Contrast with teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers, etc., almost all of whom I think would say they do something meaningful.
I have no idea what proportion of software engineers consider what they do meaningful but the team who work on Google Scholar have done a great deal for me and I’m not even an academic. The drivers at Uber and Lyft and their riders have almost all had their lives improved by their existence. Amazon has made the experience of buying books so much better it’s ridiculous. Lambda School is taking 1000s of people from basically useless as programmers to a new career. Those are all pretty meaningful, at least as meaningful as your list, which seems be about displaying caring as much as actually effecting people’s lives.
If you build something people want and it isn’t harmful you’re having an effect.
And what they've done to the publishing industry is a whole nother beast.
The next recession is going to be a bloodbath for a lot of low-income people when the demand for the gig economy dries up.
Can you really blame Amazon for destroying community centers because they put bookstores out of business?
Bookstores aren't the only viable community center, after all. Most cities and counties have a public library that's supposed to exist for the community's benefit. Additionally, in rural parts of the US, the only real community center you used to find was a church, not a library or a bookstore.
Personally speaking, my community centers exist on Signal, WhatsApp, IRC, Mastodon, Slack, Twitter, Telegram, and Facebook. (And I neglect half of those entirely.) I don't see any need to have a physical watering hole.
Also, I'm from rural US, and those places do revolve around churches, but the pockets of enlightenment revolve around bookstores. IMO, a healthy community has a strong group of intellectuals. Intellectuals tend to gravitate to bookstores.
And yes, you can definitely blame Amazon for putting bookstores out of business. I'm too lazy to find stats to support that, but there is definitely evidence that Amazon is to blame.
And sure, libraries are for the community's benefit in an ideal world, but I'm talking about the real world.
If communities die when bookstores die, sure, you can blame that on what killed the bookstore. But regardless of blame, whose responsibility is it to ensure communities continue? (This isn't the same thing as blame.)
My point isn't "bookstores are the wrong answer". My point is "bookstores aren't the only correct answer". Diversify.
Software developers invent the tools and environments that enable other people to do more efficient work. Sometimes it enables entire classes of meaning work that weren't possible before. How can that not be meaningful?
For better or worse, everything is driven by software these days. All work is, directly or indirectly, powered by software. Being in software is like the most meaningful thing you can do.
[1]: If anything, I think teaching is more meaningful, using the same argument: do software engineering and you can do one human's job of software engineering. Teach 10 software engineers and you are by extension doing software engineering as 10 humans.
On a side note: if anyone here hasn't tried tutoring/teaching natural sciences/programming in a one-on-one setting or very small group, I seriously recommend it. It's surprisingly similar to software engineering; in many ways, it's wetware engineering! You get to debug the logic in people's brains as they work through problems.
In addition that study notes that teachers are more likely to work a second job, something a Google engineer wouldn't need to do to make a decent wage.
> The average salary of public school teachers in 2017 – 18 for the State of California was $80,680. [2]
Teachers make a perfectly decent wage as is, more than the average household .
You’re going to spend more time at work than doing almost anything else during those years of your life where you work. Why not do something meaningful with those hours if you can? And if OP can get a job at Google they almost certainly can.