> you're not going to get that If you believe what the organization does furthers your purpose, then you are going to get that, although I agree that the day-t

> you're not going to get that If you believe what the organization does furthers your purpose, then you are going to get that, although I agree that the day-to-day feeling may not be that "purposeful". > Non-profits have ridiculous, completely unachievable goals There a gazillion kinds of non-profits; some do, some don't. If your non-profit is the town museum management foundation, you have a perfectly achievable goal (it's right there in the name). If your non-profit is "the coalition to end world hunger", then maybe not so much. Then again, even such a non-profit might have the actual, stated, legally-filed goal of delivering food aid to areas in the world hit with natural disasters like floods or drought - and that's not an achievable goal in the sense of being ever done with it, but it is achievable in the sense of being able to do just that continuously. > So what's so great about a non-profit tech job? That there is almost never the situation of a huge pile of closed-source code developed internally which you have to live with; and no custom expensive hardware. So typically you need to both rely on, and contribute to, free software that basically anybody can use. > Seeking to have "impact" through a data job at an average non-profit is naive On the contrary. There is great potential of technological impact outside the organization due to what I said above; and there is potential for impact on what the organization does, because it's often more fluid, and using data, you can make convincing arguments about steering activity in a different way - appealing to your colleagues desire to serve noble purposes.