Well, this has been removed from everywhere i've posted it so I might as well drop it into the rant void here.

I work at a huge, multinational corporation, Fortune 50. While I work at a huge company, I am employed by a contracting agency, I have worked here for 7 years. I work in their Research and Development division developing software that lets the engineers interface with the computation models. We use a graphical app development platform to create the interfaces, then I use Python, FORTRAN, Perl, R, and occasional JS to preprocess the input, giving more high-level options to the engineers than what's available out of the box for the models, and create post-processing suites depending on applications use case. Often times the engineers are so shit at an experimental design that I end up coaching them through the scientific method (please for the love of god what is your hypothesis this is going to make me jump off this building...). I also do the modeling and experimental comparisons myself, along with teaching classes on experiment design and how to use computational modeling.

I like the process of my work. I like making the apps, I've enjoyed creating visualization suites for the engineers, I've enjoyed digging into implicit numerical analysis algorithms to find where rounding errors throwing things off could be. I don't mind FORTRAN, but would like to be able to use something newer than 77. Finding new ways of writing optimization methods stuff like branching off Differential Evolution or Gradient Descent methods into something different, though probably not as efficient as the base modules. I haven't liked interfacing with databases, but the databases are filled with useless shit anyway so why we even bother with them is just to placate the suits.

Everything just feels so pointless. I make an absolute shitload of money for the area, almost $90k, which is close to two times the median household income of the area. Not that I can afford a house for all this income... Anyway, I have an incredibly flexible work schedule, so flexible that for the past year I've been working else than 10 hours a week unless there's something particularly fucked or exciting. I see people working for parks services, working at water filtration, working at energy plants, working at avalanche prediction centers-- doing work that actually matters. Here I am making absurd amounts of money and contributing fuck-all to my local world. I've done more good for the world working a weekend a month at the soup kitchen than I will ever do working in R&D for one of the largest companies on the planet.

My bachelor's degree is in physics, not CS. I got this job because a forward-thinking manager refused to follow hiring guidelines for the position. They saw that my 2.8 GPA also included graduate-level computational fluid dynamics research and various robotics teams in hardware and software positions. Something they got punished for at the time, but ultimately resulted in them getting massive promotions following team performance reviews. I do not qualify for any job even remotely close to the level of pay I get now. I often only get callbacks for research assistant positions 2500 miles away for 20k a year.

I'm not interested in learning leetcode or other bullshit like big-o that no one other than hiring managers actually cares about. I'm not interested in moving 50 miles or more away from my family and friends. AND I have a family to provide for. Since there are so few companies in my area that offer this kind of work anyway my only option is remote work, which is mostly targeting newly minted CS grads. So even when I look on places like 80,000 hours most of the listings are for a pittance and require busywork certs.

Most of my coworkers, especially those not hired by the manager who hired me, come from money. Their parents work at the company, they're 4.0 ivy grads, they double majored in two types of engineering overseas, they go skiing every weekend and wish the homeless guy in the park wouldn't set up his tent there. They care more about giving the appearance of work than actually accomplishing things (hence why I get away with low actual work hours, I actually do relevant shit) and constantly create work for themselves and spin their wheels while raking in pay raises. They take more vacation days than they have paid vacation days and are loving life.