Ask HN: What is the most meaningful work you have done? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the most meaningful work you have done?

46 pointsdan353hehe56 comments

So I’ve done everything from parsing XML in the 2000s with java, to writing VXLan kernel drivers for SmartOS. It’s been a blast!

However, I’m not sure any of the work I did has really done anything to “make the world a better place.” I’m having a hard time seeing software as anything other then a more optimized way of removing money from someone’s wallet and concentrating it in someone else’s wallet.

So I want to know, how do people make software work meaningful, and how do you see it making the world better?

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When there were no 'real' (it was either affiliate spam with fake female members or just raunchy forums) free dating sites around in my country. A lot of people who could not afford the legit paid ones (they were pretty expensive) were also the people who were the most likely to stay alone; divorced, older, poor and without jobs. So I wrote a dating site from scratch (no 'scripts' for sale or open source at that time either) and ran it with my wife: 100% free while we moderated it to have 0 spammers, prostitutes, etc. Somehow it grew and somehow we manage to keep the ratio male/female close to 50/50. We ran it for 5 years basically full-time before handing it over to a relationship council agency who swore to keep it free. They did so far (well over 10 years).

This was meaningful because we managed to bring together 1000s and 1000s of people, we still get emails or hear via-via from people who met via the site, made a family, got children etc. We used to get wedding invitations, 100s of postcards and invites to see babies. It was a good feeling; even though it was very heavy work (24/7 basically and we couldn't afford to hire anyone), I would love to do something like this again, just cannot think what it would be.

I never thought I’d grow up creating label printer software but I just love making good hardware usable by average people. As my (electron) app’s revenue accelerates through 6-figure territory I think about how the money is a good measure of how much I’m helping people. I get emails every day about how users love my app - and sheeeesh, that feels good.

Read more at https://label.live

That's an inspiring product you got there. I love the simple concept of building a good interface for something that doesn't have one. Are you using WebUSB or something to interact directly with the printer?

Using node-usb which means all USB interaction happens with the main process of the electron app (node), not the renderer (chromium). It wasn’t easy or straightforward how to make it work seamlessly across Mac and windows.

Long time ago, I coded the form on Santa's official website [1] used to submit your Christmas wishes to Santa. Without that form children (and adults) wouldn't have been able to reach him using a computer. A lot of people used that form to submit their wishes for Christmas and hopes for the future. I guess in a really real sense that makes me Santa's little helper :)

(santa.gl / Greenland / does exist anymore)

I do not have any memories of blissful glee to draw from; but I have a feeling Santa Claus, and all other forms of "magic" to a small child, would be involved in such moments I know I've had -- and there is little that compares to it.

Thank you.

I love this comment!

I've had a 20 year career spanning 15 companies and in retrospect none of the work I did for any of those companies strikes me as meaningful. In most cases, if the work had not been done, project not implemented, things would have carried on regardless with no one much affected either way. Some large companies might have spent money differently - that's all.

My current contract is in the running for least meaningful ever. If the entire long running project I'm a part of didn't exist, the only effect would be that the people who work on it would work elsewhere. The 400,000 users would actually gain time that they are currently obliged to spend using what this project offers.

I have a few side projects in the creative writing space that added real value for real users over the past 15 years and probably changed and improved the way they worked, so there was meaning there, but that's pretty much in the past now.

I'm currently working on some dev tools for the healthcare sector - a side project that I have high hopes for - and if that completes I feel it has the potential to be meaningful and add real value down the chain to the lives of real people.

> I've had a 20 year career spanning 15 companies and in retrospect none of the work I did for any of those companies strikes me as meaningful.

You absolutely did meaningful work: Increasing shareholder value.

Commerce is commerce. Not all work has meaning.

Even in the non profit sector things get tricky. I have since changed my outlook into not causing net negative outcomes on the world. Sometimes you get lucky and can help people, sometimes you get to just make something pleasant and convenient. Sometimes you entertain.

