One of the most rewarding projects I've ever worked on was a catalogue website for a local music shop. It paid what I now make salaried in about two weeks, but

One of the most rewarding projects I've ever worked on was a catalogue website for a local music shop. It paid what I now make salaried in about two weeks, but in the years since I've heard back on multiple occasions how much easier it made the lives of these lovely people running this lovely little store. They didn't even have a CMS before; they made pages manually, via a WYSIWYG from the 90s, for each of their hundreds of instruments. And since COVID, more than half their business comes through this site. It's made a night-and-day difference for them. I think the over-engineering problem described by the author comes down to the fact that most of the work that most of us do is deeply empty. We don't impact lives in meaningful ways, at least not directly and/or for the better. You really need both of those to feel a sense of personal impact. So we look for other forms of reward instead- we create puzzles for ourselves to solve. It's hard to find work in our field that's directly impactful at all, much less that pays anywhere near what we'd make otherwise. Software companies that aren't eating the world can't afford to pay salaries that cover a comfortable cost-of-living in SF or Seattle or Austin, where many of us have put down roots already. And (my impression is that) they hardly exist at all outside of those hubs. I don't know what the answer is.