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You need to work on projects that you genuinely feel passionate about, not just random companies to pay the bills. You can still be a part of a bigger system bu
by puredemo 12y ago
You need to work on projects that you genuinely feel passionate about, not just random companies to pay the bills. You can still be a part of a bigger system but feel great about the work / product that your company is putting out.
If you feel passionate about social networking, work on facebook or twitter. Hell, twitter's existence was almost solely responsible for enabling the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 and 2012, resulting in some pretty widespread social changes.
If you feel passionate about Open Source, try working for RedHat. If you think AI is going to be the next big advancement towards human progress, try to get on at IBM or another research time devoted to it.
Are you really saying that there aren't any problems out there that you feel a need to solve, that there aren't any companies solving them that you'd like to work for?
- throwthrowaway 12y agoNo-no, this is not about passion. When one joins Facebook this does not mean he or she works on "social networking", it means he or she works on a tiny portion of a massive Facebook's codebase, implementing, say, a layout of a targeted ad for Chinese users. I don't want to say anything is wrong with Facebook in this situation, it's just a company with a huge product and 7000+ employees. You are almost guaranteed to be re-inventing the wheel "Facebook way" there.
- tonteldoos 12y agoFrom personal experience, the bigger (or more structured) the company, the more likely it is that you will be actively discouraged from straying too far from your assigned bit of work, either by doing it differently, or taking on a tangential problem in the codebase. This essentially kills, over time, any desire or ability to 'make a problem your own', and you run the risk of becoming just another code monkey.