Chasing that feeling like you're changing the world for the better is IMO a fools errand. Instead chase something you don't hate yourself for building.

Commerce (can) create jobs which helps people put food on the table. That seems like it could be meaningful.

eh, some places really do exploit. I can't stomach working for an adtech company. But there are other options.

I proved to the F500 that free software (now “open source”) was worth paying for at Cygnus.

I’ve worked on some other hard potentially world changing projects over the years, including right now, but maybe of less interest to HN. I am trying to remove all the human-generated methane from the atmosphere over the next few years; if we manage to pull that off it will cut the global temperature by about a half a degree Celsius.

Curious how humans make methane? I know cows add significant methane to the atmosphere, but never thought about what else emits methane.

Methane comes from biological activity so it’s generated naturally from swamps, forests, bogs, and such.

Humans generate a lot of methane (60% of the atmospheric methane). About half is agriculture, some from ruminants but mostly from fields (including paddy fields), silage, waste, and such.

About a third is oil and gas and mining. Some comes from the oil well itself but most of it comes from fracturing the rock due to cutting or drilling so the has just seeps out.

It’s pretty hard to stop at the source (how do you put a catalytic converter on a swamp?). So you have to go after it in the atmosphere.

Feels like a bit of a shameless plug but...we're building a bionic eye to restore a sense of vision for people with blindness.

https://bionicvis.com

Are you the Bene Tleilax?

Wrote software to help people catch the bus on time, at NextBus.

We were the first to equip buses with real-time gps reporting and have that tied into digital displays at stops, and on the web.

I still see lots of my frontend stuff (backbone/js) still used after I left 8 years ago, which of course makes me happy that it's providing service to people who have to ride the bus (which I did extensively on purpose at the time - they paid me okay)

I like saving lives. I sometimes find myself in a position to help my friends when they are sick, and when I find a sick person without adequate care I step in to help, cooking and cleaning and taking them to the doctor... seeing to it that the doctor responds appropriately. I call ambulances to avert suicides and hang out with those at risk to encourage them to live. The rewards are happiness and peace.

There are definitely ways to make value in software, the examples you give are about the technology, and not the end-product, so it's tough to gage from those details what impact you may have had.

I built an ML system for a drop-ship retailer which took over a miserable job which was done by 20 people, and turned it into a part-time job for 2 people. It was meaningful, not because of what it did directly, but because it took a horrible, and somewhat meaningless job for a human, and replaced it with a machine that could do it much quicker. The two people who stayed in part-time where really happy to not spend all day doing data-entry, and they picked-up other work in the company doing more interesting things. I don't know what happened to the people who were laid-off, but I hope they went on to more interesting things.

My co-founder and I come from a research oriented world (CSIRO) and my co-founder, in particular, is used to working on early deep-tech. We were working in telehealth years before that was a thing, but we're still feel that nobody really WANTS to do telehealth, so we're happy to not be in that field anymore.

At our startup SoundMind.co we're working on improve sleep performance for millions of people (though starting off with thousands). One of the things my co-founder says he loves about what we're doing is that he can see and measure the real-life impact we are having.

Of course, I've also worked on things that I don't make a difference, like an app for the local pizza chain, a scheduling app for shift-workers that never went anywhere, and more.

You also mention that "It's been a blast!" which is great. What percentage of people can say that about their job, and take home a good salary?

Software can definitely be more than just moving money from one person to another. Sometimes you also have to look at the bigger picture of how the software you're writing is being used. The janitor at the hospital isn't just cleaning the floors, he's making the hospital germ free so people don't get sick. Sometimes it's a bit about how you are framing the job.

> So I want to know, how do people make software work meaningful, and how do you see it making the world better?

I think as long as what you build helps someone, it's meaningful. It can help many people or it can just help a friend. As long as it's a positive impact on others, it's meaningful.

