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Don’t worry that your job is pointless

100 points by jshakes 14y ago

robheaton 14y ago
“if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary” Awesome quote.
kranner 14y ago
> In reality, we do what we do because we’re good at it and doing it makes money. Speak for yourself. I work because I enjoy both making things and the act of working.
- joonix 14y ago
  Donate your salary to charity, then.
  - hermannj314 14y ago
    I'm not sure that follows. He was saying that enjoying the work and building things is sufficient to get him to work, but that doesn't mean he would prefer earning $0 than some number bigger than $0. It just means that if the 2nd option wasn't available, he would still work.
    - kranner 14y ago
      Thanks. All I meant was that to me my work is not a means to pay the bills, and perhaps I'm not even particularly good at it. I just enjoy doing it. OP is being offensively presumptuous with that statement.
qompiler 14y ago
Without doctors people would consult each other on what to do about their illness. Without nurses people close to each other will help out. Without firemen people would be passing the water bucket. Any job can be made to be useless, the difference is that when someone tries to specialize he/she becomes good at it. It's how the world works. You optimize JavaScript, which in turn helps someone else be more productive. This Disney song should give you better feeling of yourself after reading this dark and depressing blog post. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whDr4MJbIhs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whDr4MJbIhs :-D
- sturadnidge 14y ago
  I agree. Without demeaning medicine, clean water and hospital sanitation have had the biggest impact on health by far in the course of human history. Almost any job you can think of is as critical or pointless as you make it.
  - ttflee 14y ago
    Oh, I thought it would be antibiotics and immunology.
    - Domenic_S 14y ago
      Check out these stats: http://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/wash_statistics.html http://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/wash_statistics.html Water, sanitation and hygiene has the potential to prevent at least 9.1% of the global disease burden and 6.3% of all deaths. And that's today. I can't even figure what that number would be when poo-tainted sludge was the default drinking water worldwide. I assume you mean vaccinations when you say immunology. Vaccines make life better, but the impact is pretty small -- look at the outcomes for the diseases we vaccinate against. Take polio for example. Even if you do manage to contract polio, 90-95% of cases are asymptomatic and a further 4-8% are minor. What's the biggest way people got polio? Fecal transmission in water/food, which brings us back full circle to clean water.
      - ttflee 14y ago
        According to Wikipedia, smallpox 'killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans annually during the closing years of the 18th century (including five reigning monarchs), and was responsible for a third of all blindness. Of all those infected, 20–60%—and over 80% of infected children—died from the disease. Smallpox was responsible for an estimated 300–500 million deaths during the 20th century.' Of course, this disease was contained by vaccines. And immunology is definitely more broad than mere vaccines. In fact the modern immunology plays a quite central role in today's research of physiology, virology, microbiology and pathology. Back in 2003, when SARS broke out in Beijing, the streets were emptied. Nobody wanted to meet each other, nobody dared. If immunology had not existed, such scenario might not be just one incidence, but incidence after incidence.
tomp 14y ago
I'm not smart enough to make a Nobel-price-worthy contribution to science, to cure an epidemic disease or to invent a new way of producing energy. I don't have a physics degree to help build rockets nor a biochemistry degree to design better food. I didn't choose to study to be a doctor, and even as I somewhat regret that choice, it's too late now. I also don't own any land, so I can't be a farmer. The only way I can change the world for the better is to earn a huge amount of money and then spend it on other people that actually can do one of the above. Like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet. So even if my career pursuits are totally focused on money, that's not a bad thing!
- dsego 14y ago
  Maybe us "not so smart individuals" could be a small cog in some bigger picture, like a world interdisciplinary project to cure cancer (think Manhattan project, or NASA). But in capitalism it's more important to work on SEO and sell stuff to people. All of the advances of modern computing boil down to advertising, such a shame.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Yeah, all those computers running medical devices, the algorithms behind genome sequencing, the software running on the Mars Rover - all advertising! I'm all for self-deprecation, but that's just insulting to people who use computers for good.
    - dsego 14y ago
      I know, I was deliberately exaggerating for effect.
  - Domenic_S 14y ago
    Selling stuff to people isn't a bad thing. My own personal example: I work for eBay Inc., so my job is to be a cog in a bigger picture like you said. That bigger picture is game-changing commerce. I don't know the numbers, but some large amount of people have found a way to make a full-time living selling on eBay, or Magento, or some other platform using PayPal to take payments. They feed their families by selling stuff in our marketplaces. On the buyer's side, we help people get what they want for the best price. That makes people's lives better, too. Maybe it's just rationalization. :) But I do think that many capitalist companies create a net positive for the world.
generalpf 14y ago
Fantastic article. Thank you for writing it.
crusso 14y ago
I always find these self-flagellation articles interesting, but feel like I'm observing a phenomenon from an outside perspective. Do most people agonize over the supposed "importance" of what they do? Do they feel so insecure when comparing what they do to what others do? Do they feel that what they do really is going to change the world or matter in some spiritual context? I don't really worry about it. I figure that if I'm content doing what I do, with my work-life balance, with the money I make... then why worry about it. Whenever little thoughts or concerns of self-importance come to mind, I always think of Ozymandias.
