[mseebach]

Meaning is incredibly fickle, certainly not an inherent quality of pretty much any work.

The work you do today seems to enable a range of businesses to get on with doing whatever it is they do by letting them leverage some incredibly powerful technology. That sort of enablement seems like something I'd find meaningful. But you're not me, and I'm not you.

If you want to work on more deep technical problems, for the sake of the technology itself (at the cost of being rather further removed from the real-world applications your work enables), go look for that, that's perfectly reasonable. But be careful about assuming that this will necessarily feel more meaningful.

[zapperdapper]

I agree that this "meaning" is a hard thing to put your finger on.

But you know it when you see it.

I think it's maybe not so much about the actual work as how you feel about the work. I have worked on side projects that are not too dissimilar to the day job, but have felt far more meaningful to me - it's sometimes hard to define exactly why though! I used to think it was about helping others, and it is true that does feel meaningful, but I think there's more to it than that.