My first job I worked designing new jamming systems for fighter aircraft. Really interesting work and I was really good at it but basically the end goal of the

My first job I worked designing new jamming systems for fighter aircraft. Really interesting work and I was really good at it but basically the end goal of the work was to make planes survive so they could get to a location where they could kill people. Left that to do QA on a GUI builder used to run nuclear power plants, trains, and chemical factories (wanted to work in computer graphics which I had a lot of experience with but there were no other jobs available e.g. in the film industry). The work was boring and the people were horrible but I was lazy and stayed until the company lost $2M and I was fired because I had just trained someone younger and cheaper to do the same job. (The company was a small cash cow for a while after that, then had its IP sold off so everyone lost their jobs. Getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to me.) Tried doing software QA consulting for a while. Exciting to meet new people and solve new problems in medical billing and geographic mapping, but always had to be looking for the next job and I'm not a great people person and jobs were sparse in my region and I didn't want to move since I'd just bought a house. So then I went into education as a software engineer, supporting research in computer science at an Ivy League college, completely out of industry. Very interesting work, seemed like it might make a difference in the world though I've never seen anything I've helped develop used very much (maybe some of the wireless sensor work has been copied in industry, I pray that some of the electronic animal herding and computer log analysis work is never used at all). Job security was awful, grants run 1-3 years, then either I had to switch professors by joining a new project or try to look for work elsewhere. Yet a few profs and I, with some effort and scary times, managed to keep me employed in the CS dept for 20 years, last 10 years mostly with the same prof. He grew bigger and bigger britches while my pay stayed the same. He kept demanding more and more because now he was important and felt his work should be more important or whatever. When my retirement savings grew large enough I retired and have never regretted it. I was never entirely happy with various aspects of any of my jobs. Some of the work was way more interesting for some jobs and grants, some of the people way worse (working in a company with 3000 people, almost exclusively men who have been through wars has unique advantages and drawbacks), the pay generally not great in any of them (except consulting). Looking back I think I would have been happier becoming an artist, but it is extremely tough making a living as an artist so I probably would have died early or had to go back into writing software anyway. I have my name on lots of patents (but get nothing from them) and papers (fame is pretty useless). It is still a question in my mind as to whether anything I did ever really helped society. Some days I think it did, some days I think it didn't. I certainly helped make a few other people rich, but I never could be as mean and insanely ambitious as they were. Being retired is the best job I ever had, I may yet become an artist just for fun. Doing it for money would probably ruin it.