I've worked at 50% of the FANG companies and some of their direct competitors. My co-workers are usually smart and interesting. That's the good part. I like[d] computers for the sake of it but I don't find anything the slightest bit fulfilling about helping corporations hit their objectives. I do my best to stay out of the way of too much responsibility (it's not working sadly, I keep getting promotions) so that I can at least come up with my own projects that involve at least a little abstract thinking. Infrastructure as code projects make me want to kms for example. Great, I can trigger a bunch of api calls by filling out a yaml file. Great, we can templatize the yaml file so that more people can use it. Cool cool, I want to die now it's so boring.

> My theory is if I worked in a different business then I might feel that I am positively contributing to the world rather than just helping sell something.

Meh, you say that. I worked on an open source project that did a lot of public good but it just caused me to burn out even faster. Back then I was dating for example and going on dates ate a lot of my time and energy and having a job that I felt morally obliged to do got in the way of me feeling good about spending that time and energy advancing my own personal goals (I wanted to get married and have kids). I left that job and took a boring corporate job where I didn't mind slacking and met my partner within a year lmao. It was 1000% worth it to make that trade. Being overly invested in your work just makes you more exploitable. You'll work your butt off on some open source library and make below market salary while people will work less hard making use of your code and make a lot more money than you.

In the end, boring commerce related stuff is what gets me paid. I approach it as: if I'm working harder than I need to in order to not get fired I'm working too hard. Some people will call this cynical or whatever, but to heck with that. Our whole economy is a race to the bottom in terms of price/performance so why would I not behave accordingly?

It might sound like whining but I also love the fact that spending my teenage years and early 20's obsessed with all things computer science set me up to make a very good living with relatively low stress. It's boring and unfulfilling but oh well. We're all smart people here, we can figure out ways to survive and feel good despite the fact that the economy disproportionately rewards things that suck to do.