Really I don't think software is different from anything else. Are you helping someone learn something? Are you helping someone put up fence? Are you helping someone fix a car? All of that is meaningful. Software can multiply it which is a plus, but you really only need to help one person.

I have found that working on making applications accessible is meaningful. It makes financial sense, as it opens up new business. Mostly though, it’s just the right thing to do. It gives access to groups of people that have historically, tragically, been overlooked. Personally I work on administrative software, so it helps open up job opportunities.

I made an algorithm, and then had a book published based on it, that gender swaps any text you put into it.

It’s called Gender Swapped Fairy Tales and the whole idea is about showing up the subtle (or not so subtle) gender biases we all have.

Some things are obvious like processes now rescuing princes but there are a whole lot of other things you won’t have noticed about the way these stories are told. For example there are a lot of fathers desperately wanting to have children. And female beasts and monsters that are allowed to be angry and scary and still get to be loved.

Some more info here: genderswappedfairytales.com and it’s available in all good bookshops in the uk, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Poland and Italy. and will shortly be published in France, Germany, South Korea and hopefully more places soon!

For me it’s the perfect sweet spot of a project that’s technically interesting AND something I personally believe in AND (hopefully) important to wider society.

I tried searching for meaning in Software projects I do at $job only to come to a realisation that I am essentially working to translate someone else's business need to a solution that makes them money and I get a part of it as salary. I don't think I will find the satisfaction I am looking for in that environment, and that is okay. Now, I treat the job as a job and strictly not work outside my "leased out time". I spend time at the wood shop making things that makes me happy and feel like the curious kid. There is something magical about putting in hours at making something and then feeling the tangible result with your hands. Perhaps something primate that gets triggered in my mind.

In short, the most meaningful work I ever did in my life so far was building the cradle and crib that my son sleeps in.

I agree. The most meaningful work I ever did was upholstery. Think about how often a couch or chair is used -- that's hours of enjoyment and comfort every day!

>removing money from someone’s wallet and concentrating it in someone else’s wallet

Have you forced someone to give their money to someone else, or have they done so willingly? Has anyone given you money for no reason, or was it generally in exchange for something useful to them?

Υou most likely are saving people time, and what is life if not time? You're freeing chunks of life so people could spend that doing something they want to do, with people they want to do it with.

"parsing XML" is a means to cumulatively save lifetimes. Imagine someone inventing the washing machine and describing that as "making something rotate with water, detergent, and fabric inside".

I worked on an application that helps prevent train collisions. And another application to detect faulty doors on older trains to prevent passenger accidents.

This sounds very cool and meaningful. No room for bugs in the first one.

In different ways, most things I've done have been meaningful. I learnt to code through cofounding a massive non-profit fanfic website with my friends and that build helped... me! I was living in poverty on welfare and had no way to go to school as I was the sole carer for my quadriplegic family member. Then I took what I'd learned and worked on a new project, connecting profoundly disabled people and roboticists to explore the world through drones. Nowadays I run a free code school for refugees and other people living in poverty, where professional developers volunteer to teach and mentor the learners so they can get good jobs in tech and start their own lives in this country.

Interspersed with those three big projects I've done contracting and agency work, mainly in Accessibility FE, and that has been a bit less motivating to work on, though it's useful, I think, to make all sites and apps work properly for as many people as possible. I've always stayed in the arts or academia for those contracts. I've never worked at a megacorp or for any kind of prestigious employer, so I've never really had to worry about the ethics of an employer. (Obviously I've never been paid loads either. :D )

I count myself so lucky to be able to spend my days like this. I leap out of bed to go to work in the morning. I recommend it!

> cofounding a massive non-profit fanfic website

Perhaps are you one of the cofounders of AO3 (Archive of Our Own)?

Aye - I wrote the front end, a loooong time ago now.

Well, thanks for all the work you’ve done! It is one of the best creative gems of the Internet, and the site is very well-designed.

You are completely welcome. It's an absolute joy, that place!

