How do you find companies working on problems that are actually worth solving?
By that I mean:
- not making the world a worse place (e.g. ad tech, most of fintech, crypto)
- given that, those don't necessarily need to be NGOs, green tech, charities; "boring" businesses working closer to the user are also fine.
For context, here's my site: https://sonnet.io I'd say that I'm a decent product developer/maker, designer and teacher (in that order), but I'm terrible at marketing, which is the main thing I'm trying to improve.
Here's how I'm approaching it so far:
1. I've taken a break from work to focus on research, and study (it's hard to keep focus otherwise and I'm generally quite engaged in my regular work)
2. I'm approaching (generally) smaller businesses directly instead of using recruiters
3. I'm actively working on smaller projects, focused on a specific user problem (e.g. mental health friendly apps, helping people discover alternatives to ad-sponsored social media) -- the goal here is becoming a solo founder (yes, I know it's hard)
4. I also run mentoring sessions via https://sonnet.io/posts/hi
Some of them turn into product discovery (people sharing their problems) or me becoming the mentee which I love as I thing this is a great personal/career development tool
I find it really hard to work "bullshit jobs", from a mental health point of view. The issue is that with the type of career many of us have followed here, esp. founders/software engineers it's easy to fall into a loop of solving more and more complex problems, then getting rewards for them, be it financially, through titles/labels, or (perhaps mainly) just more complex problems to solve... and it's easy to lose context, suddenly realise that the problems you're working on are not worth solving. I've grown out of that mindset, but weirdly enough, I'm feeling lost regarding how to get where I want to be.
So, how did you find a place like this? What would you recommend yourself x years ago, when you took your first steps?