Throughout my career I have tried my best to avoid work in industries that I consider as doing harm, e.g. oil & gas, defence and financial services companies like JP Morgan that have a large prescence locally.
In the last few years I have worked for a cloud consultancy with similar values, however, I have still found myself working on projects for clothing companies that I would consider as fast-fashion with questionable supply chains.
I am starting to wonder if I need to take my skillset in another direction to find more meaningful work. I took an interest in C# and microservices in the past and while that has worked out well for me, it seems to have locked me into a very enterprise world with values that rarely align to my own.
Has anyone faced a similar dilemna? Basically, I am struggling to find my Ikigai as I do not feel like the world needs the work that I am doing.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
The prospect of programming medical devices terrifies me. Like it obviously needs doing, and I have nothing against the act itself. But like, I know I’m fallible, I know that the code I write isn’t perfect. What if a device I programmed were to break down and cause someone else’s death?
I don’t know. I’m a bit neurotic, but the idea is terrifying.
This is exactly why I got out of healthcare IT, it wasn’t my fault half the products used by the hospital were outdated crap but i felt horrible whenever they would break and I was struggling to get this equipment/system working again that was used to diagnose or treat people’s life threatening conditions.
Now I work in an absolutely unethical business but at least no lives are dépendant on my work
That’s why there are rules set in place to make the software secure as possible. Checking everyone a value gets set and throwing the whole device in error Mode of something fails. And then there are unit tests, ISO, the hardware is also very secure to make sure a battery doesn’t explode or there is no super high current and stuff like this. Tbh I’m just a junior dev so I might not have the biggest grasp on the concepts but I’m pretty sure med devices do more good than harm
Absolutely, but there’ll always be outliers. Someone didn’t properly vet the PR because it was late on a Friday and they wanted to go home. Maybe it was a tricky piece of logic, or a poorly documented method that had some sort of side effect. Perhaps management had bought into AI hype and let a LLM deal with the PRs…
I always loop back thinking about Therac 25, which hopefully wouldn’t happen in today’s society, but who can say?
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