Math tutoring to get some money on the side when I was a student. I was mostly doing it for friends and friends of friends, many of them from poor background, so never got much money out of it since I was often ending not asking to be paid or very little.

10 years later some of them still thank me, because my tutoring made the difference between passing or failing some exam, which in turn made the difference between working in a sandwich shop or as a pharmacy assistance (for example).

I used to work in Search and Rescue, managing technical airworthiness risk on the aircraft. SAR really gets you out of bed in the morning, even if you fly a desk.

Interesting topic.

I used to work in a payday loan company for couple years, and while my collegues were awesome, the business itself was/is absolute bullshit. Meaningful? Far away from it.

I decided to try my own wings, and that has been one of the best decisions of my life. Software work has become more and more meaningful because for one, I get to decide what's done and when.

When I see a problem in my world, I ask myself if this problem would concern other people's worlds too. If it's a yes, I'll start working on it.

Fundamentally, if I can solve a pain point for others, doesn't it make the world a better place?

My latest meaningful (hobby) project has been working on the General Index published by Carl Malamud couple months ago. Science should be free, and accessible so mr. Malamud released a dump with over 107 million academic papers. I've been building a public search layer on top of this, with my angle being to find connections between scientists.

There's only a 1/6th of a dump, and very very POC phase but it works: https://spider.clousby.com/

Probably a tool that I built for the local education department. It's used by public servants to work out where new schools need to be built, helps manage demand between schools etc. It's used every day by dozens of people. I don't have direct contact with them but I hear indirectly how valuable they find it.

I'm creating automations for manual tasks that our operations team is responsible for. It feels great to be, not working (only) to take work out of their hands, but to make their work easier, more interesting, more fun.

I still want to do the earth-shattering stuff, but elevating others as a force multiplier is meaningful too.

I think about that once in a while, and I still think my most meaningful work was a small tool that I built while in college (almost 10 years ago).

The university website was pretty bad and in some programs the class enrollment was on a "first come-first served basis", so picking classes was a shit show (you could accidentally enroll in two classes at the same time).

So, me and some friends got to work on a tool to help student pick classes without overlaps. It would scrap the university website and show a nice timetable visualization of all classes that you wanted to attend, along with possible times.

I know it's nothing world changing, but it was pretty nice to see the traffic spikes and the positive feedback.

The website is still up to this day (although I think the code has been rewritten), so I guess that it's still useful :)

Helping make medical imaging ubiquitous, and easier to use, will save many lives.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/health/medical-scans-butt...

For the longest time I was someone who relied on external validation of whether my work was meaningful or not. Outside of saving lives or delivering children, most of the jobs that most people do are probably not that 'meaningful'.

I spent the last three years working for a narcissist, which meant that I got minimal external validation, even when I knew the work I was doing was valuable. I learned to reframe and appreciate the intrinsic value of my effort, especially when I knew that my effort was of high quality. It's an approach that works for me and I recommend it to other people.

Your work won't answer questions such as why am I here or is my life significant? If it is the measure of meaning then many people are failures who make little impact on the world. I have found meaning through religion. Belief informs my understanding of work. That is, to work hard, provide for my family and enjoy whatever wealth I have. I am older and have seen very happy workers in jobs others wouldn't want and very unhappy workers in jobs others would think are ideal.

I'm rebuilding the cloud infra of a company that deploys shared bike systems and that feels like a meaningful reason to get out of bed in the morning. The more effective our solution becomes the more people can be persuaded to cycle rather than drive. This makes cities safer, people healthier and reduces emissions. I've always been an environmentalist so it's satisfying to find a tech job that aligns with my sense of what is important.

Before the pandemic, I was craving the opportunity to do more impactful work than I had come in the past, ideally on healthcare. But the pandemic gave me the opportunity to use my programming skills to help nearly 1 million people schedule appointments to get vaccinated.

That’s the most meaningful work I’ve ever done.

