What it takes to be Changing the World as a Job

TL;DR: How to set oneself up to be a minor part of a major noble undertaking

I’d been blessed to work at a place that might positively affect the lives of a lot of people in a dramatic way. This experience provided me with an opportunity to examine the role of a benign mission in today’s tech labor market.

The absence of meaning is a pervasive attribute of modern workspaces. A workplace that could actually provide meaning to people’s lives is filling a void. What I will try to do is, however, to undermine the naive notion of what makes a job meaningful, and to articulate what it takes instead.

The False Pretense

First and foremost, the “simple” ways of positively changing the world had been exhausted a long time ago. What remains is complex ways - such as building a commercially viable product that can grow via economic viability and benefits humanity as a side effect, or at least convincing enough to warrant private individuals’ patronage.

How many people need to be involved to be making a major difference? If counting people with a measurable impact on the outcome, their number would be in the thousands range. They need to work for years to get to their goal. Thus, the vast majority of contributors will have contributed an order of 1/1000th of the eventual outcome.

A further reservation is that as soon as there are more than a few dozen people involved, they will inevitably start having different tactical goals in mind, which typically leads to a waste of time and resources. Accordingly, a lot of people’s individual impacts will simply vanish (perhaps raising the “stake” of the others, but not in a way that can be known in foresight).

Is there even hope?

I dare say there is. There are a couple of ways to go about that which actually make perfect sense. It is just that they require much more self-preparation than just accepting a job offer.

Not an option: groupie tactics

Most enterprises fail; success depends on a core team of cooperative, focused, highly competent people doing their thing. There’s a pervasive stream of people who are not professionals attempting to get in nevertheless. I call that “groupie tactics”; if they don’t get in, they’re wasting their interviewers’ time, and if they do get in, the mundane reality of work often causes them an existential crisis. Unless you’re an established, seasoned, professional - please do everybody a favor and stay the heck away.

Option 1: accepting the perils of a founding team

One way to make a world-changing impact is to be a part of an early-stage “founding team”. It means though that you’ll need to be a competent tradesperson across a diverse set of challenges, and accept the fact that you need to persevere being out there in the brutal conditions of a new thing starting up. All of these are hard pills to swallow in an industry in which people maintain the illusion that they can get everything they want while still playing safe. Are you ready for the drop in salary? Are you ready for doing all kinds of weird things that people with your tenure do not do at other work places?

Option 2: Becoming an enabler to other people in a big team

The other option is by joining a good cause, but accepting the fact that changing the world means that you’ll need to make the team shine rather than yourself. This pattern of work goes against a lot of typical career tracks in the industry that are called “Individual Contributors” and whose ethos centers around “heroism” - so going down that path means changing your ethics and expectations of yourself and of others - are you up for that?