Does anyone working in software honestly feel like their work gives them a strong sense of purpose? Honestly I'd imagine the far majority don't, working on proprietary code for companies driven solely by profit, within agile factories where a developer's sole role is to churn out tickets on an assembly line, and have no real ownership or stake in the company's success. Hence the high rate of burnout despite the job being relatively cushy and high-paying. It certainly is a spectrum however (for me adtech felt the most meaningless).

Any job where you're someone else's employee naturally means you're sacrificing autonomy and freedom over your work, probably in the name of private profit over social good, so will probably not be as enjoyable being able to work on one's own terms unless one feels they are accomplishing more through this arrangement than they could be otherwise.

For me what personally excites me most in the tech world right now is tech that is open source, modular, and decentralized (basically the goal of web3). The idea of building a decentralized, modular, open source <insert big tech platform> sounds more interesting than golden handcuffs at <big tech company> (who IMO have also been fairly stagnant innovation wise outside of just performance and scaling under the old centralization paradigm).

I haven't made the jump though. And at the end of the day I'm still kind of a slave to money until I'm financially independent, and if I'm going to sell my labor to someone else, I might as well sell to the highest builder (assuming it ethically aligns). Haven't spent much time really looking though, with the crypto/web3 boom it may finally be reasonably possible to do that sort of work and still get paid handsomely.