On the other hand I've done lots of work that directly helps a lot of people, from educational apps to philanthropic projects to programs with significant utility for global trade, but nonetheless after all that I don't actually think the positive impact on people is what motivates me or makes me feel good about my work—more the craft and the thrill of the chase I guess. It's been an interesting realization to me.

I am trying to help others automate graphics/Images of any kind.

Working on an API to generate images on the fly, example https://img.bruzu.com/?backgroundColor=yellow&a.text=HN+Mean...

Currently working in agroculture technology software controlling water and fertilizer usages, as well as climate control and monitoring PH levels in the soil, temperatures, winds etc. and taking action based on other factor. The impact is quite big IMHO.

Some of the least technically challenging work I have done, had the greatest impact:

- Help NGOs setup websites and collect donations

- Help setup a wifi mesh network in a small village

- Teach kids programming using Scratch and JavaScript

I get a lot of satisfaction out of fixing hard to solve bugs. Those that initially look impossible to track down. It may not be earth-changing but since it satisfies me it is meaningful.

I once worked on a science lab automation to do the simulation/analysis work to process the asteriod samples. I think that's my meaningful work.

Helped the department chair by making a convenient tool to create schedules. Beats all years of commercial software development I've done since.

I don’t think there’s a fundamental need to “make the world a better place”, like in the Silicon Valley TV series.

During the COVID-19 quarantine lockdown, I was trying to come up with an idea for my blog ( https://confessionsoftheprofessions.com ) and I started collecting COVID-19 stories from around the world, but everyone knows what COVID is and everyone has a tragic story to tell or misery to share. We all collectively experienced what a pandemic is like and we all have seen or known or heard about how dangerous COVID-19 was, so there would be only so many times you can tell your COVID story of government lockdowns and all that.

Then I saw an opportunity, the only time I would personally ever have time to take on such a massive project. Work was slow. I was looking for something to do. It is called My Life As A Woman Project and sought to obtain the story of a woman from every country in the world. I already had access to a network of people from many different countries, so I switched up the focus and thought: "What is it like to be a woman in that country?" Every woman is different. Every woman will share a different perspective. But women are very detailed in storytelling. I sent requests out to about 1,500 women, most of them replied, but just a little more than 500 women were willing to share the personal story of their lives.

So I spent the next four months interviewing and even hiring some men and rehiring those women who were on board in understanding what I was doing and could reach countries that I could otherwise never reach. There are still places around the world that are communist and Internet is very limited. There are also places where it is not so easy to reach women. There were places where I spoke with "women of tradition" meaning I had to learn about their culture, learn how I needed to speak to them, and earn their respect before they would even write me a story.

Whatever the meaning of the project was, I hope it helps the world someday understand things about society and its treatment of women -- and its not all bad at all -- but these women are the game-changers of everyday life, coming in all ages from 17 to 90 years old. They told their stories of government corruption, family expectations, and even struggles with their own values and purposes in life. Women are beautiful. I figured I'd pave the way and give a woman from every country in the entire world a chance to tell her story. One simply does not talk to 1,500 women from all over the world and is not transformed or changed in some way. I hope you will be too.

A project like this was in no way cheap at all. The thing about talking to so many women and guaranteeing they share their stories and tell the truth: almost every woman was paid between $10 - $20 with some more of the rare women from harder-to-reach countries costing me a lot more to obtain and even authenticate that it was actually a woman writing her story. Taking advantage of that ONE MOMENT in human history where EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE WORLD was pretty much at home is what allowed me to do this. Most of these women were out of work and were needing some work so I compensated them in exchange for telling their story.

The project was solely funded with donations to my blog as well as from my life savings.

https://mylifeasawomanproject.com

The work i do can be pretty boring and behind the scenes for the most part, but i figured i'd share a few tidbits nonetheless...

