No one can make moral or ethical judgments for you. I recognize the hesitance towards defense, surveillance, attention-commerce, and tech consultancy. However, there can be positive moral and ethical perspectives even on those examples. The reverse is also true for industries that, on the surface, seem much more ethically marketable. I personally consider any automation that removes human work from the economy to be a positive contribution to humanity. You can make the perspective that robbing labor opportunities from real humans is a moral failure. My point is that moral choices are usually based on a combination of personal values and a certain understanding of the problem space.

I can’t make ethical suggestions for you, but here are some options that might appeal to you:

• Paperwork Automation for professionals (Lawyers, Notaries, Hospitals, Governments)
• Bioinformatics for medical and environmental applications
• Computer vision for medical tools (Detecting anomalies in scans)
• Agrotech (seed, grow and harvest food more efficiently for a better environment)
• Prosthesis Robotics (Help people in need of mobility)
• Accessibility Engineering (Help people with disabilities access websites, programs and games)
• Environmental modeling for sustainable planning
• Supply chain optimization (software to get goods from A to B with the least impact)
• Video Games!

A career is not only the industry or sector you service. It’s also about the relationships and colleagues you deal with. The work ethic and labor standards you have to deal with. The opportunities you get to build a reputation. The physical location of the opportunities. These are all things to consider when starting out on a career.

Edit: The best way to feel good about work is to set reasonable expectations for yourself to others and meet them consistently. Understanding human problems and solving them. That’s what telling computers what to do is all about.

It’s difficult problem to solve. Lemmy’s stack is a bit unconventional. The rust backend is not idiomatic and the ui is based off a template of an isomorphic not-quite-react framework. Its not impossible, but it will take a while for alot of programmers come onboard.

That being said, there’s more to it than writing code. Better bug reports, reproduction, updating docs and triaging/managing the issues is possibly more important than writing PRs. Don’t be discouraged!

Article is a bit dated and hard to read. The gist of the author is relatable though 15 years later: redundancies have been hella annoying, especially if they are unknown. Bad abstractions, however, create dilemmas, dead-locks and chicken-and-egg situations. And it’s impossible to create good abstractions unless you have no colleagues and no customers.

I would take some frustration over grinding to a halt any time.