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.

  • Dojan
    link
    English
    21 year ago

    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?