- zoba 14y ago
  For some, the concern stems from this line of thought: "This is my one life, and after its gone I'll never get it back. I need to make the best of it." So then we imagine what the best life could be. We don't even have to try hard to imagine the best life - examples of people who had a better life are constantly made apparent. Whether a life more noble, more enriched, more fun, more profound, or any other adjective, it doesn't matter because we see them all. Then we see that elements of our life are not notable and we regret that others may have done something better than ourselves. And then we feel guilty, sad, upset, or angry that our ONE CHANCE, our life, isn't what it ought to be in order to be the best. So, we trudge on making the best moves we know how. Its sometimes a bit of relief to see articles like this which, for a few minutes, give a sense of relief that maybe we don't have to cram every ounce of our lives with greatness... I don't buy it though. This is my one chance, and I'll be damned if I waste my most functional hours of the day on something that doesn't matter.
  - crusso 14y ago
    This is my one chance That's the thing. Your one chance for what? I'll be damned if I waste my most functional hours of the day on something that doesn't matter. Do you have some notion of an afterlife where that even matters? Really, I'm not that nihilistic in the way I live my life, but intellectually I don't really fight it.
    - 14y ago
michaelochurch 14y ago
A problem with us as a tribe is that we tend to misunderstand the fact that most humans require conflict to reach for greatness. We, as technologists, perceive a natural conflict between what we want (whether it's to live for 1000+ years, to fly to Japan for $50 on a non-polluting electric airplane, to have all of the world's information accessible at a computer terminal, or just to have more interesting jobs) and the actual state of the world, which we see as dismally primitive. We don't need a human enemy to have conflict and to inspire us to greatness; primordial entropy is our enemy. Most people don't think this way. It takes a fight to unlock their energies. This is especially true at the complacent top of society. The best way to create social mobility for smart people is to create a massive, irreparable cleavage in the elite. In 1540, it was the Protestant Reformation, leading to exploration and trade and new theories about politics, culminating in rational government and modern capitalism. (Henry VIII was no saint, but one of the reasons for his horrible reputation is that he promoted smart commoners to work out his split from the church, angering nobility of the time.) In 1965, it was the Cold War, resulting in incredible technical progress, including the space program and the Internet. Neither of these rifts was free of harm or pain, but ultimately, humanity is better off with its elite cleft in two halves that hate each other's fucking guts (and will therefore promote smart people from without in order to win their existential struggle) than it is with one elite that can singularly focus on keeping itself established and the "without" outside. When there's harmony in the elite, there is no progress. Most of our jobs are based on conflict. Hedge fund traders are trying to outsmart other hedge funds in a winner-take-all market. In VC-istan, it's all about ad dollars (hence, I call it "ad-banking"). Most of the great technologies we use (e.g. the Internet) were funded by military projects: people wanting to out-innovate and out-technologize the Russians. It'd be better if we could do great things without all the negative side effects of conflict, but human organizations are lethargic and no elite has been immune to the temptation of parasitism. The pointlessness we perceive in our jobs comes from the fact that most of what we do isn't about civilization's advancement, but about helping one party compete against the other. Web development is mostly about making one business more attractive than the other guys, which has a zero-sum, arms-race feel to it. All of this conflict leads to multiplicity of efforts, left-against-right work, and weird indirections that sap our efficiency. It seems like this renders 95% of what we do pointless. The problem is that, in reality, without the business conflicts that waste 95% of our work, most of us wouldn't have jobs or money at all, so the wastage would be 100%. The only thing that will allow transfer of wealth out of an elite and into new talent is some kind of severe conflict within that elite. The ideal of capitalism (until a parasitic, socially-connected corporate elite hijacks it and subverts whatever mechanisms it uses to force competition) is that business elites in competition with each other will always perform better than single monopolistic powers. This is also why VC-istan sucks Hitler's necrotic scrotum. VCs collude and decide, as a group, who's hot and who's not. They don't compete with each other. They'd rather get invited to each others' parties and in on each others' deals. The lack of competition within that elite leads to downright awful terms for the people actually doing the fucking work.
soneca 14y ago
When I began college my carreer plan was this Bill Gates "be rich or powerful, than do good for the world" path. Well, it doesn't work like that. Actually, now I see this as kind of selfish, a pretentious delusion of self-importance. When I thought like this I wanted to be a hero, not make the world a better place. I realized my mistake in time, changed my major, started a carreer on the non-profit sector and I was cool with doing something adjuvant as part of something that was trying to do some good. But that doesn't mean the more important conclusion of the OP, that is "Just because optimising Javascript isn’t making the world a better place right this second doesn’t mean you’re destined to a life of misanthropic selfishness" is wrong. This has something to do with Steve Jobs connecting dots, with Gandhi being a lawyer before being Mahatma, with Muhammad Yunus being a humble professor of Economics in his native country before a Nobel laureate (Peace