Careers are inherently meaningless?! Would you mind elaborating?
The way I see it, advancing in one's career is about gaining more and more skills and experience to merit a higher paycheck, which is a proxy for the value one provides to their employers and the market in general. The proxy is definitely not perfect, but it's the best one we have.
So under this view a career is inherently meaningless, at least if you are willing to attribute meaning to people providing value to one another, which I definitely do. I don't think that video gaming (at least on one's own) is as meaningful for society.
A career can be meaningful or meaningless. It can be meaningful if you are making money doing something you feel it's important to do in the world: for example, nature conservation work. I am working on that, and in that realm I care about the work I do. But I also have a corporate job, where I'm just hired to do something for someone else. In that case, it's only about money and I just satisfy the job description without putting anything more into it. In that case I'm just using it to make enough money to support my future projects and I don't plan on staying here much longer.
I'm not suggesting your work is the only source of fulfillment or that one's career should be the sole measure of their self-worth. Rather, the importance of finding value and meaning in one's work is a complementary means of achieving personal fulfillment and happiness. It is still possible to find value and meaning in jobs that do not align with a person's interests or passions. The key is to find a balance between work and other aspects of life.
Basically every corporation you can work for will have you doing something meaningless (and is dedicated to a meaningless pursuit besides). As the world population shrinks in the deep future, perhaps that will change - but right now it definitely will not.
As such, I have trouble seeing why you'd think any work you do means anything. Most likely it doesn't and that's okay. It is not within your control to have meaningful work available. It is within your control to have a healthier attitude towards your workplace and your work.
I think the idea is that there's a potentially meaningful part of someone's life outside of their company if what they work on isn't just contained in their company. I don't read it as the OP suggesting it's a precondition for a meaningful life; it seems to be one potential path.
its amazing how every piece of this comment is either referencing money, social connections or status. it reads like you've forgotten that whats significant about a job is the work itself, and what it does. well, for me anyways.
I think you overestimate how much "profession" plays a role here. I think people only really care about doing honest and worthwhile work. No one have any idea what they "want" to do in 5 to 10 years.
The problem that I see with work today is that the value from my work is so hard to derive that I can't help but see it as pointless. I mean what value have I generated from writing a bunch of code that is used to do some analysis? How is my company/industry providing value to society again?
I think IF people find genuine satisfaction from their work, then they are more likely to think that it is their "dream" profession. That is to say that what the profession is doesn't really matter as much as what the person think of their work, whatever that is.
For instance, if janitors is a highly respected and well paying job, would people still think less of sweeping floors and flushing toilets?
Meaning and purpose are not things that you find in work; they are things that you make. As a CTO in a small adtech company, my standard pitch to hungry young talent went something like this: You're not going to be curing cancer or putting people on Mars, and we don't have daily catered lunches or a foosball table, but I will give you A) more responsibility than you would have elsewhere, B) more opportunity to make an out-size contribution to the company, C) more freedom to choose the tools and methods you want to use, and D) lots of data to play with. And then I would point out people who honed their crafts and made money in adtech and then went on to work on curing cancer, sending people to Mars, etc.
I am reminded of a story about a janitor. Being a janitor doesn't seem like an obviously meaningful and fulfilling job, but if you work as a janitor to provide for your daughter so she can go to college, then that job indeed can be profoundly meaningful.
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?
I used to think it wasn't. My jobs were, no matter how it was dressed up, trying to earn a massive retailer an extra percent or two on their already massive earnings over doing anything that impacted the consumer positively.
Since I started working for myself, I find it meaningful if only because I get to actually BUILD stuff.
But after all of the advertising I've done, I'd like for my next full-time job to be a net positive for society.
What if the value to someone is keeping people busy and thus not challenging the status quo? Or what if the job is useless to society but still makes some money?
If you find your work to be meaningless, who am I to argue. But I've had a number of jobs at different companies at various places along the 'meaning' gradient. It's not all the same. Though I also agree that meaning is, to large degree, yours to make, at least as much as it is a property of the situation.
Perhaps not everyone thinks their career is the most/ only important thing. They might even actually care about others rather than simply seek to virtue signal. Imagine that!
I know people who have thought their work was meaningless wherever they went.
