As I near the end of my career, the cumulative effect of the shit I've seen in this industry, and my disappointment in humanity since 2016, I'm about to break my own moral code, and take an incredibly lucrative gig at a defense contractor building a platform of multi-purpose, highly reconfigurable drones.
2010's me would have starved before even returning the recruiter's e-mail, now I'm strangely OK with it. Knowing that my work will help kill russian soldiers and defend Ukraine even makes me kind of proud.
Bitterness really changed me. I'm curious, how has it changed you?
May be good to note that many people find working for defense contractors neither unethical nor immoral ... and that this isn't about "the ethical and moral choice", but your "ethical and moral choice" :)
Interesting, as I've grown older, I have had to actively try and keep my morals defined.
Constantly seeing people behave badly and get rewarded for it has increasingly led to me to believe that obeying the rules is a fools game.
The startup that you could have joined but turned down - maybe it would have been successful, or, maybe you would have ended up slaving away for 10-15 years only to see it slowly fail.
The girl/boy you could have asked out - maybe that was the one, or maybe they would turn out to be a basket case.
Crossing a powerful CEO and losing your job - maybe keeping the job would have made you rich, or maybe working for such a person would have been soul destroying and broken you.
It's very dangerous to use hindsight to select decision points that you now know would have definitely been the "right" choice to make. That is a path that leads to bitterness and regret.
I'm in a very similar position to you - I'm reaching the end of my career and my thoughts have increasingly turned from "what's the most exciting/interesting/useful thing to be doing" to "I need to make enough money to see myself through to the end - what's the optimum way to do that". The optimum way may be to bend some of the principals that I may have.
Reading through what I've written I hope it doesn't come across as condescending. That is certainly not my intention as I feel in many ways the way you do. Maybe we're both just getting old ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At my old job, the manager of my manager still wanted to keep his hands on the infrastructure, but his background was in software engineering and the effect was that a) the limitations of the infrastructure closely matched the limitations in understanding of that person and b) me and other coworkers were frustrated because most ideas for improvement would get rejected for no real reason (just bullshit managerial reasons).
I’m half regretting my decision though, because now in faangland you supposedly can fix stuff around but the workload is so intense and the pace so fast that effectively I can’t take the time to analyse interesting problems and design a solution.
I used to be optimistic about stuff but now i just go online and tell people the pessimist view of their problems lol