Having a child predecease you is one of the worst things that can happen to a person in general. This is a common sentiment in humans. The strange thing is that you mentioned you're trying to follow "logic." This is not logic. These are emotions.
Well, we're talking about someone who was in legal trouble for taking information from academic libraries that he thought should be free for all. He was willing to put himself at a great personal risk for the sake of making information free. So he would probably be critical of OpenAI for not being open enough, and would probably champion the cause for more and better open source models.
Her argument wasn't that you should be able to go from level 8 to 10 in two years.
Her argument was that she should have come in at level 9.
The Bloomberg article clarified it like this:
"She came into the job with 23 years of experience in the financial services and technology field but was hired as a level eight employee while other men who were hired at the same time as her, and allegedly had less experience, were hired at level nine. As a level eight employee, Rowe made about $750,000 a year while some of the level nine employees made over $1 million a year."
As some others have mentioned in this thread, the most important problems are often not the most interesting.
For example, Code for America has several "civic tech" projects where volunteer software engineers can make apps to make it easier for recipients of government benefits to navigate the system. These kinds of "civic tech" apps make government more efficient. They have a direct and measurable positive impact on poverty and inequality.
But these projects are not particularly interesting from a technological perspective. They are not rocket science. They are just web apps. A lot of the time, solving important problems is not particularly complicated or difficult. You just have to care. In other words, you have to be able to prioritize your values over your ego. Will you be able to put on your resume that you learned a fancy new technology? Probably not. But will you be able to say that you had a positive impact? Probably yes.
If you are a software engineer looking to make a positive impact, you should search for terms like "civic tech" or "humane tech" to find projects that are driven by humane values, not profits. Or you should reach out to a nonprofit organization and ask if they need help with their website. They could often use help with making it easier to get donations, communicate their message, contact a politician, or do other stuff related to their website.
The other thing to remember is that solving the most important problems is not just thankless, most of the time. It also doesn't pay well, because it often involves serving people and communities who don't have the ability to pay much. But if you are one of those patient people who prioritizes your values over your ego and your finances, I respect you, and even though I don't know your name, you are my favorite kind of person.
I think the world would be a beautiful place if the most important problems were also the most financially lucrative to solve. But we don't live in that world. We can't expect the financial incentives to line up with what's important. If you serve a nonprofit that aims to make the world a better place, you probably can't do it for the money. It has to be because you care.
The tone of this thread is so unrelatable to me. I feel like the total opposite of the sentiment in this thread. I want to work in a place that pushes me to do better and fulfill my potential. I know that's hard, because true learning is almost always uncomfortable and feels like work. But in most jobs throughout my career, my experience is of feeling stifled and asphyxiated. In practice, many times when I've tried to "grow" in my role, the reaction from my colleagues was negative and I got the sense that I didn't belong there, that I was stepping on people's toes, that overworked people felt insulted or threatened rather than relieved by my offer to take on tiny pieces of their responsibilities. Things have gotten better now that I'm in my 30s and better at standing up for myself, but I'm still in an uphill battle just to be included in conversations. As someone who is passionate about technology, I want to answer questions like, "What's the hardest thing I can do?" or "What's the most awesome thing I can make?" or "What's the biggest positive impact that I can have?" And then I feel jealous when I read this thread because I wish I had a tenth as much support as some of these people have. I wish I had a manager who wanted me to grow too much!
Google offered several times to work with Apple to get full compatibility with their messages. Apple refused every time. This is Apple's deliberate choice.
You sound like you work at a larger company. I've worked at large companies and it's amazing how many resources large companies can waste, and how easy it is for people in those companies to hide that waste.
It drives me crazy when I see a lot of waste - whether it's time, money, or just human potential when people want to achieve more but they don't have the right opportunity because others dismiss them as not having potential. I became much happier when I moved to a small company that was run much more efficiently and very little was wasted, and if people are in a position where they don't feel good about what they are doing, there are sufficient opportunities for them to do something different.