Tech has a nasty age bias once you hit 40, and I've seen people fall apart when they get laid off and finding a new job is hard for reasons that aren't exactly fair. Finding meaning in your life outside your job is how you keep sane when economic circumstances aren't working in your favor.
(Also like, to be clear these roles aren’t all high paying if you’ve adjusted your life so that without 300k/yr you can’t function then like, I agree you have boxed yourself into a harder corner. That said, I currently have found a combination that is both impactful and lucrative. So that’s super cool when it works out. I am desperately trying to structure my life so I’m not boxed into needing this to be true in the future because meaning in my work is still more important to me than money from my work.)
You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to cobble together work during a downturn like that if I were to lose my primary job and be unable to find another. I would likely take the most fulfilling work I could find. Then when times were good I’d resume more fulfilling work. Just like I’ve done through out the time I’ve been in the field so far.
Given that we have been in a 12 year period of one of the largest tech expansions in the history of our industry, I don’t see why it makes any sense to argue that people shouldn’t be seeking fulfilling work now.
But there are a lot of folks like OP who were focused hard on getting a job at Google and making boatloads of money and never took the time to figure out what they wanted in life besides a high paying job. For people in that position, I would say keep the unfulfilling job, let it be unfulfilling until you know what drives you, and figure out what you want in life. Then you'll be in a position to decide whether to seek meaning at work or not. I personally chose to find it outside of work, which has made the career bumps a lot easier to handle because my identity isn't wrapped up in my job.
1) I agree that this is often true! Code can be pretty boring. That doesn’t mean there are no interesting problems that you can tackle with programming. It just means most people work on incredibly boring stuff and think that’s all there is and totally fine. Find something that’s a better use of your time.
2) There is more and less difficult software engineering. If yours is really boring why wouldn’t you try something more challenging? It doesn’t always pay as well but it can be a lot less terrible to experience on a daily basis.
3) Most of the hardest problems in making interesting technology that touches the world isn’t in exactly how the code is written. Learning this is the first step towards starting to be equipped to tackle the actually hard problems in our field. Which you could work on directly, if you wanted.
None of this is to say that anyone has to do this. You don’t have to have fulfillment in your job. Though you and most others should frankly probably look around and make sure the code you’re writing is doing actually good things in the world rather than bad ones, that’s an ethical obligation but one that is pretty orthogonal whether or not you’re working on interesting problems. (If people optimize solely for money though, they bend towards writing code that makes that empowers companies over people and generally makes the world a worst place. People have a responsibility to evaluate this and try and avoid the ones that don’t.)
Mostly: it’s fine to make the choice to not work on something fulfilling. But stating that there’s nothing fulfilling to work on in this world is just nonsense, defeatist and mostly means you’ve resigned yourself and everyone who takes your advice to unfulfilling, boring and miserable work that doesn’t grow you worth a damn.
And that probably sucks. So why take that approach?