Comment by time_to_smile

Companies by their nature are driven by profit motives and in almost no circumstances have a positive impact on the world. They exist to exploit people and resources to the benefit of their owners. Even the most well meaning startups I've worked with eventual devolve into doing "harm with a smile" to their customers. In my experience, as a rule of thumb, the more altruistic the mission the more horrific the actual behavior (be more skeptical of CEO/Founders pitching a desire to "help people", it will start that way but one day you'll be selling your user info to big pharma to exploit them for every penny).

I've worked for the Federal Government, thinking it would provide some "good work", and I personally found that to be pretty off putting. Most of the people I interacted with were bureaucrats obsessed with defending and expanding the little bit of power they had, with very little interest in serving the public. However there were a high number of people who were seriously committed to changing the world. So if you want to meet some of these people government work can open some other doors (just bewared it might leave you ultimately disenchanted).

The best place I've found for doing "good" work is the odd, small team doing research at a university. I say this a someone who has a lot of frustrations with academia as well, but there are small pockets of people doing cool research to make the world better that need technical skill to help (academia is much better on the non-tenure faculty/staff side). This can be anything from biologists working to cure cancer to academic libraries building tools for students/the world. This is the most likely chance you have to be in a room filled with smart people all seriously interested in doing work for the benefit of the world. I have long hoped to find the right team to one day land on, but that will have to wait until later in my career because...

One major, major catch: expected to severely cut your comp. Salary information is public for both publicly funded universities and the federal government. Go look up what software engineers make at these places and you'll see sub-100k salaries are far more common than not. 15 years ago the gap wasn't as big (and the recession might send us back to that world), but today you have to really, really not care about comp.

I used to do meaningful work for universities, I had a lot of fun interacting with students and brainstorming with clever people not driven by any profit motive. Unfortunately the gap in pay became too much. I make more than 5 times what I used to back then, but do miss waking up in the morning as asking "what's the best thing I can do for the world with my time today?"