Mission Driven Work
You can really change the shape of healthcare — seriously.
I’ve been an application, web, and embedded developer over the course of the past 15 or so years. I’ve worked for both large and small companies, mission-driven startups to larger faceless corporations. The impact of my work differs with each job and sense of accomplishment ranges from the nerdy, theoretical that I can share with a small subset of people to work that directly affects my mother and father, grandma and grandpa.
I wasn’t delusional about the output of my work in terms of changing the world, but there were times when I thought I was really producing “good”. It was mostly bullshit, mostly. “And yes, we’re disrupting digital media. But most importantly we’re making the world a better place. Through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility.” Are these abstractions really touching people, their lives, and invoking real change for the better? Most likely not.
It wasn’t until joining the USDS that I was able to combine my work of doing good from previous jobs with the scale of impact that one can only find in the top 10 or so companies.
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Rather than drop a large, incoherent post here and now, I’d like to try to bucket ideas into separate posts.
- How does one actually shape healthcare?
- How does my work actually touch everyday people?
- How do I get work done in this environment vs the traditional one? What am I actually doing in terms of work?
- What others can be doing to enact change?
- What is actually good work? How does that manifest?
