Yup I live in America, and the black eye and tear gas I got from the cops last summer during the protests told me all I needed to know about the state violence that occurs in the US. Not to mention the “cops” showing up in unmarked vans and snatching people off the street, or secret prisons, or the cellular surveillance planes, or the vigilante “patrols” that continue to this day and are encouraged by the police captains.
The police state is here, and if you own guns they’ll just storm your house with a swat team, shoot your dog, and charge you for assaulting an officer.
America is also a fucked up place where people walk around in fear of the police and the paramilitary forces (sorry, “patriots”) that occupy most of the US outside the major cities. You never know when one of them is going to pop into a synagogue or a grocery store with an AR-15.
This country is dystopian af too; the American dream died with 9/11. We’re just another empire that’s rotting from the core.
It sounds like you have a pretty good idea of who you are and what you want, so I doubt you would have a problem finding meaning in your life even if you hated your job. You're probably not destined for a mid-life crisis like this, and it's not universal by any means.
But there are a lot of folks like OP who were focused hard on getting a job at Google and making boatloads of money and never took the time to figure out what they wanted in life besides a high paying job. For people in that position, I would say keep the unfulfilling job, let it be unfulfilling until you know what drives you, and figure out what you want in life. Then you'll be in a position to decide whether to seek meaning at work or not. I personally chose to find it outside of work, which has made the career bumps a lot easier to handle because my identity isn't wrapped up in my job.
Likewise for Lyft and Uber; they just haven't fully collapsed yet -- but give them another 2 years. There will be a smoking pit in the short-range transit market because it costs at least twice what riders pay today just to keep the drivers making the same amount when the VC subsidies go away, and nobody is willing to pay that. You're already starting to see the subsidies dry up with food delivery services where there's an additional $15-20 in fees.
The next recession is going to be a bloodbath for a lot of low-income people when the demand for the gig economy dries up.
I wouldn't say it's a red flag to have Google on your resume, but I will say that I do make a point of understanding what exactly an applicant did during their time at Google. Like any company, there are good teams and bad teams -- but at Google, it's possible to contribute nothing and still not get fired due to the way they're structured internally.
I mean this in the nicest way possible (I envy your optimism!), but I'm curious how long you've been working as the last 12 years have been an exceptionally good period in tech. My career started in the middle of the dot-com era in the late 90s, so I've been through a few cycles where finding engineering work was hard and people who had crappy jobs were grateful for the income. Those experiences dulled my optimism about the meaningfulness work -- I spent a year in the early 2000s eating ramen and freelancing websites in PHP because I couldn't find a "real" job after the startup I worked for that was going to save the world went bust. Maybe I'm just a cynical old lady at this point, but I do feel emotionally well-prepared for whatever happens next.
I think you absolutely can find meaning at work, but it cannot replace the meaning you find outside of work. You can tolerate doing a meaningless job if you have other things in your life to sustain you, but you can't guarantee your work will always be meaningful. Finding meaning outside work is resiliency.
If you want to do this, and you can consistently find interesting work, then go for it! What I mean by "these jobs aren't hard" is that one person is easy to replace, and you are not guaranteed a job in the future just because you have one now. There are always high periods and low periods in a person's career, and you have to mentally / emotionally prepare for those.
Tech has a nasty age bias once you hit 40, and I've seen people fall apart when they get laid off and finding a new job is hard for reasons that aren't exactly fair. Finding meaning in your life outside your job is how you keep sane when economic circumstances aren't working in your favor.
When your company is a monopoly that has a printing press for money, the normal competitive pressures don't apply. There's no need to aggressively cut head count because employee salaries are such a small percentage of their expenses relative to other companies of similar size.
Google is like an ivy league school: the hard part is getting in.
I have; I was a software engineer for over a decade before I moved up through architecture and laterally into product. Those problems are tedious. Not difficult.
Very few people have that luxury. The career path for your average software dev in Silicon Valley does not have a lot of interesting work involved -- it's a bunch of middleware stuff like parsing data, CRUD operations and updating documentation. It's the 21st century version of being an auto mechanic -- super interesting at first, but there's a definite ceiling on the knowledge.
There is only so much interesting work to go around, and you're usually not going to be doing it. You can seek fulfillment at work, but you also have to be prepared not to find it. Seeking fulfillment elsewhere is the secret to not burning out.
Software engineering just isn't that hard. Tedious yes, but not remotely difficult. We've been fed the narrative of economic success that many folks have forgotten what personal success looks like. You can be successful in your career and still feel like a failure.
Therapy is the answer here. You have to un-brainwash yourself from the notion that your job is your life and figure out what really matters to you. Then focus on that, and use your job to fill the boring hours in between.
I agree that you need to push yourself and discover who you are -- but the answers to those questions aren't going to be found at work. This sort of mid-life crisis is pretty common for career-focused people in their late 20s - early 30s and the solution is to find interests and friendships outside of work.
The police state is here, and if you own guns they’ll just storm your house with a swat team, shoot your dog, and charge you for assaulting an officer.