I recently user-tested a job posting for a high-meaning job. [1] Some people were very excited by the meaning, and were strongly motivated to apply. Others cared very little or not at all about the purpose; they worked because they wanted money for other things. Both are perfectly valid ways to approach work, I think, but I would handle each kind of employee differently.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yNITCTtVh5qHPof12cSf5PWh...
Writing tests and documentation or diving deep into debugging hard issues is what I consider part of "good work" (and that I have also enjoyed doing), and I can't wait to do good work. It just has to be compatible with the rest of life. It's mostly the way we work that has to change rather than the content of the work.
I like to imagine that there is a virtual priority queue of software tasks out there, waiting to be done.
Some of it is feature development, some of it is detailed bug investigation, some of it is documentation, and some of it is user interface work.
What might be incredible would be to declare your interests and skills and start picking from the priority queue, with appropriate rewards as you progress, and at your own pace, knowing that you're contributing back to important tasks of the day. Ideally with a social safety net to allow people to enjoy life and adapt to changing circumstances.
I'm one of three directors of a small IT company in the UK and I'm feeling more and more compelled to steer it towards more innovative and societally important things. We are very small in the grand scheme of things but you will have heard of some of our customers. I am a pointy headed boss (PHB) who runs Arch Linux on his laptop and has a 3D printer on his desk. I also have a hammer drill and a set of sockets on it at the moment. That's at home.
I could probably find some jobs for you but frankly I suggest you start your own firm/organisation, do your thing and get all the rewards in whatever form that means - may not be financial. You sound very close to having a vision. Focus on what you really want to achieve and do it.
If you still fancy a chat, I'm up for it.
"You will give me interesting or meaningful work"
To be direct: this sounds entitled. Lots of growing companies don't have the resources to babysit and hand feed work to engineers. They need driven, self motivated engineers who can identify problems and help identify solutions, create and drive projects in ambiguous circumstances, that serve the businesss. It sounds like you're disconnecting from the requirements of a business to succeed in a market. I've worked on teams who got the "only give me the interesting programming tasks" engineer and they are a rot to the company. Whether or not you mean it to, that's how this pattern matches for me. Lots of work isn't interesting and is hard to rate the "meaning" of, and successful teams and companies need this work to be done by the whole engineering team.
"I like Python. I don’t like PHP and Java."
I would omit this entirely, as the language isn't related to how meaningful the work is and contradicts your previous paragraph.
"No technical interviews or coding challenges"
Again I think this shows immaturity and not understanding the needs of a business and hiring. Technical interviews do indeed have all sorts of problems, and they're generally the lesser of the evils of technical interview styles. Not every company has the luxury of "let's hire this person to figure out if we like them" and not every engineer has the luxury of "I'll do an unpaid take home that takes up my time instead." Onboarding takes time for lots of teams in a business, and getting up to speed on the domain of the business is an investment for everyone. Who you hire is one of the most important decisions a business has to make. Having a technical interview process of some kind is important, even if it has challenges to be objective with.
"I will prefer payments in cryptocurrency"
Just my personal taste, this one is an irk to me. It's a sort of removed-from-reality "I don't care about your real world taxing and accounting needs, I like crypto." Most companies flat out won't / can't do this, so it's a weird request unless you're specifically looking at a crypto company.
The great irony of this post is it's all just things you want, and not really anything about you or your skillset. The things a hiring manager or recruiter would actually look for are completely absent from this post. There's a hint with contradictions that you're looking for a mission driven company, beyond that I don't understand the point of this article. It smells of "companies, come to me, I'm special" while immediately setting limitations like "I don't like PHP." The hiring managers I know would say "this person doesn't sound like they know what they're looking for in a company, why would I consider them?" It sounds like you've already checked out from your own responsibility of understanding a company and why you might like them.
First, the author says interesting OR meaningful work. So even if it’s true that the developer won’t be interested in, say, writing documentation for a legacy steel manufacturer, this developer might be happy to do so for a good non-profit.
Second, the author never said documentation and the like weren’t interesting. Perhaps that’s true, but Francesco merely wrote that he prefers Python over PHP and had a few industries he thought were interesting.
We all have skills and industries were interested/not interested in. And I think we and Francesco generally recognize some unpleasant work must be done in any field.
well, he just slid down to "more unreasonable" with that clarification :) I can understand a "great coder doesn't want to write documentation" broadcast message, but if you want meaningful work to your standards, it's really on you to find the companies doing it and apply to them.
I would extend the common good advice to employees to this applicant: Offer to your manager solutions to problems, rather than just complaining about problems; managers have enough headaches, what they ache for are helpful employees; this also applies to hiring managers, so find a hiring manager who will want you, don't make him find you.
Personally, I'd be unlikely to hire somebody in the "great coder who won't write documentation" category. But I'm happy to help a mission-oriented person find the right thing for them, even if it's not with me. Right now I'm also going to a great deal of effort to find the right people for a role.
And I don't particularly ache for helpful employees. What I want are people who care enough about the problems to think deeply about them and find approaches to solving them that I might never have come up with. And then are intrinsically motivated to see them through. If in that process they come to me with problems, that's great. Solving employee problems so they can get stuff done? That's my job.
