- I have worked for a bank. You tell me why do we need yet another bank nowadays, and why on earth do we need to make a fancy SPA with effects and all? Anyway, they paid good money and I gained experience
- I have worked for an e-commerce platform. Again, if it disappeared from the internet no one would complain. We were into "let's build more microservices" mindset. A waste of talent (the engineers I worked with were intelligent people) and time. But hey, I was a Staff engineer, and so I got a bunch of money in exchange for my wisdom in distributed systems (but I still wonder why do we need distributed systems when a one big machine or a couple of them would have done the job)
- I have worked for a SAAS company. The classic pay per customer per month. Totally useless as well (there dozens SAAS companies like us out there). In this one we were more worried about using "boring technology" (PHP, nginx, Postgres) instead of asking ourselves why do we even exist as a company
- And a long etc.
In every company I have been I never felt we were doing something meaningful for the society. I don't feel bad, whenever I see around I see useless companies (not only in IT). I just take as granted, in the capitalist society we live in, that people just want to make money, send their kids to good schools, enjoy vacations in a sunny place, and then retire in peace... so useless jobs/companies are needed.
What makes me a little sad from time to time is to see us, the human race, spending brains, time and billions in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, while we don't put the same amount of resources to solve a real problem like what's going in Israel/Palestine/Russia/Ukraine where people are dying.