I work as a software developer and sometimes have these kinds of feelings as well. As I see it, my work is primarily for me to survive on and get tons of money I can later put to good use (I know that this sounds a bit like the “effective altruism” bullshit)

I can’t help with the programming side of things other than to say that it seems remarkably useful from where in sitting (others have given some answers that sound about right to me). I can tell you about the alternatives. I’ve had a fair few jobs, in several different fields. All of them had seriously unfulfilling aspects. Every single one. The problem is capitalism.

David Graeber popularised this idea of ‘bullshit jobs’. As Marxists, we can use this idea, but we must put it into it’s material context.

Of course, some jobs will be more fulfilling than others. Some jobs will be more useful to ordinary people than others. But every job will have its problems.

You could be in a factory manufacturing products that are designed to break. You could get a job in a kitchen and see how much food they throw in the bin. Or a job on a farm spraying pesticides and fertiliser onto the plants. You could even become a medical doctor and face the misery of telling patients that although there’s a cure or treatment, they can’t afford it.

I’m unsure if it’s the best advice, but it’s the advice I live by: pick something you enjoy (most of the time), be as good as you can be at it, then do it until you hate it or get sacked/made redundant; then do something else and get good at it, and so on.

There aren’t many jobs for life ‘any more’. And these days people seem to move fields quite often, too (it might always have been like this). It’s shit not having job security, etc, but accepting that we’re forced to live a kind of nomadic way of life in capitalism can make big decisions like this a bit easier.

Whatever you choose now does not have to be forever. Many people don’t get the choice! If you have the choice to do a job you enjoy and get paid well for it, do it. Don’t beat yourself up or feel too guilty about it (unless you’re programming a Anglo-European military tech or something like that). You can also choose how to spend your income to help vulnerable people or support your union, etc – it’s hard to do that if you pick another job and only earn enough to live (if that).

Being good at something comes with quite a lot of understated power, too. This could just be the power to move to a more fulfilling job in the same field. Or it could be the power to change policies or practices in your current place. Or the power to help people outside work, who need your expertise but can’t afford it. Or the power to support lower paid workers in your institution with less power (through the union, etc).

TL;DR – If people avoided jobs that weren’t useful, there would be a lot more unemployed people. Don’t feel too bad about getting a job that wouldn’t exist in a utopia. There is social usefulness in getting good at almost any job, including programming.

programming is very important, but like most fields, it’s basically impossible to find a fulfilling job doing it under capitalism assuming you actually need to make enough money to live 😑

if you’d rather get a job helping people in another field, do that; if you want a programming-related job, from personal experience, I’d recommend finding something that at least isn’t helping imperialism

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just because someone’s labor is manual doesn’t make it meaningful, u know it is someone’s job to manufacture those asshole benches with shit in the middle so homeless people cant sleep on them. and just because someone’s labor is intellectual or programing specifically it doesnt mean its useless or bad i mean this very site is the product of such labor and i would say its pretty cool.

Personally, I try to deal with this by using skills I gained to contribute to FOSS. But yeah, it kinda sucks.

I do ERP related stuff (not much developing yet, more project management/consulting). I think that sort of practical program bridges the gap quite well between programming and usefulness to the masses.

That all being said I don’t currently feel like I’m helping anyone, except maybe the owner of the company. I need to change that in the next few years.

I love programming, but I feel like it doesn’t have too much use outside getting people to spend their hard-earned money in stuff they don’t need…

That’s not all you can do with it. You can make things that are actually useful: the catch is that the people they’re useful for are ghouls.

Have you considered going into FPGA development or CNC machines?

True, but also you’d be earning a lot of money if you’re hired by the right company, although I don’t know if that applies to the first world, since wages are “high” there. I know a couple of people where I live who work in that field and they have ridiculous amounts of money thanks to that shit. One of these people writes code for some Argentinian satellites so that’s kind of fulfilling, though.

I left my career over similar feelings, totally valid.

You could continue working on a shitty tech job and getting a high wage while also contributing to free software projects you have interest on.

I used to work developing stuff for a customs house and it fucking sucked and ended up quitting, but only because i had something to fall back on.

I don’t think programming is useless, but if it were it’s not immoral to take a useless job in capitalism. If you do enjoy it though, doing it as a job could make you lose the passion for it. Another reason you might not want to go into programming is that the high salaries and benefits for programmer labor aristocrats came because as the field was new, capitalists wanted lots of people to get the skills so they could be useful to them. Now that there are a sizable population of programmers the higher supply will satisfy the demand and make your labor cheaper to the tech bourgeoisie. And with the way the economy is going and how we’ve seen companies like Twitter and Facebook largely downsize it will likely get worse in the coming years.