Nobel prize, not Economics). I just quit my job on a non-profit startup, after 8 years in the field, and now I am a founder of a regular, for-profit startup. This is not my final carreer path, this is teaching me a lot about disrupting things. I mean, A LOT. The paradigm shift emerging through startups is very powerful. On a final note, all this "I want to change the world" mantra that I often listen applied to tech startups is, 99% of the times, BS. Facebook indeed changed the world. For better? Not necessarily. Twitter did? Not in my opinion. "But what about the Arab Spring??". Listen, people, empowered by technology change the world. So you may say that technology change the world. Not brands. SMS technology is changing the world in many ways all over Africa, internet changed the world, not Twitte, or Facebook. Some startups disrupted some technology use so strongly, that they became monopolists in their use. But still, don't confuse technology and brands. Summarizing, optimizing Javascript may not be making the world a better place right this second, but if you are improving your knowledge, and - another good advice from OP - don't let yourself be defined by your job and is trying hard to create a big picture for yourself, than optimizing Javascript may be a very important dot that you will connect to make a difference in the future.
- RougeFemme 14y ago
  To add on. . . code is just a tool/component used to make other, more complex tools. And if the tool your code is used in ultimately makes the "hero/philanthropist/???" more effective, then you are still making a positive contribution.
rco8786 14y ago
> The fact is that if all the web developers (or investment bankers) disappeared tomorrow the world wouldn’t change much – at least not compared to doctors or nurses or firemen. There wouldn’t be a global meltdown. I really beg to differ.
- mikegioia 14y ago
  I think if all programmers disappeared the world actually might shut down. Just think of all the places in the global infrastructure that require software to work: financial trading, military, flight control, all modern business accounting and financial reporting, medical systems, etc.
  - krapp 14y ago
    All that software already exists and is running though, and I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'shut down.' These industries might no longer be able to update, but I think it's possible to run just about any industry without IT, or on legacy code, just on a smaller, slower scale. You could predict some level of catastrophe for the disappearance of any large sector that affects commerce -- from truck drivers to sewer workers to even maybe interns. I think this implies the tenuous nature of our economy more than the relative importance of programmers.
kenkam 14y ago
I agree with the OP's general point. Career aspirations? What I give back to the world? To me, I just want to be happy in my life, I guess some can argue it's Utilitarianism. This is my big picture. So if I can pay my bills, live the lifestyle I have (not very lavish btw), go to work and be happy working there (above average, you're always gonna have bad days), have a healthy relationship with parents, friends and the other half, and be able to save some money to ensure my and my family's future happiness, then I'm happy. So whether I am a graphic designer, charity worker, investment banker, even a saint, if I can continue to be happy and do the stuff I said above, then I couldn't care less if the job was 'pointless' or not. Who is to judge? It's worth something to me! Disclaimer: I work at a bank as a developer. Perhaps not the 'coolest' job out there, but if it means I can go home and be happy, then I consider myself a success. Don't get me wrong, if anyone asks wouldn't you want to be a millionaire, of course I would, but sacrificing my happiness? It'll require more thought. Final thought: maybe I'm only 27 and I haven't hit the mid life part yet. I am keeping an open mind as to how my thoughts will change...
clux 14y ago
There's plenty of ways to make a difference in the world without having a job that is immediately altruistic. http://80000hours.org/career-advice http://80000hours.org/career-advice has a lot of good information along these lines.
solistice 14y ago
I find we're really bad at defining goals. Let's play a short question game. You win if you read through these questions and you say "Nah, got this covered" without feeling guilty. What are you working for? To better society? To make an impact? Sure. That's a little vague though, isn't it? Ok, maybe it's to better society. Define better (Well, uhmm...better, you know?") and define society (Uhmm...the country? Ohh wait, the world? Maybe those kids in africa?). You kinda see where I'm going with "this is way vague for a life purpose"? Ok, let's take the impact example. Which impact? Do you want to be remembered? Just remembered, or positively remembered? Or do you want to make a lasting change on the face of earth? How long should it last? How visible should it be? Or do you want to change somebody? How do you want to change them? What will you do to change them? The gist is definition. A lot of "career planning" is an improperly defined goal for an even larger time period than the usual resolutions we make. Stop smoking, lose weight, work out more. How often do you keep your new years resolutions? Proably not that often. So why are you entrusting your life purpose to the same kind of expectation making that you do for your new years resolution, to some goal with quicksand consistency? You know the feeling you get in mid february that you didn't keep up with your resolutions, right? You feel guilty because you've wasted another year and still haven't gotten these things done. Lack of willpower, right? Ok, imagine you're 35, look at your life resolution, realize that you haven't lost weight nor changed the world, and you feel guilty. Really guilty. Because your former me is ashamed of what you've done. And it's not just a new years resolution, it's your life goal you haven't gotten done. Ok, fair enough. Figure out what exactly you are trying to do till when, preferably with why you want to do these things. Name - date - reason. You can't worry about the pointlessness of something if you got the point on a paper in front of you, 12pt Times New Roman. Then factor that into object(ive)s and method(ology)s, so you can whip up the source of your life one task after another. You'll get there.
