What's the least bullshit job you've had?
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What's the least bullshit job you've had?
Flip side to https://lobste.rs/s/3omsld/ever_had_bullshit_job , because I was starting to feel a little depressed… what jobs have you had that you felt were genuinely enjoyable, useful and productive?
For me that’s actually my current job writing software for cargo drones. I think it’s one of those technologies that genuinely will change the world, mostly for the better, and it’s super exciting to be in it from the ground up. I’m going to quit in a few months because hoo it’s a lot of work and I’m a bit burned out… but there’s a 50% chance I’ll come back after a season or two and say “hey, turns out everything else in the world is less cool, want me back?”
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I used to program for a customs/logistics/cargo company. One day my father’s medicine got delivered using the android app I built, with the sticker I designed, using the domestic cargo integration I made. It wasn’t saving the world, but it was at least making the cogs spin.
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I spent a dozen years building active implantable medical devices - we stuck computers in people and wired them up to their nervous system to treat chronic neuropathic pain. It was a long journey; when I joined it was a research group of a half-dozen people, and by the time I left it was a billion-dollar international company just a hair’s breadth from FDA approval. I bailed because I was burned out; I’d been working solo remotely for the past 5 years in a company with no remote culture (pre-pandemic) and I just felt like I was fighting fires on my own all the time. But I’d been there for a whole career by then, and I’d been lucky enough to see and do some really amazing things (both R&D and technical firefighting).
And when I woke up in the morning I never doubted whether I was doing the right thing. I’m lucky I bombed the interview before that (basically designing electronic products like credit card machines…)
edit: I’ve just been a stay-at-home parent to a school age kid this year and it’s been quite the adjustment; I’ve been recovering from burnout, but also trying to adapt to the lack of structure and clear goals/achievements that comes with that.
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I do data engineering for an electric grid optimization company. We work with commercial and industrial energy consumers to reduce load on the grid at times of peak demand. Grid operators pay us to reduce load, and we pay our customers who reduced the load. It is unfortunately difficult for our customers to directly interface with the grid to bid in their energy consumption during peak demand events, so we are a necessary middleman. With less peak load on the grid, less of the dirty peaker plants are spun up to meet peak demand. I find the work rewarding and important.
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My first job out of uni was mostly generating reports for engineers at CERN to review the quality of the magnets going into the LHC. That was pretty much the best job I could’ve landed at that time: a meaningful project, mentoring, a good quality/time balance, a great work/life balance, and colleagues with lots of patience for my newbie questions.
(I’ve had my share of bad jobs, but never a bullshit job. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but I suspect getting a degree and leaving of any job where I’m not learning anything useful have helped.)
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I work on the devops/devex side for an oil company, helping deploy our software so our clients can drill better horizontal wells faster and easier and for less.
I might not be writing the algorithms that do the work, and I’m not the ops guy actually deploying software, and I’m definitely not the driller or rig hands who are ultimately making the wells, but I’m making that person’s job better, and making it easy to develop those tools.
It’s useful to all human action.
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Maybe it’s “bullshit”, but I really enjoyed it, and it served an entertainment purpose.
I used to write video games, and really enjoyed it. Also really enjoyed seeing people in the store buying our games, hopefully making them happy.
My current job is a website for purchasing homeowner’s insurance. We currently are one of the few companies that hasn’t exited Florida, so helping people get insurance who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get it is somewhat fulfilling.
Granted, none of these jobs is Mother Theresa quality, but I feel like they serve(d) a purpose.
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In the mid-90s, I worked at a job porting various Unix tools to QNX for a small one-man shop (literally, until I was there, then it was a two-man shop). I even got to do some greenfield coding (a finger service for QNX). I had fun, and it was working with something other than Unix and Windows.
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I may have been very fortunate, but every job (even early gigs in preteen/teens) I’ve had has been fulfilling in one way or another, albeit some have come with “lips sealed” kind of price (e.g. critical infrastructure) or abusive downsides (.se academia can go get fscked). The one I would’ve liked to approach again in a retcon like fashion, even though the world has spun infinitely many times since, was full-time debugging/reversing.
I used to work in a tiger team (“MiB”) at Sony-Ericsson into Sony-Mobile during the feature phone to smartphone transition (so pre-android up until Android ~5). The issues dealt with were all of the late-stage “developer / function groups could not figure it out kind” and were often systemic, show-stopper costly and crazy.
Hardware to software to manufacturing - nothing was off the books and the numbers/management involved cut through organisational bullshit often enough that it was tolerable. You could very much begin a day by getting a box of bricked devices, vague instructions towards “we think this is an n% return driver” (margins were thin enough that saving cents on the BoM by not having an MMU was fair game even if that meant tens to hundreds of loosely connected developer groups forced to share a memory space). Issues were at times close enough to risk an entire product. Source-code access was fairly incomplete and quite useless; Go forth and fix!.
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Currently, I work for a company that produces a cryptocurrency hardware wallet. I’m not super into crypto, and I definitely wasn’t before getting the job, but it’s neat to see people talk about how much they love the product when I go to conferences and meet with people.
My current project is a peer-to-peer crypto asset transfer protocol, which is very interesting to work on and, if successful, will help a lot of people make the transactions they want to in a secure and fast way.
I know a lot of people aren’t really into cryptocurrency, but I feel like I could really help those who are with the product I’m working on.
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None was ever bullshit free.
For three months though I started to build a cooperative to support other cooperatives with IT services and process consultancy.
It broke down for personal reasons even if the business looked good and the possibility for political impact where high.
Now I’m back to a bullshit job, algorithmic accountability, where we reverse engineer social media platforms to hold them accountable, start litigations, show the public the tech corporations violate laws and human rights. It’s more meaningful but for Graeber’s definition this is definitely a bullshit job because I solve problems created directly by the job of somebody else.
Eventually I will move to some job in sustainability that has not too much greenwashing and quit the bullshit.
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my current self-employment working on https://seppo.app
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