I'd have to say that probably developing the page over at https://apturicovid.lv/#en

Back when vaccinations hadn't even started properly, contact tracing was viewed as one of the ways slow down the spread of COVID, so around 100 professionals in my country got together and worked on developing the Latvian contact tracing application "Apturi Covid" ("Stop Covid"), in which i also got to partake in.

Sure, creating the site wasn't anywhere nearly as impressive as working on the actual back end which some other people got to do, but i'd say that it was still pretty useful, since it served as the first point of contact towards getting to know the initiative for hundreds of thousands of people, allowed embedding the ToS and Privacy Policy in a web view for the mobile apps and also allowed various companies and media organizations to access visual and audio materials to inform their clients about the app.

On a more personal level, it was proof that you can leverage modern technologies pretty effectively when you're not dealing with projects that are in maintenance hell and that have endless amounts of technical debt, or a restrictive governance structure.

Furthermore, it was proof that a team of capable people can work together pretty efficiently, in stark contrast to the "e-health" system in Latvia, which has cost about 15 million euros to develop to date, and still doesn't even work: https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/latvija/par-e...

I guess it also got recognized in the local industry somewhat, since the app itself received an award as well: https://likta-lv.translate.goog/pieskirtas-ikt-nozares-balva...

Well, it's either that, or fixing production issues that block the work of healthcare organizations. I actually once went to visit one such institution to get an idea about what the problems with their system were in person and saw the queues of people forming, none of which could receive the services that they needed.

Fixing those issues by ripping out the neglected components of that outsourced project and replacing them with something that actually worked was satisfying, since i had a direct experience with the problem that i was solving by doing so. That "boots on the ground" experience was pretty humbling.

I’ve worked on everything from back end enterprise apps used by day traders to building information retrieval systems for kiosks at airports to embedded software running on a particular eink device.

Everything was directly meaningful to me, insofar as it provided someone value, gave me money for sustenance, and/or was something I was personally extremely interested in.

Meaningful is a relative concept, and I sincerely hope people in this thread don’t fall in a trap of comparing what they’re doing so what others are or are not doing.

It seems quite a bit of your writings are being murdered.

But, on point: "Meaningful is a relative concept, and I sincerely hope people in this thread don’t fall in a trap of comparing what they’re doing so what others are or are not doing."

I almost did. I've been feeling like I need to keep on grinding and moving on to more and more lustrous work, for some reason. Perhaps its to feel like I'm not "falling behind" in the "pack?" Perhaps I simply have too much time to ruminate, and not enough other tasks and hobbies to "round out" my life. Nonetheless, I've caught myself. Thank you.

With age, I'm adopting your point of view: work is simply to live. If it's work you're interested in and has tolerable-to-good coworkers, all the better. If not, well that leaves me to find "meaning" elsewhere/some other source of the "everything is on track" emotion.

I think we're all insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Our work simply makes no difference in the world, and serves only to keep the commerce machine churning -- till we die. In a previous time this notion would've been harrowing, but now it has no weight. That's simply life.

A good friend, through years of soul-searching, has taken to "altruism" via local non-profits and just being a good person to those within his personal sphere. Something about it rings of depth and goodness, in comparison to the usual and shallow bombast that rings empty from all those spouting about "revolutionizing," "changing the status quo," and "making the world a better place."

I feel the latter is simply done for the self, while the former is truly a self-sacrificing act. Perhaps being a decent human being towards those around you is the most meaningful thing you can ever do. It certainly doesn't have the manic high of "I'm doing something important, something impactful, and something BIG!" It's a mellow and tranquil feeling -- one too weak to get high off of. So why does he go through with it? I think its because he's purposefully developed a moral fiber. It's not grand, nor does it excite, but it's coming to be one of the only aspects I truly respect in others.

Achievement, accomplishment, importance, prestige, and so on, is all just grift in the end. A massaging of reality to make others perceive you in a different light so your ego/self-worth/emotional need is satisfied. Whereas a detached decency towards one's fellow man is not so.

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