- Retric 14y ago
  The real problem is forget what actually makes them happy can have little to do with what society says should make them happy. I feel more joy thinking about my job as useful destructive chaos than any sort of direct betterment to society. Consider, people actually making atomic bombs often had a great deal of job satisfaction. You can look at people at the bottom as in desperate need of help, or a buffer in case of crop failure. Now think about it for a second which idea makes you feel better? PS: I am not saying this is a good thing, but it's a thing that's worth considering.
RTigger 14y ago
One of my favorite stories told by our software consultants (the people we send to client sites to train how to use our software effectively): One day he went to a customer's site to train them on the new version of our software, and met with one of the bookkeepers of the company. He showed her a report that we recently added a column to as part of a feature request from our clients, and she started crying. He was asking her what was wrong, worried that we did something terrible. She replied: "You just saved me 3 hours a day. Now I can go home when my kids are home from school instead of after supper". Just because we're not saving babies doesn't mean we're not making people's lives better.
- mikegioia 14y ago
  You just hit the nail on the head. I work in ed-tech and while a school contract is no where near the size of a business contract, we regularly hear from school administrators how much of their day they get back.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  You just saved me 3 hours a day. Now I can go home when my kids are home from school instead of after supper. The ugly part of this is that we rarely know whether we're saving time or cutting jobs (and depriving people of income). Between our low level of access to the relevant information, and the execrable leadership the world currently has, we can rarely know that. When the world has good leadership, technological progress (even small victories) save time and create wealth. When it has bad leadership, it ends jobs (that are never replaced) and helps the working world shut itself down.
  - arscan 14y ago
    whether we're saving time or cutting jobs It depends what you mean by "jobs". If you mean it in the headcount sense, then yes, that's bad. Good leadership should inform its employees of how technology is impacting its operations. That way employees have an opportunity to prepare and to find new ways of adding value, so they don't have to leave once their old role becomes obsolete. But if you mean "jobs" in the "having a person do this specific action" sense, then I couldn't disagree more. Progress isn't made unless jobs (in that sense) are cut. The human mind has such amazing potential and we shouldn't waste it doing things that can be easily automated.
bjhoops1 14y ago
But what about my deep-seated need to feel like I'm fundamentally better than investment bankers?
zekenie 14y ago
I wholeheartedly believe you can save lives (including babies) with javascript. http://hackingmedicine.mit.edu/ http://hackingmedicine.mit.edu/ The way healthcare professionals use computers is slowing down r & d and ultimately costing lives. I worked at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center last summer. They claim that they are the leader in healthcare IT. Yet my job was to copy clinical data from one computer system to another by hand. They had a developer doing manual data entry at a Harvard teaching hospital! Today, healthcare needs programmers as much as they need doctors (maybe not in the same quantities).
lukethomas 14y ago
As someone who has the goal of "making enough money so I can give back", I've realized that doing something NOW is important for a couple reasons: 1) I could die tomorrow and 2) Habits form, and if I plan on giving services/time/money at a latter point in my life, I might as well start now and get used to it (even if the amount is small).
adamman 14y ago
I'm seeing a Cloudflare page that states that the site is offline and there is no cached version available. I wonder if this is because they decided to set up cloudflare right when their site was getting hammered by HN.
- jng 14y ago
  That could be it. Still, the server is down, and Cloudflare is showing that it can't really do anything. Even if reasonable, it's pretty bad publicity for Cloudflare (at the very least, definitely not good).
smky80 14y ago
This is an important idea. Several years back I quit a well-paying job in finance because I wanted to work on meaningful problems. What I realized fairly recently is that most problems are social problems. It's not like some demon is draining the world of natural resources and polluting it, creating antibiotic resistant bacteria, or starting wars all over the world. We're doing that. You want to save the world? Start with being a good parent.
- HNaTTY 14y ago
  ...Or don't have any kids at all, since kids turn into adults and adults are the cause of pretty much all the social problems we have, such as pollution and depletion of natural resources.
randomdrake 14y ago
Great article. It looks to be down at the moment, however. Here's a link to a mirror/cache of it: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kY15Yvu4rOMJ:jshakespeare.com/dont-worry-that-your-job-is-pointless/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kY15Yvu...
jefe78 14y ago
Seeing that your site is offline, I'm going to have to disagree with you. -Sysadmin
oscargrouch 14y ago
“Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that you do it” Mahatma Gandhi
daSn0wie 14y ago
thank you
touristtam 14y ago
A job that can be automatized _is_ /unimportant/. Your finance wizard can just be replaced by a few line of code _because_ his whole world is already part of this technology world. Now try to automatize the one doing to the coding. People losing jobs are a consequence of an economic decision, not because of technological advancement. Knowledge is still power.
RTigger 14y ago
I ended up blogging a response to this - http://rtigger.com/blog/2013/03/20/saving-the-world-with-software/ http://rtigger.com/blog/2013/03/20/saving-the-world-with-sof... TL;DR - We change the world for the better in so many ways that we don't even realize. Don't sell ourselves short.

