Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?
You might as well have asked who among us won the lottery.<p>I've been struggling with this for years now; after 4 boring jobs I finally gave up even the expectation that what I'll be asked to do will be even remotely interesting (or socially useful). The chance of landing an interesting job is absolutely minuscule - the market rewards whatever it rewards at the moment, and that's where jobs flock. These days, one of the bigger thing the market rewards is writing a web-based CRUD that's 99% chrome, 1% of actual functionality. Extra points if you can get some user data to sell to adtech industry.<p>(My own criteria for "interesting" these days are a bit different. I'm not looking for "interesting technical problems", as in advanced CS stuff, but "interesting outcomes" - pushing the humanity forward, or alleviating a social problem for some group of people. I find it hard to even <i>find</i> companies that apparently work on something like that, and even then it seems they have to do <i>lots</i> of boring work as well.)<p>--<p>EDIT: Then again there's this topic that has been casting shadow on my happiness for a long time, that I finally seem to be able to define. Maybe our civilization has finally crushed my soul, and I noticed it just now. But it feels to me that the revealed goal of our market-driven world is to <i>abstract everything away with money</i>. The end-game is that as an individual, your responsibility in the society is to pick a skill - <i>whatever skill</i> - that makes you money, and then to use money to solve everything else with your life. It doesn't matter what you do, there is only one meaningful meta-skill - making money fall out of the system, into your bank account.<p>Maybe I'm just realizing something obvious that parents should have taught me when I was a kid. I don't know. Maybe it was wrong of me to seek meaning in the things one does? Maybe that approach is no longer supported by our civilization?