Sorry, not picking on you specifically, but the HN meme of 'what we do is so important' is pretty tiring. My very first job, supporting cancer research, was actually probably pretty important in the scheme of things, and the owners were relentless about busting our chops if we started to take ourselves seriously. I liked that, and found it healthy.
So, a less flippant 'my cause' statement. I'm an engineer. I like solving hard problems. I work hard regardless of whether your business is "important" or not. Now maybe I'm falling into the 'hire somebody just like you' trap, but I'd far rather hire somebody motivated by solving problems, not somebody motivated by the extrinsics.
I am not saying you are wrong, but I am offering a counterpoint. Personally, I scoff at most of the job listings on here. 'Change the world with our personalized back scratching service' or whatever (only a tiny change from a lot of the actual job postings, I made it silly to avoid ticking off legitimate businesses). Tell me you want me to scale your back room, or your analytics are really hard and no one really knows how to extract meaningful data, or you are trying to get your latency down, or you are moving to GPU and CUDA to solve some computational problem. I'm there, I don't care too much if it is Santa Strike or cancer research (I care some, I am overstating things a bit to make a point).
I'm expecting some push back on this, and that's reasonable. I'll just point out that while I am not a pure blood capitalist, I do think the markets will tell you if what you do is 'important' in the form of success. Which is not to say really important things might fail in the market, they do. But if you are making money you are providing value to somebody, and that is, to my mind, enough reason to live and contribute. The world would be bleak indeed if we focused on very. serious. and. important. problems.
Sorry, not picking on you specifically, but the HN meme of 'what we do is so important' is pretty tiring. My very first job, supporting cancer research, was actually probably pretty important in the scheme of things, and the owners were relentless about busting our chops if we started to take ourselves seriously. I liked that, and found it healthy.
So, a less flippant 'my cause' statement. I'm an engineer. I like solving hard problems. I work hard regardless of whether your business is "important" or not. Now maybe I'm falling into the 'hire somebody just like you' trap, but I'd far rather hire somebody motivated by solving problems, not somebody motivated by the extrinsics.
I am not saying you are wrong, but I am offering a counterpoint. Personally, I scoff at most of the job listings on here. 'Change the world with our personalized back scratching service' or whatever (only a tiny change from a lot of the actual job postings, I made it silly to avoid ticking off legitimate businesses). Tell me you want me to scale your back room, or your analytics are really hard and no one really knows how to extract meaningful data, or you are trying to get your latency down, or you are moving to GPU and CUDA to solve some computational problem. I'm there, I don't care too much if it is Santa Strike or cancer research (I care some, I am overstating things a bit to make a point).
I'm expecting some push back on this, and that's reasonable. I'll just point out that while I am not a pure blood capitalist, I do think the markets will tell you if what you do is 'important' in the form of success. Which is not to say really important things might fail in the market, they do. But if you are making money you are providing value to somebody, and that is, to my mind, enough reason to live and contribute. The world would be bleak indeed if we focused on very. serious. and. important. problems.