100 points by jshakes 14y ago

“if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary” Awesome quote.

kranner 14y ago

> In reality, we do what we do because we’re good at it and doing it makes money. Speak for yourself. I work because I enjoy both making things and the act of working.

joonix 14y ago
Donate your salary to charity, then.
- hermannj314 14y ago
  I'm not sure that follows. He was saying that enjoying the work and building things is sufficient to get him to work, but that doesn't mean he would prefer earning $0 than some number bigger than $0. It just means that if the 2nd option wasn't available, he would still work.
  - kranner 14y ago
    Thanks. All I meant was that to me my work is not a means to pay the bills, and perhaps I'm not even particularly good at it. I just enjoy doing it. OP is being offensively presumptuous with that statement.

qompiler 14y ago

Without doctors people would consult each other on what to do about their illness. Without nurses people close to each other will help out. Without firemen people would be passing the water bucket. Any job can be made to be useless, the difference is that when someone tries to specialize he/she becomes good at it. It's how the world works. You optimize JavaScript, which in turn helps someone else be more productive. This Disney song should give you better feeling of yourself after reading this dark and depressing blog post. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whDr4MJbIhs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whDr4MJbIhs :-D

sturadnidge 14y ago
I agree. Without demeaning medicine, clean water and hospital sanitation have had the biggest impact on health by far in the course of human history. Almost any job you can think of is as critical or pointless as you make it.
- ttflee 14y ago
  Oh, I thought it would be antibiotics and immunology.
  - Domenic_S 14y ago
    Check out these stats: http://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/wash_statistics.html http://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/wash_statistics.html Water, sanitation and hygiene has the potential to prevent at least 9.1% of the global disease burden and 6.3% of all deaths. And that's today. I can't even figure what that number would be when poo-tainted sludge was the default drinking water worldwide. I assume you mean vaccinations when you say immunology. Vaccines make life better, but the impact is pretty small -- look at the outcomes for the diseases we vaccinate against. Take polio for example. Even if you do manage to contract polio, 90-95% of cases are asymptomatic and a further 4-8% are minor. What's the biggest way people got polio? Fecal transmission in water/food, which brings us back full circle to clean water.
    - ttflee 14y ago
      According to Wikipedia, smallpox 'killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans annually during the closing years of the 18th century (including five reigning monarchs), and was responsible for a third of all blindness. Of all those infected, 20–60%—and over 80% of infected children—died from the disease. Smallpox was responsible for an estimated 300–500 million deaths during the 20th century.' Of course, this disease was contained by vaccines. And immunology is definitely more broad than mere vaccines. In fact the modern immunology plays a quite central role in today's research of physiology, virology, microbiology and pathology. Back in 2003, when SARS broke out in Beijing, the streets were emptied. Nobody wanted to meet each other, nobody dared. If immunology had not existed, such scenario might not be just one incidence, but incidence after incidence.

tomp 14y ago

I'm not smart enough to make a Nobel-price-worthy contribution to science, to cure an epidemic disease or to invent a new way of producing energy. I don't have a physics degree to help build rockets nor a biochemistry degree to design better food. I didn't choose to study to be a doctor, and even as I somewhat regret that choice, it's too late now. I also don't own any land, so I can't be a farmer. The only way I can change the world for the better is to earn a huge amount of money and then spend it on other people that actually can do one of the above. Like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet. So even if my career pursuits are totally focused on money, that's not a bad thing!

dsego 14y ago
Maybe us "not so smart individuals" could be a small cog in some bigger picture, like a world interdisciplinary project to cure cancer (think Manhattan project, or NASA). But in capitalism it's more important to work on SEO and sell stuff to people. All of the advances of modern computing boil down to advertising, such a shame.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Yeah, all those computers running medical devices, the algorithms behind genome sequencing, the software running on the Mars Rover - all advertising! I'm all for self-deprecation, but that's just insulting to people who use computers for good.
  - dsego 14y ago
    I know, I was deliberately exaggerating for effect.
- Domenic_S 14y ago
  Selling stuff to people isn't a bad thing. My own personal example: I work for eBay Inc., so my job is to be a cog in a bigger picture like you said. That bigger picture is game-changing commerce. I don't know the numbers, but some large amount of people have found a way to make a full-time living selling on eBay, or Magento, or some other platform using PayPal to take payments. They feed their families by selling stuff in our marketplaces. On the buyer's side, we help people get what they want for the best price. That makes people's lives better, too. Maybe it's just rationalization. :) But I do think that many capitalist companies create a net positive for the world.

generalpf 14y ago

Fantastic article. Thank you for writing it.

crusso 14y ago

I always find these self-flagellation articles interesting, but feel like I'm observing a phenomenon from an outside perspective. Do most people agonize over the supposed "importance" of what they do? Do they feel so insecure when comparing what they do to what others do? Do they feel that what they do really is going to change the world or matter in some spiritual context? I don't really worry about it. I figure that if I'm content doing what I do, with my work-life balance, with the money I make... then why worry about it. Whenever little thoughts or concerns of self-importance come to mind, I always think of Ozymandias.

