We should all be mission driven
Note: The opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my employer.
These days AI assisted coding tools have made it easier than ever to build almost anything. The hardest part isn’t figuring out the architecture, creating the infrastructure, or even learning to code; it’s figuring out whether to buy the Claude max or OpenAI pro subscriptions. Seemingly overnight the discourse in the tech community has shifted to what model is the smartest, what agent framework is the best, or how to maximize productivity. This work has paid off - it’s now easier to go from an idea to product than ever before, and we’re seeing more lines of software being written everyday. But with all the emphasis on the how, we’ve seem to have lost touch with the what and the why. We can build entire apps or websites from a single prompt, but have we as a community stopped to think about what we’re building and why?
In my experience I think almost everyone working in tech identifies in one of two camps. The a job is a job camp, and the I love what I do camp.
I work to live
I think the common thread in everyone I talk to in the first camp is freedom. People want more time to do whatever they want and spend time with people they like. In tech, the people with the most freedom are those that worked at “prestigous” companies, got paid extremely well, climbed the corporate ladder, and retired by the time they’re 40. I think a significant chunk of people in this camp want to be that person, and I think that’s led us to have this maximalist mindset. We’ve attached prestige to working at companies, or starting your own, not because of what they do, but because they represent the shortest path from today to freedom. This is where I think we’ve gone wrong. In social settings people usually don’t make decisions to get what they want at the expense of their friend group, so why does this mentality exist outside the local setting of our friends? I think the answer is impact and consequence. In a localized setting our decisions have greater impact and greater consequence, and as we become more removed from the impact and consequence, it’s easier to default to selfish tendencies. This fundamentally isn’t true, especially in the tech world, where the things we build can have outsized impact on millions and millions of people. What we build matters, and we should all strive to use our talents and education to pushing society forward. This isn’t to say personal wealth and liberty don’t matter, they absolutely do, but I believe we can have both. We can work high paying jobs and retire early, but still feel like what we’re building is making a difference - we just have to be pickier with where we work and who we work for.
Take gambling for instance. It’s pretty universally accepted that gambling has a net negative effect on society. Despite this, companies like DraftKings, Kalshi, Polymarket are growing faster than ever berfore. Not only that, but I’m starting to see several startups pop up trying to gamify consumer habits by offering loot boxes, mystery boxes, and even ways to gamble on virality. It’s everywhere now, a byproduct of the casino-ification of America. Now imagine if all the effort and time that goes into making these platforms as addicting and successful as possible was redirected it towards solving problems like carbon emissions or improving education in the AI era, or whatever issues that you cared about. Societal health should not come at the expense of personal gain.
I live to work
Solving hard problems was one of the big reasons I got into startups. I think it’s easy to get sucked in by the possibility of working on something cool, or having total ownership and autonomy to make technical decisions, that we detach ourselves from how our engineering work gets used. There is a line though, no matter how cool the project I’m willing to be the majority of people wouldn’t work on mass civilian surveillance, or weaponized drones that enforce every civil law. This line tends to be ignored, though, when the effect of our work does not have outsized negative impact on society, and I think this is the wrong mentality. We should not avoid working on problems that have a broad negative impact, but we should avoid working on problems that don’t have a broad positive impact. There are interesting and complex problems that need to be solved in every industry. Chances are there’s a lot of overlap between complex technical challenges amongst companies, so similar work can be found at more mission driven companies to you, as long as you’re willing to look.
Software at its core is about removing friction. Fundamentally this means a human user is impacted in some way or another by software that we write. The problems we as engineers solve in some way impact the lives of some human user, and if they didn’t there wouldn’t be a problem to solve in the first place. So if our jobs are always going to impact people, we should be conscientious about the kind of impact we have.
An important caveat I want to make here is I am not trying to define the shape of work that people should do. Everybody has their own unique set of values and world view and that individually shapes what we think is “good” and worth working on. I don’t believe there is only 1 set of values that is correct, but I do believe that society as a whole would benefit if people worked on things that they believed in.
I don’t think a sense of duty is lost in our generation. Teenagers and young adults still strive to be loyal friends, paraents strive to raise their children the best way possible. But somewhere along the way we’ve forgotten that our sense of duty applies to the larger community and society as well. We all should do our part to create and propel society forward in a positive direction. What we do matters, and we should take pride in the impact that we have.