Finding Meaning in Work
Given the amount of time and energy we expend in our workplaces, it makes sense to look for some kind of meaning in the work we do. We cannot all be Jonas Salk (inventor of the Inactivated Polio Vaccine), or Frederick Banting (first to isolate insulin, and origin of the Miracle at the Toronto General Hospital), but we can at least hope that our work is making the world a slightly better place.
However, if I were to judge the output of my career so far, I’m not sure that any of it has contributed in a meaningful way to improving anything.
Working in Academic Research
My career started in an academic research lab, working on medical robots (think Da Vinci Surgical System). The project aimed to improve patient outcomes by adding virtual walls to the robot workspace to protect important anatomical structures. This required precise registration of pre-operative imagery with the operating field.
This registration was impossible. The pre-operative images were MRI scans, taken with the patient lying horizontally, but in the operating theatre, the patient was tilted about 10° downwards (with their head lower than their feet), and their abdominal cavity was inflated. This pushed all the organs away from their natural positions, and gave the surgeons more room to operate. It also made the pre-operative imagery useless since everything had moved.
After a year, we parted ways.
Working in EU Projects
My next job was for a company that made most of its money on European Union Funded projects, and had never made a single product in its entire lifetime. The organisation would bid on robotics projects, hack together a solution that worked just well enough to make a demo, and then move on to the next project. The strategy worked well, but the lab was full of abandoned prototypes of things that might have been viable products.
After four years of never finishing anything, I grew frustrated, and was not-so gently shown the door.
Working in the European Space Agency
I wanted to work somewhere where there was an actual long-term goal, and I thought I had found it when I joined the European Space Agency. The lab had an illustrious history of ground breaking work, but by the time I joined, it was rudderless. The project that was driving the work was at best an engineering demo, not a serious research goal.
Within 18 months, I was gone.
Working in Industry
I was done with research. I wanted real products, real customers.
I joined a small company making components for small satellites (less than 50 kg). I had high expectations, and was quickly disappointed. The company had survived on a steady diet of juniors, left without guidance, destined to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. The code was cobbled together by electrical engineers, as a means to an end, mashing the keyboard until they thought it worked.
The firmware was brittle, assumed that everything would forever stay on the happy path, had no tests, or standards, or even a hint of good practices. Repositories were usually not up to date, and picking up a new project usually meant asking the head engineer to search through his virtual machines for his uncommitted changes. The existence of an On Orbit Hardware-In-The-Loop Test frame in the communication protocol said a lot about the overall lack of quality. [1]
To some extent, I am proud of the work I did there. Every day I would work on hardware that was on its way to space! I did my best to impose standards in the codebase, but I wonder how long they persisted after my departure.
But was the work actually useful?
The products we worked on were of questionable quality. One in-development product could not use the external oscillator for the microcontroller clock. The engineer who had designed it was long gone, and the project was too late to respin the board. As a result, the control loop could only use 0.5 % of the available control action.
The customer, who bankrolled the entire development effort, would have been better off killing the project, and buying off the shelf hardware from somebody competent.
Working in Defense
After moving to a new country, I decided to change industry, and stepped into the world of defense. Learning little from my past experience, I had high expectations.
Aside from the habitual bureaucratic incompetence of large organisations, I was struck with confusion over the goals of the team. Had anybody asked me what the priorities for the next quarter, or the next year were, I would have been at a loss. Had anybody asked me what the most pressing issues with the hardware were, I would have been similarly stumped.
As I tried to onboard onto the project, trying to make a mental model of this undocumented monolith, I struggled to see how I would make an impact. I was hired with lofty goals: to become a bridge between their grumpy senior engineer and the junior programmers tasked with making his vision reality, but I was left chasing down the typos of a prolific, but clearly dyslexic programmer.
I entered the defense industry looking for purpose. I expected to be able to relate my work directly to current geopolitical priorities, but by the time the work landed on my plate, it had been stripped of all context, and purpose was lost with it.
What if the Journey was the Purpose?
Looking back at the last 10 years of my life, I could not point to a single project I worked on that improved the world around it in any measurable way.
As I pondered this unpleasant thought, another one came into focus. I have always enjoyed teaching, and I had the opportunity to mentor quite a few interns and juniors along the way.
Even interns whom I thought I failed, seemed happy with what they learned working with me. Juniors I mentored grew into engineers I would hire again in a heartbeat.
If I failed to have a positive impact through my projects, maybe they would.