zoba 14y ago
For some, the concern stems from this line of thought: "This is my one life, and after its gone I'll never get it back. I need to make the best of it." So then we imagine what the best life could be. We don't even have to try hard to imagine the best life - examples of people who had a better life are constantly made apparent. Whether a life more noble, more enriched, more fun, more profound, or any other adjective, it doesn't matter because we see them all. Then we see that elements of our life are not notable and we regret that others may have done something better than ourselves. And then we feel guilty, sad, upset, or angry that our ONE CHANCE, our life, isn't what it ought to be in order to be the best. So, we trudge on making the best moves we know how. Its sometimes a bit of relief to see articles like this which, for a few minutes, give a sense of relief that maybe we don't have to cram every ounce of our lives with greatness... I don't buy it though. This is my one chance, and I'll be damned if I waste my most functional hours of the day on something that doesn't matter.
- crusso 14y ago
  This is my one chance That's the thing. Your one chance for what? I'll be damned if I waste my most functional hours of the day on something that doesn't matter. Do you have some notion of an afterlife where that even matters? Really, I'm not that nihilistic in the way I live my life, but intellectually I don't really fight it.
  - 14y ago

michaelochurch 14y ago

A problem with us as a tribe is that we tend to misunderstand the fact that most humans require conflict to reach for greatness. We, as technologists, perceive a natural conflict between what we want (whether it's to live for 1000+ years, to fly to Japan for $50 on a non-polluting electric airplane, to have all of the world's information accessible at a computer terminal, or just to have more interesting jobs) and the actual state of the world, which we see as dismally primitive. We don't need a human enemy to have conflict and to inspire us to greatness; primordial entropy is our enemy. Most people don't think this way. It takes a fight to unlock their energies. This is especially true at the complacent top of society. The best way to create social mobility for smart people is to create a massive, irreparable cleavage in the elite. In 1540, it was the Protestant Reformation, leading to exploration and trade and new theories about politics, culminating in rational government and modern capitalism. (Henry VIII was no saint, but one of the reasons for his horrible reputation is that he promoted smart commoners to work out his split from the church, angering nobility of the time.) In 1965, it was the Cold War, resulting in incredible technical progress, including the space program and the Internet. Neither of these rifts was free of harm or pain, but ultimately, humanity is better off with its elite cleft in two halves that hate each other's fucking guts (and will therefore promote smart people from without in order to win their existential struggle) than it is with one elite that can singularly focus on keeping itself established and the "without" outside. When there's harmony in the elite, there is no progress. Most of our jobs are based on conflict. Hedge fund traders are trying to outsmart other hedge funds in a winner-take-all market. In VC-istan, it's all about ad dollars (hence, I call it "ad-banking"). Most of the great technologies we use (e.g. the Internet) were funded by military projects: people wanting to out-innovate and out-technologize the Russians. It'd be better if we could do great things without all the negative side effects of conflict, but human organizations are lethargic and no elite has been immune to the temptation of parasitism. The pointlessness we perceive in our jobs comes from the fact that most of what we do isn't about civilization's advancement, but about helping one party compete against the other. Web development is mostly about making one business more attractive than the other guys, which has a zero-sum, arms-race feel to it. All of this conflict leads to multiplicity of efforts, left-against-right work, and weird indirections that sap our efficiency. It seems like this renders 95% of what we do pointless. The problem is that, in reality, without the business conflicts that waste 95% of our work, most of us wouldn't have jobs or money at all, so the wastage would be 100%. The only thing that will allow transfer of wealth out of an elite and into new talent is some kind of severe conflict within that elite. The ideal of capitalism (until a parasitic, socially-connected corporate elite hijacks it and subverts whatever mechanisms it uses to force competition) is that business elites in competition with each other will always perform better than single monopolistic powers. This is also why VC-istan sucks Hitler's necrotic scrotum. VCs collude and decide, as a group, who's hot and who's not. They don't compete with each other. They'd rather get invited to each others' parties and in on each others' deals. The lack of competition within that elite leads to downright awful terms for the people actually doing the fucking work.

