
Ask HN: How hard is it to find meaningful work? - justleftcollege
Hey HackerNews,<p>A bit about me, I&#x27;ve been programming since 11, I started with Pascal and have dealt in many varieties of programming (game programming, backend, frontend, kernel, low level systems, you name it and I probably have messed around with it).<p>I graduated HS, I got enough marks that I had choice of any college and any degree in my country.
I finished my degree last year, and I have been working since the start of this year.<p>What I have found is that, the joy that I found in programming doesn&#x27;t really exist at work. 
I&#x27;m largely just moving JSON around, I&#x27;m not really working on any unsolved problems, just adapting existing ones to specific business cases. And not many people care about quality software, they just want software out fast, so they have insane deadlines. (I am outputting 200-400 LOC of garbage code a day at the moment on average)<p>I feel like I&#x27;ve been fed a lie somewhat, &quot;Do what you love and you will never have to work another day in your life&quot;. I am somewhat regretting majoring in CS, maybe I should have majored in something that makes more money, maybe I should&#x27;ve become a Mechanical Engineer, I love math, so solving math heavy problems at work sounds fun.<p>Its thrown me into a bit of an existential crisis, is this my life for the next 40 years or so?
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mindhash
It will help if you find meaning in the work that you are doing than finding a
meaningful work.

When I graduated, I had similar experience. I was deep into cs and loved the
art of programming. But then I was writing SQL queries for most of my day. I
was upset but during this time I also spent incredible amount of time learning
how databases work internally, optimising SQL and Db through low level traces.
Another really useful thing I learnt in this job is users. My users were
financial controllers, warehouse managers. The job gave me a deeper
understanding of how users think, what they know and what matters for them.

Over the years I worked with many tech and product shops but the amount of
insights and learning at that job are incomparable. I just had so much tim to
learn things I would otherwise not spend time on.

A software problem is intriguing and fun to work on but it's not always
meaningful to others.

