For those of you who are proud of your employer: where do you work?
For everyone else: if money was taken out of the picture, where do you think you would feel proud to work?
Pay is not nearly as good as tech (I make less than at my first job), but it's rewarding and not nearly as high stress either, and we're doing something really unique in the world. Not sure if this is something I want in the really long term, but loving it for now.
It's a lot of stuff going on, and in some sense it's like a "CTO" role of both steering, designing, and implementing tech to help steer a clinical trial in the right direction. But we're not a pharma clinical trial — we're a research lab, so our group is tiny (<10 full-time), so we're constantly doing everything and under-resourced.
So it kind of feels like a startup in a lot of ways, but with very different KPIs and measurements of success, since we're grant-driven.
Professionally, it's me and another bioinformatician doing all the tech decisions, so it's giving a lot of experience that are transferrable out into the tech world if I ever wanted to come back (I used to be a UX designer).
And yes, the pay is terrible (I make less than my first jr. UX designer role), but it's also much less stress than a tech job. And it's rewarding because I can say that our team helps treat people like a 7yo girl who almost got her leg amputated from an infection, and she's absolutely fine now! (But yes, I wish it paid more, and it might, if we score this massive pending grant.)
Personally, I'm proud to work for the UK Civil Service. I get to see how the work I do helps keep people safe. I don't have to care about the "mission" - or agree with every decision made by every team in every department - but I can look at the positive impact my team is having on the world.
I've also worked for the NHS. Again, a big organisation with a lot of flaws. But being able to "nudge the oil tanker in the right direction" feels great.
I once worked for my local council. That allowed me to contribute to my local community.
For me, it's about making the world better rather than making someone else richer.
I get to log off every day feeling good though, so it all seems worth it to me.
Knowing I built something people found useful and were willing to pay for was a big moment for me. The day I quit my full time job and worked on my own service full time was a big moment in my life.
Good:
Chance to work on some awesome large scale projects. Relatively stable employment if a civil servant. Some groups like JPL get to work on cutting edge and unique projects such as the Mars robot drone.
Bad:
Low compensation and few growth opportunities. Projects can get cancelled at any time (see the NASA "Constellation Program"), depending on politics. Hard to get a job as a civil servant, most people are contractors. A lot of work is managing contracts and system integration. Slow pace.
Now I run a non-profit that is focused on helping people. My income is around 1/5, but my pride and general job satisfaction is 100x.
But if you take money completely out of the picture and let me do anything at all, I would definitely be a youth athletic coach and teacher.
Otherwise, where do you draw the line? Every taxpayer funds our war machine, many funds invest in arms, every campaign donation is partially responsible for every war, etc. That's the other side of democracy, eh? If we're all in charge to some degree, we're all guilty to some degree.
You're no more guilty than any other regular joe. We just outsource our dirty work to you.
I am thinking closer to retirement I'd like to shift gears and work on electronics/IoT type projects with a social startup. I've seen some interesting companies doing things like deploying low-cost educational computers, fresh water systems, and so on to benefit people who don't have access to those things.
For the former, it'd be anywhere that respects the value of the stuff I'm working on, lets me solve technical issues in a responsible, well tested, thought out way and has a decent engineering culture in general. I wouldn't feel proud to work somewhere with no source control where changes are done live without backups and no one has any idea what they're doing.
Meanwhile for the latter, anywhere that doesn't:
1. Support authoritarian governments, or other questionable organisations (like cults and extremist groups)
2. Sell a product that is knowingly harmful to their customers (like cigarettes, some types of drugs, etc)
3. Knowingly sow discord and promote false information for financial or political gain (NewsCorp, InfoWars, etc)
4. Try to undermine society and destroy people's privacy, ala Facebook.
Honestly, every company I've worked at so far was trying their best to provide a good product/service/experience to their customers, and I've been proud of working there.
It's thankless and there's relatively limited budget. The median IT worker warms a chair, so there's plenty of challenges to tackle.
But, if you regularly engage with teachers and students, you can see the impact that smoothly operating technology and applications has on education.
When I worked in retail IT, I found I could help and comfort people through some of the scariest moments. Tech and data are some of the most personal things for many people. I felt like a therapist half the time.