soneca 14y ago

When I began college my carreer plan was this Bill Gates "be rich or powerful, than do good for the world" path. Well, it doesn't work like that. Actually, now I see this as kind of selfish, a pretentious delusion of self-importance. When I thought like this I wanted to be a hero, not make the world a better place. I realized my mistake in time, changed my major, started a carreer on the non-profit sector and I was cool with doing something adjuvant as part of something that was trying to do some good. But that doesn't mean the more important conclusion of the OP, that is "Just because optimising Javascript isn’t making the world a better place right this second doesn’t mean you’re destined to a life of misanthropic selfishness" is wrong. This has something to do with Steve Jobs connecting dots, with Gandhi being a lawyer before being Mahatma, with Muhammad Yunus being a humble professor of Economics in his native country before a Nobel laureate (Peace Nobel prize, not Economics). I just quit my job on a non-profit startup, after 8 years in the field, and now I am a founder of a regular, for-profit startup. This is not my final carreer path, this is teaching me a lot about disrupting things. I mean, A LOT. The paradigm shift emerging through startups is very powerful. On a final note, all this "I want to change the world" mantra that I often listen applied to tech startups is, 99% of the times, BS. Facebook indeed changed the world. For better? Not necessarily. Twitter did? Not in my opinion. "But what about the Arab Spring??". Listen, people, empowered by technology change the world. So you may say that technology change the world. Not brands. SMS technology is changing the world in many ways all over Africa, internet changed the world, not Twitte, or Facebook. Some startups disrupted some technology use so strongly, that they became monopolists in their use. But still, don't confuse technology and brands. Summarizing, optimizing Javascript may not be making the world a better place right this second, but if you are improving your knowledge, and - another good advice from OP - don't let yourself be defined by your job and is trying hard to create a big picture for yourself, than optimizing Javascript may be a very important dot that you will connect to make a difference in the future.

RougeFemme 14y ago
To add on. . . code is just a tool/component used to make other, more complex tools. And if the tool your code is used in ultimately makes the "hero/philanthropist/???" more effective, then you are still making a positive contribution.

rco8786 14y ago

> The fact is that if all the web developers (or investment bankers) disappeared tomorrow the world wouldn’t change much – at least not compared to doctors or nurses or firemen. There wouldn’t be a global meltdown. I really beg to differ.

mikegioia 14y ago
I think if all programmers disappeared the world actually might shut down. Just think of all the places in the global infrastructure that require software to work: financial trading, military, flight control, all modern business accounting and financial reporting, medical systems, etc.
- krapp 14y ago
  All that software already exists and is running though, and I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'shut down.' These industries might no longer be able to update, but I think it's possible to run just about any industry without IT, or on legacy code, just on a smaller, slower scale. You could predict some level of catastrophe for the disappearance of any large sector that affects commerce -- from truck drivers to sewer workers to even maybe interns. I think this implies the tenuous nature of our economy more than the relative importance of programmers.

kenkam 14y ago

I agree with the OP's general point. Career aspirations? What I give back to the world? To me, I just want to be happy in my life, I guess some can argue it's Utilitarianism. This is my big picture. So if I can pay my bills, live the lifestyle I have (not very lavish btw), go to work and be happy working there (above average, you're always gonna have bad days), have a healthy relationship with parents, friends and the other half, and be able to save some money to ensure my and my family's future happiness, then I'm happy. So whether I am a graphic designer, charity worker, investment banker, even a saint, if I can continue to be happy and do the stuff I said above, then I couldn't care less if the job was 'pointless' or not. Who is to judge? It's worth something to me! Disclaimer: I work at a bank as a developer. Perhaps not the 'coolest' job out there, but if it means I can go home and be happy, then I consider myself a success. Don't get me wrong, if anyone asks wouldn't you want to be a millionaire, of course I would, but sacrificing my happiness? It'll require more thought. Final thought: maybe I'm only 27 and I haven't hit the mid life part yet. I am keeping an open mind as to how my thoughts will change...

clux 14y ago

There's plenty of ways to make a difference in the world without having a job that is immediately altruistic. http://80000hours.org/career-advice http://80000hours.org/career-advice has a lot of good information along these lines.

solistice 14y ago

I find we're really bad at defining goals. Let's play a short question game. You win if you read through these questions and you say "Nah, got this covered" without feeling guilty. What are you working for? To better society? To make an impact? Sure. That's a little vague though, isn't it? Ok, maybe it's to better society. Define better (Well, uhmm...better, you know?") and define society (Uhmm...the country? Ohh wait, the world? Maybe those kids in africa?). You kinda see where I'm going with "this is way vague for a life purpose"? Ok, let's take the impact example. Which impact? Do you want to be remembered? Just remembered, or positively remembered? Or do you want to make a lasting change on the face of earth? How long should it last? How visible should it be? Or do you want to change somebody? How do you want to change them? What will you do to change them? The gist is definition. A lot of "career planning" is an improperly defined goal for an even larger time period than the usual resolutions we make. Stop smoking, lose weight, work out more. How often do you keep your new years resolutions? Proably not that often. So why are you entrusting your life purpose to the same kind of expectation making that you do for your new years resolution, to some goal with quicksand consistency? You know the feeling you get in mid february that you didn't keep up with your resolutions, right? You feel guilty because you've wasted another year and still haven't gotten these things done. Lack of willpower, right? Ok, imagine you're 35, look at your life resolution, realize that you haven't lost weight nor changed the world, and you feel guilty. Really guilty. Because your former me is ashamed of what you've done. And it's not just a new years resolution, it's your life goal you haven't gotten done. Ok, fair enough. Figure out what exactly you are trying to do till when, preferably with why you want to do these things. Name - date - reason. You can't worry about the pointlessness of something if you got the point on a paper in front of you, 12pt Times New Roman. Then factor that into object(ive)s and method(ology)s, so you can whip up the source of your life one task after another. You'll get there.

