4 ms·

I'm going to take an educated guess that you've just turned 30 or are about to turn 30? I had this exact same problem where I became entirely disillusioned wit

by kinnth 4y ago

I'm going to take an educated guess that you've just turned 30 or are about to turn 30? I had this exact same problem where I became entirely disillusioned with the output of my work after having become reasonably senior and realising that the majority of my time and effort ammounted to projects which either failed or treaded water. The unfortunate reality in business is that the projects that truly change the world are 1 in 100. They don't look or feel much different from any other at the begining but when traction really does start to take off you know you have something right. I think from your description, you need to work at a startup where you have genuine impact. This is the only way you truly "feel" meaning. You might still build something that's reasonably worthless to humanity, but you will do it your way and take your own risks.

ragnarsson 4y ago
I felt disillusioned 4-5 months in my first job after college. I could see the project I was working would take a long time to create something of value (3-5 years) but we were always put under pressure to show some stupid demos to management every quarter. So at the end we were just doing these demos and not working on actual things that we needed to do. The project was important, if implemented successfully it would cut jobs of ~60 people in the organization. So management kept on adding more people until they realized that there was no real progress and they dumped the project and we got reassigned. I realized that 1 year of my work as well as ~15 other engineers just went to waste.