I have friends who are doctors.....their work doesn't feel meaningful. They are constantly pressured to move from patient to patient like they are cattle.
Friend is a pharmacist, she stands 12 hours a day. She he is forced to go in sick. She gets written up for being late.
Many teachers hate their jobs, they are underpaid and have to deal with all kinds of good/shitty kids.
Chef? Seriously do some snooping around subreddits/message boards for these professions. You will quickly realize how corporations can make any "meaningful" job a drag and unhealthy.
Programming can be extremely meaningful. You can create great things that help society. However, many of those projects won't pay for themselves. So, if I company wants to pay me over six figures to write some code, I will gladly take it.
Plus, I am a nerd, I like building stuff, sheds, racing sims, tinkering on bikes, cars and computers. My ability to tinker with computers, write queries and programming can allow other people to do their jobs. Imagine a health system without a computer.
Maybe to you, but not necessarily other people. There are likely people in any role that feel the work is meaningful and fulfilling, and others who do not.
Yep, doctors stopped being in charge of healthcare entities (hospitals, clinics) and now their work conditions suck. And not just during residency, any more.
> Friend is a pharmacist, she stands 12 hours a day. She he is forced to go in sick. She gets written up for being late.
If there's one thing that would be a shock to life-long programmers, it's how just one tiny step down the in-demand ladder (I'd write "social status", but we don't actually have any of note [doctors do, but fat lot of good that did them when the capitalists finally got ahold of them], rather, we're just in-demand) means operating under management conditions we'd find intolerable. No last-minute-notice skipping out for an hour to take your dog to the vet or whatever, certainly. That kind of shit's reserved for the top half of management, in most other environments.
> Many teachers hate their jobs, they are underpaid and have to deal with all kinds of good/shitty kids.
I don't think any teacher I know would advise anyone to become a teacher. Work environment is shit, the amount of time you get to spend on the part that's why anyone wants to do teaching keeps dropping, parents are jerks with too much time on their hands, admin's the most shockingly-stupid set of people with advanced degrees ever assembled (and a bad case of petty-dictator syndrome), pay & benefits have been slowly (or, recently, not-so-slowly) falling relative to the rest of the economy for at least a couple decades, and half the voters hate you for no good reason. Do. Not. Do. It. [EDIT: Oh, and that describes a decent school district. The bad ones are all that plus a whole pile of nightmarish crap, on top]
I have three friends who are anesthesiologists and they are all generally meh about it. They treat it like being a mechanic.
There’s always a flip side to being a helper like a doctor too - not everyone survives surgery. The thing they don’t tell you about doing that emotional labor is that it’s poorly compensated and exhausting and so people tend to dissociate and become less and less compassionate the longer they do it just as a self defense mechanism.
I know a number of lawyers who find their work intensely meaningful and are willing to put up with the bull shit despite the challenges.
I can think of examples of people in my life who have these professions on either side of the coin (find it meaningful, find it a drag, whatever).
I'm a programmer and find it meaningful. I also know people who are programmers and hate it. In fact, I've also worked as a chef and a teacher. I found there to be both satisfying and unsatisfying things about each of these jobs.
Clearly, different people find different work meaningful.
Having a small percentage of the jobs in society be sufficiently well compensated is a sure path to a large number of people being unsatisfied in their careers.
Not sure why you feel I was being hostile towards you. You seem to be really getting defensive in almost aggressive manner.
I'm nearly two decades into the software dev industry now and working in a FAANG. I use "working" loosely as I've completely gone into quiet quitting mode for the last 5 months or so. I hate this job, I hate this company, I hate this industry. I can count on one hand the number of times in my career that I actually enjoyed working on a particular project and those were exclusively lone-wolf risks I took to advance myself (thankfully they paid off).
I'm only doing this to support my family. There is not a single day where I don't dread sitting down in this fucking chair and staring at a screen for 8 hours. Thankfully I'm able to stave off depression with hobbies and other interests.
I've preferred working tech support. I've preferred low-end service jobs.
But those pay shit, so here I am.
I think I might really enjoy & be good at product management, but breaking in without lucking into a role at an existing employer is tricky. Keeping an eye out for opportunities—I definitely do not want to still be killing Jira tickets and fighting broken tools and bad SDKs when I'm in the last third of my career. Started out ambivalent, and have grown to hate it.
[EDIT]
> There is not a single day where I don't dread sitting down in this fucking chair and staring at a screen for 8 hours.
Oh, yeah, and this resonates, in particular. If not for having a family, I'd be out already. Find something with much lower pay but a quick little well-defined, "person asks for thing, I deliver, they're happy" reward loop, ideally with as little glowing-screen time involved as possible, and go back to having, like, any energy at the end of the day. All that extra money would not be worth staying in this industry, if it were just me (also I'd have a whole lot more saved up for early semi-retirement by now if nobody else needed any of it, LOL)
25 years later I'm a still working in software (though not on the web), and my motivation for doing so has changed very little.
1) How personally validating a job is to a person
2) How valuable the job is to society at large.
To see how those might decouple, consider Superman continuously turning a crank to provide limitless energy for society (credit: SMBC [0]). Fabulously valuable to society, extremely lacking in personal validation for superman.
In general, you'd expect salary to correlate with 2, and inversely correlate with 1, since the sense of validation is in effect part of the compensation you're getting from a job. It also seems pretty common to (IMO wrongly) think that 1 and 2 are tightly coupled: the jobs that produce the greatest societal value are the ones that feel the most personally validating. But that's just because modern society is far more complicated than our brains were evolved to handle. Identifying the actual value of a job requires following a complex chain of incentives and value production through the vast networks of businesses and organizations that comprise our world.
Sadly for those instincts, it is probably true that a programmer writing a piece of code that makes $business_process_c56_2 0.1% more efficient, which is then run billions upon billions of times is actually producing more value in net than a teacher who changes the lives of O(1000) kids over their lifetime.
[0]: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2305
Yeah but normalisation usually involves deflating people's pay instead of increasing that of "Doctor? Teacher? Nurse? Public defender? Chef?". A very odd wish to be honest.
But it would appear that there is effort being made to “correct” it:
> The Federal Reserve should refrain from raising interest rates too fast in the name of controlling inflation. Even a “mild” recession resulting from these actions will do significant harm to low-wage workers and their families.