Now, Im a software developer working at a bank writing code for handling fraud. Even though banks are usually seen as evil, the work I do actually is actually too try to make customers' lives just a little bit easier when they go through a potentially tough time.
I think many jobs are like this if you look at it from the right perspective
On a more personal level, I sometimes wonder if I am wasting away my potential to earn $$$ by pursuing a career in academia. Currently I have no family, but in the future, if I do, then I would feel an obligation to provide for them, in all ways, including financially.
I'd personally say both yes and no.
Yes, as in, you could be earning money right now and you aren't. And no, as in, your work in academia will most likely be recognized and valued by employers once you decide to join the industry.
I think part of is that everyone is working on the same project and has a shared common goal of making the game as good as possible. Plus there's so many different disciplines involved, its really awesome to see everyone's combined talent come together.
And as much as there can be some negatives to gaming, I do think games and other entertainment like movies are a net good thing in the world
I have built a successful consulting practice that has allowed me to bootstrap a SaaS business and buy and operate a very small farm.
The thing I’m proud of is developing a balance between seemingly disparate interests. I love working in different areas and building relationships between them.
That said, I think I am happy to work at Netflix currently.
Advertising and gambling, that's our super fancy gadget dystopia.
Makes me embarrassed to admit how much I actually love tech and enjoy my power to wield it.
A) A place delivering support to those in need, within my geographical community. For example, working for an organization running a food bank, career oriented learning, and similar services.
B) A team working on a cutting edge area of science and/or engineering, which would advance human understanding in a way that will lead to overall societal improvement.
It's possible though, that I'm conflating pride and fulfillment.
I don't work for that company, not because of money, but because I don't feel that such a company exists. At least not one which requires my skill set.
Prior to March 2020 I did work for companies that I think held those values dearly. Those values are now gone, replaced by TCP.
The difference vs working in pure tech is that I don't have to guess whether my impact is a net negative or positive. I'm not working on some abstract toolset that can be used by any actor, good or bad, I'm making bespoke software for a specific audience for a particular reason: to help increase renewables output.
I'm not rich and never will be (nor do I WANT to be -- it'd change me too much), but I'm still quite well-off compared to most Americans and especially compared to the rest of the world, even those who do work in tech.
If money weren't a thing, I think it's the kind of work I'd volunteer to do quite a bit of anyway. Except I'd travel more and take Fridays off :) But otherwise, the work is innately fun (very visual frontend stuff written in a semi-modern stack), my coworkers are awesome, the work-life balance is good, my managers are attentive and reasonable humans, and there's no cutthroat backstabbing that I've ever seen. We also don't work for cults of personality, just regular people doing regular business stuff.
Part of the reason I don't want to work for a FAANG or similar is that I have no control over the output of my work. I was burned by an early startup experience, when I was interning at an (ostensibly) anti-spam company working on some novel methods; this was before Gmail and before ML really took off. It was a fun crew, but one day the founder decided he wasn't making enough money and decided to sell the tech to the Chinese government to censor dissidents instead. I noped outta there with a bad taste in my mouth, forever skeptical of the tech companies that are basically mercenaries for hire.
It saddens me that so much of my work (web dev) is controlled by basically 3-4 giant companies and we're all at their mercy. The Internet is more centralized than it's ever been, and that's getting worse by the day. Still, though, at least I can take some of their stuff and actively funnel it towards causes I believe in.
Some days I look at the powerful CEOs and wish they'd have a change of heart and funnel some of their productivity towards the common good instead of stupid Twitter arguments or the biggest spaceship. The Patagonia CEO turning his brand into an environmental nonprofit last month gave me a lot of hope in humanity, that maybe once in a while the good guys can still win.
But ya know, in the meantime, you just do what you can. I'm proud of my work, but more than that, I'm proud that I've managed to make peace with my life, finding a good balance of everything. There is no pure good, and very rarely pure evil, in this world. We all deal in moral ambiguities, and it's a matter of picking (and maybe occasionally winning) the battles that you care deepest about. You can be an ally to many causes, but only be on the front lines of one or two. We're only human at the end of the day, no need to beat yourself up for simply having been born into a flawed world and imperfect societies. If you're nudging things in the right direction, that's all anyone can ask of you.