[Grishnakh]

>The work I do makes a difference. Not in a "I make something people use" difference,...

I'd just be happy with that. Most of the work I've done professionally hasn't gone anywhere; it's always "we missed the market window" or "upper management decided on a new strategy". I can't point to that many things I got to work on that actually made it into the market and were used by people for long. One place (a semiconductor company) had a successful though buggy product and large customers in place, with the product already deployed into the field, and the software I wrote got used by some customers, but then suddenly the company decided they weren't making a big enough profit margin on this part (even though the profits were guaranteed and extremely low-risk as the customers had the part designed-in), so they simply quit the market and laid off our entire team.

Making something people use would be a step up. Rescuing people and feeding starving kids is a pipe dream, but then again I work on embedded devices, not big data or analytics or anything like that so that's not exactly a position that'd be easy for me to find if I really wanted it.