On the other hand I know people who find a lot of meaning in humble jobs like food service because there is a very clear line between serving people food, satisfying them, making them happy, etc. It can be a very emotionally satisfying thing to do even if it is not high paid, high status, etc.
I have rarely felt bored or that my work was meaningless but I have sometimes felt work inhibition, maybe every 5 years or so. Usually I find some things I really like about my work but I also look for meaning in side projects.
For instance now I have a side project which involves a lot of coding but is basically artistic. I find it gratifying in itself, but it also "closes the circle" by strengthening skills that were weak for my work. I am a applications developer who is really strong in protocol design, databases, applications architecture and also systems programming such as compilers and debugging really strange problems. I wasn't so good at visual design and found it an uphill battle to learn how to make web sites accessible, which is an important part of my role because it is critical to our customers and thus critical to making sales. (e.g. "meaningful")
Since I've had my art project I've learned how to draw things, make images and knock down any obstacle in that area even if I "don't know how to do it" and it makes me better at my day job and more satisfied in it.
Many farmers, scientists, teachers, and construction workers lead meaningful careers.
But think about McDonalds. The food is grown by "farmers", the buildings were built by construction workers, the people who work there were taught by teachers, and the food was created by scientists.
Some, but not all, of those people are doing meaningful work.
Now consider the banker that renegotiates mortgages with long time customers to help them stay solvent, the politicians who stand up for constituents, the salespeople who help people find a car that will really serve them well, the lawyer that takes a pay cut to defend the accused...
Meaning is not found in what you do, but how you do it.
Not the OP, but I have had the experience of working on worthwhile products, but in the context of a preponderately meaningless job. Even if a product has some value, you can find your role demeaned by terrible ethical practices, psychopathic bosses, sales-dominated practises insisting on low quality work, institutional insistence on lying to clients, etc etc. The word 'meaningless' may be a bit over-categorical, but I'd consider it defensible to refer to situations where the meaningless/negative aspects overwhelm the positive.
My experience was that this was the case with all commercial jobs I did. Bearing in mind that only the top 10% or so (which by definition we can't all be included in) have a very wide choice of work.
Dare I say you're both right and missing each others point?
Doing a good job at everything you do personally and professionally is (like you say) integrity and drives self-respect.
At the same time, the work you're doing can be menial/meaningless to you and thus may take time from tasks that have greater meaning, or it may even be mentally unhealthy (stress) or impact your relationships (long hours) that is sometimes required TO do a good job.
Not everything we do in life is going to matter, I'm not arguing we need to have meaning in everything. However there is a point I think where people do need some sort of personal meaning/connection to some of what they're doing. For many people its family, others charity, volunteering or working in fields where they are passionate and connected to or any/all of the above/other.
Too often people take the admirable approach of trying to do the best job they can at everything, and burn themselves out on tasks and jobs that don't provide them personal benefit in their lives otherwise in my opinion, its a cultural issue that seems to be getting worse.
People talk about all sorts of things they supposedly need to have satisfaction in their work, but they are mostly red herrings. People get obsessed with benefits and qualifications and pay and titles and status and all sorts of nebulous things when they know they are missing something, but don't know what.
What matters is a sense that you are doing meaningful work. All the other stuff, like the technologies you work with, the quality of your co-workers and management, the free coffee and lunch or lack thereof, will not provide substitutes in the long run.
And, by "meaningful", I don't mean glamorous, change-the-world stuff that appeals to vanity. Clearing out drains (or the IT equivalent) is useful and meaningful. By lack of meaning, I'm talking about anything that amounts to digging ditches to fill them in again.
Unfortunately, most job ads and recruiters assume that who you work for and why don't matter much at all - they just are looking for someone with a list of tech skills to plug in to a machine.
So, I would say what's worked to some extent for me is temping and volunteering and getting to know different people and organizations.
The way I see it, advancing in one's career is about gaining more and more skills and experience to merit a higher paycheck, which is a proxy for the value one provides to their employers and the market in general. The proxy is definitely not perfect, but it's the best one we have.
So under this view a career is inherently meaningless, at least if you are willing to attribute meaning to people providing value to one another, which I definitely do. I don't think that video gaming (at least on one's own) is as meaningful for society.
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