[jerf]

Have you tried... looking for one that isn't?

I've been in the biz for coming up on 25 years and I've never tried to make anyone click on an ad.

It also may help to downgrade "doing genuine good" from "solving the world's biggest problem once and for all" to "helping people get food reliably" or "keeping this industrial process that provides value to thousands of people going" and so on. Sometimes I do lose a bit of track of what I'm doing, but in the end the jobs I've worked still end up helping people do useful things, or protecting people, not making them click on ads.

There's a lot of jobs in programming that don't involve making them click on ads. Even in the heart of Silicon Valley, there's going to be a lot of jobs that don't boil down to that.

But you may have to, you know, change jobs.

[UncleOxidant]

I've never had a job convincing people to click ads either in about the same amount of time. But when I look at the salaries being paid by those companies trying to get people to click ads I think I must've made a mistake somewhere. Not that I want to have a job getting people to click ads, but those jobs pay like 2X to 3X the highest salary I've ever made (or more).

[spenczar5]

You haven't made a mistake. Those jobs pay highly because they have to. The phenomenon of soulless, not-great-for-the-world jobs being really highly paid is not a new one, and not at all unique to software - compare a celebrity plastic surgeon versus a doctor who saves lives after disasters, or a corporate attorney at a weapons company versus a pro bono lawyer who works for virtually nothing.

[jerf]

Full disclosure, I'm doing OK (not living in SV helps a lot), but, yeah, I'm not pulling down half-a-mil a year.

But I don't want to hate my job. I don't always love my current job... as I like to say, they're paying us precisely because this isn't what we'd be doing of our own free will... but I don't want to hate it.

Because it's more than just the hating the job. It's coming home every day to your family in a bad mood. It's your children associating you coming home with the guy in the bad mood coming home. It's being on hair trigger all the time despite your best efforts. It's living in a place I don't want to live.

The funny thing is, I look at that and I don't feel like I should be willing to pay $300,000/year for that... but apparently I am.