I worked 5 years at a company I dreamed about. Then 2 at another one. It was an amazing experience, I learned a lot in the process and met many great people. Problem is, there are no companies or projects left for me to dream about any more. :'(
I achieved my dream in my 20s by working for Sun Microsystems. The company behind SunOS (then Solaris), and all the hardware I drooled over while in the university. Where I met luminaries like Diffie and Gosling. Where pure magic like dtrace and zfs were born. Java too. A place where brilliant quirky engineers ruled the world. A company that built the best operating system and awesome hardware, how awesome is that? (Spoiler: extremely awesome). The ride of my life.
Today.. what? Most silicon valley jobs by volume (GOOG+FB) are in advertising. Not interested. Most of the rest are in building yet another phone app or social site. Yawn.
Where are the pure tech companies innovating cutting edge hardcore technology products? I want to dream again.
Everything interesting we've had was bought by Mail.ru, Yandex, or Sberbank. Everything runs on ads, which I consider the cancerous tumor of the internet.
Silicon Valley is even more depressing than that. I've been there, and I've seen these offices with rows and rows of desks that go as far as you could see. This didn't feel like a welcoming environment. This also raised that question about what the hell do all these people do.
I want companies that are primarily concerned with making the world better, not making shareholders richer at the cost of everyone's sanity.
I think that was the original dream in a way too - to learn enough to be able to create the things I imagined. Maybe I'll work part time at regular work and part time on the 'dream', who knows. Like others have mentioned though, there's often a lot to be grateful for in the moment, dreams aside.
The software industry is trending towards dumbing everything down and making increasingly user-hostile design decisions. This is the exact opposite of my values. Then there's the purely technical side of things. It's becoming scarily common for software developers to not understand the abstractions they're using and the compromises they're making while choosing those abstractions. This leads to poor-quality, underperforming products. It's become so ingrained into the culture that people legit look at you weird when you tell them that they don't need react and 50 JS libraries to build a website and that using the Android APIs in an app directly is a perfectly okay thing to do.
So, there are diminishing opportunities for creating a startup, and most existing companies' values go against mine. I feel lost at this point. I truly have no clue where to go next and what to look for. Nonprofits maybe?
But if I'm being honest, I have to remind myself that the industry was not any better when I joined. Actually, I initially refused to work in that field for the same reasons that you list, except the epitome of dumb and user hostility at the time was Microsoft and Oracle. What made it possible for me to work in the industry was the raising tide of free software. Contributing to the success of it was interesting and fun and meaningful.
Now this tide have receded. Open source has merged with the industry, it incorporated its culture and helps greatly with the dumbing down and the over production of junk software.
I'm waiting for the next wave to come. I'm not sure where it will come from. My best guess at the moment as the most important, potentially disruptive technology, is functional OS distributions pioneered by NixOS and perfected by GuixSD, that has the potential of becoming the Debian of the future and revolution the way we assemble and distribute software and put an end to that unprincipled era of containers.
Rust is also an interesting piece of tech that has the potential to promote correctness and optimization in a field obsessed with simplicity.
So if one had to look for a job right now I would encourage either evangelization in one of those technologies maybe. That, or to work in a farm and enjoy computers on the side.
My job is part of my dream, but not all of it. I am currently building the other part, where I have equity in something that is growing everyday.
I hear people talk about how great high school was, or how much they loved college or their 20's. For me, each decade is better than the last as long as I'm still learning, growing, and building.
I've been realizing recently, maybe late in life - I don't know if this is obvious to other people much earlier - that discreet goals don't make much sense in such changeable, open-ended lives. Why aim to save $10,000 when you could aim to maintain the practice of saving 10% of your income - forever? Every month or quarter or year you can look and say hell yes, I hit that goal! Maybe you want to increase it one year. $10k will run out in no time, but a good habit doesn't. Also, maybe saving sums of money isn't really what we need to focus on... Kind of like lifting some arbitrary weight. Maybe what we really want is health and strength, or financial security and independence to allow us to buy the things we want or need. Maybe rather than travelling to a specific location, we want to live in such a way that we can have the opportunity and means to explore and see interesting places. The discreet goals could be a sub-goal of the system perhaps, but probably shouldn't be the focus.
I've always had these silly discreet goals and terrible habits to support them. I think, moving forward into my later 30s and beyond, I'll try more to focus on systems over discreet, limited results.
Maybe it's from James Clear?
> You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
> This is a quote from my new book Atomic Habits and was adapted from one of my favorite sayings by the Greek poet Archilochus: “We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”
I really like that! Thanks, I'm going to check this out.