do actually is actually too try to make customers' lives just a little bit easier when they go through a potentially tough time.

I think many jobs are like this if you look at it from the right perspective

I work in academia doing ML research, and from an ethical standpoint I think it is one of the best places to be. Still there are ethical issues to consider. For me, thankfully I do not do any controversial research. I sometimes wonder, if I am wasting public money and burning energy pursuing certain research directions, but that is just about it.

On a more personal level, I sometimes wonder if I am wasting away my potential to earn $$$ by pursuing a career in academia. Currently I have no family, but in the future, if I do, then I would feel an obligation to provide for them, in all ways, including financially.

Working for a game studio and launching a game is a really satisfying experience IMO

I think part of is that everyone is working on the same project and has a shared common goal of making the game as good as possible. Plus there's so many different disciplines involved, its really awesome to see everyone's combined talent come together.

And as much as there can be some negatives to gaming, I do think games and other entertainment like movies are a net good thing in the world

Health Care Tech, like Siemens Health or Philips

I’m sure there are places I’d feel proud to work, but right now it’s for myself.

I have built a successful consulting practice that has allowed me to bootstrap a SaaS business and buy and operate a very small farm.

The thing I’m proud of is developing a balance between seemingly disparate interests. I love working in different areas and building relationships between them.

For me, I have come to terms with that fact that an fully moral employer is unrealistic in this competitive world. So I stopped feeling proud or disappointed by what my employer does in the world (as long as it does not actively goes out of its way to harm people).

That said, I think I am happy to work at Netflix currently.

I am proud to work where I would because people help each other, management recognise hard work and we all get along. The idea that one profession (especially half of the ones listed here) is more noble than another is non-sense with the exception of about 0.1% of jobs are each end of the scale.

For me it's mostly been gambling companies that I've abstained from working for.

I use to feel proud about where I worked. Then a series of unfortunate events happened and I no longer work there. Now I'm again wandering through corporate America trying to find purpose. Shame.

Off the cuff, I suspect I would feel proud to work in one of two conditions:

A) A place delivering support to those in need, within my geographical community. For example, working for an organization running a food bank, career oriented learning, and similar services.

B) A team working on a cutting edge area of science and/or engineering, which would advance human understanding in a way that will lead to overall societal improvement.

It's possible though, that I'm conflating pride and fulfillment.

I would feel proud to work for a company that treats real human interaction as the building block of everything we have in society. The meaning of life, so to speak.

I don't work for that company, not because of money, but because I don't feel that such a company exists. At least not one which requires my skill set.

Prior to March 2020 I did work for companies that I think held those values dearly. Those values are now gone, replaced by TCP.

I work for Materialise. It's a Belgium-based AM company with a strong presence in the health sector. It is not too famous, not too big, not that rapidly growing either, but it does produce a net positive effect on society while staying financially healthy for over 30 years.

I hope to do a tour in the US Digital Corps some day. The nonprofit space would be great too, but hard to find a lot of them with problems that my skill set addresses.

I do machine learning for aberration correction in the transmission electron microscope. We are not the hippest ML lab (META, Deepmind.. ), but its super cool stuff.

A farm or a hospital.

my own business

I love Bandcamp, they never reply my emails. :(

Organizations that I would feel proud to work for: The Internet Archive. ISRG. Wikipedia.

Always hard to pin down. It’s an “I’ll know it when I see it” sort of thing.

I am proud to work for my own company

For most of my career, I've worked for mission-driven organizations, mostly environmental nonprofits or renewables companies. The pay was shit but the people were awesome and I felt good about work every single day. It was worth it. Then I got let go during COVID and moved to a bigger renewables company, but it's pretty much the same: working on some project I directly care about, for a cause I agree with, at a wage I can live by.

The difference vs working in pure tech is that I don't have to guess whether my impact is a net negative or positive. I'm not working on some abstract toolset that can be used by any actor, good or bad, I'm making bespoke software for a specific audience for a particular reason: to help increase renewables output.

I'm not rich and never will be (nor do I WANT to be -- it'd change me too much), but I'm still quite well-off compared to most Americans and especially compared to the rest of the world, even those who do work in tech.

If money weren't a thing, I think it's the kind of work I'd volunteer to do quite a bit of anyway. Except I'd travel more and take Fridays off :) But otherwise, the work is innately fun (very visual frontend stuff written in a semi-modern stack), my coworkers are awesome, the work-life balance is good, my managers are attentive and reasonable humans, and there's no cutthroat backstabbing that I've ever seen. We also don't work for cults of personality, just regular people doing regular business stuff.

Part of the reason I don't want to work for a FAANG or similar is that I have no control over the output of my work. I was burned by an early startup experience, when I was interning at an (ostensibly) anti-spam company working on some novel methods; this was before Gmail and before ML really took off. It was a fun crew, but one day the founder decided he wasn't making enough money and decided to sell the tech to the Chinese government to censor dissidents instead. I noped outta there with a bad taste in my mouth, forever skeptical of the tech companies that are basically mercenaries for hire.

It saddens me that so much of my work (web dev) is controlled by basically 3-4 giant companies and we're all at their mercy. The Internet is more centralized than it's ever been, and that's getting worse by the day. Still, though, at least I can take some of their stuff and actively funnel it towards causes I believe in.

Some days I look at the powerful CEOs and wish they'd have a change of heart and funnel some of their productivity towards the common good instead of stupid Twitter arguments or the biggest spaceship. The Patagonia CEO turning his brand into an environmental nonprofit last month gave me a lot of hope in humanity, that maybe once in a while the good guys can still win.

But ya know, in the meantime, you just do what you can. I'm proud of my work, but more than that, I'm proud that I've managed to make peace with my life, finding a good balance of everything. There is no pure good, and very rarely pure evil, in this world. We all deal in moral ambiguities, and it's a matter of picking (and maybe occasionally winning) the battles that you care deepest about. You can be an ally to many causes, but only be on the front lines of one or two. We're only human at the end of the day, no need to beat yourself up for simply having been born into a flawed world and imperfect societies. If you're nudging things in the right direction, that's all anyone can ask of you.

For myself

Data vis at Uber