For most of my career, I've worked for mission-driven organizations, mostly environmental nonprofits or renewables companies. The pay was shit but the people were awesome and I felt good about work every single day. It was worth it. Then I got let go during COVID and moved to a bigger renewables company, but it's pretty much the same: working on some project I directly care about, for a cause I agree with, at a wage I can live by.

The difference vs working in pure tech is that I don't have to guess whether my impact is a net negative or positive. I'm not working on some abstract toolset that can be used by any actor, good or bad, I'm making bespoke software for a specific audience for a particular reason: to help increase renewables output.

I'm not rich and never will be (nor do I WANT to be -- it'd change me too much), but I'm still quite well-off compared to most Americans and especially compared to the rest of the world, even those who do work in tech.

If money weren't a thing, I think it's the kind of work I'd volunteer to do quite a bit of anyway. Except I'd travel more and take Fridays off :) But otherwise, the work is innately fun (very visual frontend stuff written in a semi-modern stack), my coworkers are awesome, the work-life balance is good, my managers are attentive and reasonable humans, and there's no cutthroat backstabbing that I've ever seen. We also don't work for cults of personality, just regular people doing regular business stuff.

Part of the reason I don't want to work for a FAANG or similar is that I have no control over the output of my work. I was burned by an early startup experience, when I was interning at an (ostensibly) anti-spam company working on some novel methods; this was before Gmail and before ML really took off. It was a fun crew, but one day the founder decided he wasn't making enough money and decided to sell the tech to the Chinese government to censor dissidents instead. I noped outta there with a bad taste in my mouth, forever skeptical of the tech companies that are basically mercenaries for hire.

It saddens me that so much of my work (web dev) is controlled by basically 3-4 giant companies and we're all at their mercy. The Internet is more centralized than it's ever been, and that's getting worse by the day. Still, though, at least I can take some of their stuff and actively funnel it towards causes I believe in.

Some days I look at the powerful CEOs and wish they'd have a change of heart and funnel some of their productivity towards the common good instead of stupid Twitter arguments or the biggest spaceship. The Patagonia CEO turning his brand into an environmental nonprofit last month gave me a lot of hope in humanity, that maybe once in a while the good guys can still win.

But ya know, in the meantime, you just do what you can. I'm proud of my work, but more than that, I'm proud that I've managed to make peace with my life, finding a good balance of everything. There is no pure good, and very rarely pure evil, in this world. We all deal in moral ambiguities, and it's a matter of picking (and maybe occasionally winning) the battles that you care deepest about. You can be an ally to many causes, but only be on the front lines of one or two. We're only human at the end of the day, no need to beat yourself up for simply having been born into a flawed world and imperfect societies. If you're nudging things in the right direction, that's all anyone can ask of you.