Retric 14y ago
The real problem is forget what actually makes them happy can have little to do with what society says should make them happy. I feel more joy thinking about my job as useful destructive chaos than any sort of direct betterment to society. Consider, people actually making atomic bombs often had a great deal of job satisfaction. You can look at people at the bottom as in desperate need of help, or a buffer in case of crop failure. Now think about it for a second which idea makes you feel better? PS: I am not saying this is a good thing, but it's a thing that's worth considering.

RTigger 14y ago

One of my favorite stories told by our software consultants (the people we send to client sites to train how to use our software effectively): One day he went to a customer's site to train them on the new version of our software, and met with one of the bookkeepers of the company. He showed her a report that we recently added a column to as part of a feature request from our clients, and she started crying. He was asking her what was wrong, worried that we did something terrible. She replied: "You just saved me 3 hours a day. Now I can go home when my kids are home from school instead of after supper". Just because we're not saving babies doesn't mean we're not making people's lives better.

mikegioia 14y ago
You just hit the nail on the head. I work in ed-tech and while a school contract is no where near the size of a business contract, we regularly hear from school administrators how much of their day they get back.
michaelochurch 14y ago
You just saved me 3 hours a day. Now I can go home when my kids are home from school instead of after supper. The ugly part of this is that we rarely know whether we're saving time or cutting jobs (and depriving people of income). Between our low level of access to the relevant information, and the execrable leadership the world currently has, we can rarely know that. When the world has good leadership, technological progress (even small victories) save time and create wealth. When it has bad leadership, it ends jobs (that are never replaced) and helps the working world shut itself down.
- arscan 14y ago
  whether we're saving time or cutting jobs It depends what you mean by "jobs". If you mean it in the headcount sense, then yes, that's bad. Good leadership should inform its employees of how technology is impacting its operations. That way employees have an opportunity to prepare and to find new ways of adding value, so they don't have to leave once their old role becomes obsolete. But if you mean "jobs" in the "having a person do this specific action" sense, then I couldn't disagree more. Progress isn't made unless jobs (in that sense) are cut. The human mind has such amazing potential and we shouldn't waste it doing things that can be easily automated.

bjhoops1 14y ago

But what about my deep-seated need to feel like I'm fundamentally better than investment bankers?

zekenie 14y ago

I wholeheartedly believe you can save lives (including babies) with javascript. http://hackingmedicine.mit.edu/ http://hackingmedicine.mit.edu/ The way healthcare professionals use computers is slowing down r & d and ultimately costing lives. I worked at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center last summer. They claim that they are the leader in healthcare IT. Yet my job was to copy clinical data from one computer system to another by hand. They had a developer doing manual data entry at a Harvard teaching hospital! Today, healthcare needs programmers as much as they need doctors (maybe not in the same quantities).

lukethomas 14y ago

As someone who has the goal of "making enough money so I can give back", I've realized that doing something NOW is important for a couple reasons: 1) I could die tomorrow and 2) Habits form, and if I plan on giving services/time/money at a latter point in my life, I might as well start now and get used to it (even if the amount is small).

adamman 14y ago

I'm seeing a Cloudflare page that states that the site is offline and there is no cached version available. I wonder if this is because they decided to set up cloudflare right when their site was getting hammered by HN.

jng 14y ago
That could be it. Still, the server is down, and Cloudflare is showing that it can't really do anything. Even if reasonable, it's pretty bad publicity for Cloudflare (at the very least, definitely not good).

smky80 14y ago

This is an important idea. Several years back I quit a well-paying job in finance because I wanted to work on meaningful problems. What I realized fairly recently is that most problems are social problems. It's not like some demon is draining the world of natural resources and polluting it, creating antibiotic resistant bacteria, or starting wars all over the world. We're doing that. You want to save the world? Start with being a good parent.

HNaTTY 14y ago
...Or don't have any kids at all, since kids turn into adults and adults are the cause of pretty much all the social problems we have, such as pollution and depletion of natural resources.

randomdrake 14y ago

Great article. It looks to be down at the moment, however. Here's a link to a mirror/cache of it: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kY15Yvu4rOMJ:jshakespeare.com/dont-worry-that-your-job-is-pointless/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kY15Yvu...

jefe78 14y ago

Seeing that your site is offline, I'm going to have to disagree with you. -Sysadmin

oscargrouch 14y ago

“Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that you do it” Mahatma Gandhi

daSn0wie 14y ago

thank you

touristtam 14y ago

A job that can be automatized _is_ /unimportant/. Your finance wizard can just be replaced by a few line of code _because_ his whole world is already part of this technology world. Now try to automatize the one doing to the coding. People losing jobs are a consequence of an economic decision, not because of technological advancement. Knowledge is still power.

RTigger 14y ago

I ended up blogging a response to this - http://rtigger.com/blog/2013/03/20/saving-the-world-with-software/ http://rtigger.com/blog/2013/03/20/saving-the-world-with-sof... TL;DR - We change the world for the better in so many ways that we don't even realize. Don't sell ourselves short.