How do you personally define "meaningful work," and what factors contribute to your sense of fulfillment in your professional life?
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Work that improves humanity. I currently work for a global fashion brand, and while I am grateful for having a job in the first place, I don’t consider my impact meaningful at all.
Maybe one day I’ll have the privilege of making a living working on products and technologies that provide actual value.
You could start down that road by contributing to open source projects that you use, rely on, or where the missionresonates with you.
I don’t consider most open source projects as meaningful as well. I’ll have to really look for one that is up to my standards.
What are your interests? What are you passionate about?
Well, anything cybersec related, hacking, radio engineering, hardware hacking (but I don't consider those very meaningful either, it depends).
An example of fields that I find meaningful are autonomous cleaning robotics (as in ocean cleaner robots, critical), clean energy solutions, clean water solutions, medical research, smart agriculture solutions, smart farming solutions, etc.
Have you looked at the work being done by LF Energy? lfenergy.org/ - Also OpenScapes in the open science field openscapes.org/
Also: hackaday.com/2021/03/05/a-new-open...
I'll check all of these out, thanks!
This is my whole life goal, to do meaningful work. This will change from person to person, but for me, it is all about supporting causes that are important to me such as the climate crisis, poverty, exclusion, open source sustainability, and ensuring that everyone not only has access to the internet, but that they can use the websites, services, and application that run on it.
When I look back at my day, week, month, year, and ultimately life, I want to see that I did work that made a difference, even if it was only for one individual, cause, or group.
If it’s helpful to myself and my colleagues, it’s meaningful. I don’t need something to be so grandiose, I just want to be helpful.
This. This right here.
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.” -- Gandalf the White in the Lord of the Rings
"Meaningful" is just something I can look back on and think... "Ya know what? That was pretty awesome." And ideally, someone else would look back on it and say "That really helped me. Thanks."
One way of thinking about fulfillment at work is to use the "lottery test" - aka if you won the lottery tomorrow what would you want to be doing?
Yes of course my first order of business would be to take a nice vacation and figure out how to allocate that money properly, but after that I know I'd still want to be pursuing work and projects in one way or another. I'm fortunate to be at the point in my career where finding companies whose mission I align with is easier than it had been in the past when I was more junior. But if I'm being honest with myself I think I could've started using this test even earlier on.
Work that adds value to the world in some way. That's flexible of course and to some it might include what others consider BS jobs (like insurance, banking, or public services). But the difficulty of credibly finding a value add in some lines of work is what saw the term BS jobs emerge.
As far as dev work goes, the value add can be as simple as practice and learning. Which is what drives a lot of smaller passion projects I expect, some of which balloon into much larger projects.