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Comment by ahmedk92 | Hacker News Reader

I notice a hive-mind of looking-down on "ordinary work" even if it's not really challenging, and is actually isn't less purposeful than open source projects that get to the HN front-page.

'Coolness' is an unmeasured and a dangerous motivation.

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It's not a hivemind, it's people expressing their frustrations. In this industry, it's easy to feel safe in terms of income, so naturally people seek fulfilling needs from higher up the Maslow's pyramid.

And a typical programming job is not really doing anything useful for the society except maybe extremely indirectly. At best, it's not actually harmful.

Personally, I've been through plenty of webdev jobs, and almost always, it was building a copy of something that already exists and is better, so that our company (or our customers) could compete in the same space. If I ever met a potential user of such service and my bosses weren't looking, I'd actually direct them to the original competitors. It would be dishonest to do otherwise. It's jobs like these that can make one feel they don't contribute anything useful to society (making your boss richer by building a copycat product in a global market is hardly useful for people other than your boss).

Essentially, companies/products like Google (AltaVista, Lycos, ect.), Facebook (Friendster, MySpace, etc) or Slack (IRC, Skype, etc)?

IMHO, it's very rare to be working on something truly unseen; and if you are, the chances are numerous people are working on the same thing at very this moment, just in a different flavor. Aren't these incremental improvements part of the natural selection?

IMHO, you should strive to find meaning not in the external, but internally; you should start somewhere, however basic it is (fixing your bed and cleaning your room, before trying to change and help the world). Jordan Peterson talks about that in great detail - highly recommend his lectures (they're available online).

Outside of tech, there are plenty of pretty mundane businesses that do lots of social good. In tech this is harder mostly because everything has almost global availability by default. But still, you don't neccesarily have to work at one of the big five to have social impact.

As for finding meaning within, I see this as a cop out. If you extend it to the limit, the most meaningful life is that of doing nothing and enjoying your inner self. It's not the kind of life I'd personally find meaningful.

Writing just another automation tool, application, website is hardly helping the planet. Making some billionaire company owner more wealthy even less.

Let's be honest: less than 10% of software jobs are producing something meaningful.

Meaningful | interesting | paid.

Pick one. Pick two if you are both very talented and lucky. Pick three if you are Torvalds.

the biggest problem with ordinary work is the rote schedules most such work entails. Just having to be in the same building for many years from X am to Y pm Monday through Friday, except for M weeks vacation, is itself pretty depressing to many people

> 'Coolness' is an unmeasured and a dangerous motivation.

As is curiosity, but we have little problems with people motivated by it in tech?

Oh no, we have big problems with coolness in tech.

He was comparing coolness, an "unmeasured and a dangerous motivation", to curiosity, which is similarly unmeasured and dangerous. ie, both are unreliable motivators and yet the industry idolizes both.

It's a form of virtue-signalling, much like making sure all of Hackernews knows you eat strictly paleo and only have as many possessions as can fit in a single rucksack.

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