[Freedom5093]

> The whole concept is pretty stupid, rooted in a silly assumption; that a grand, noble mission is essential to motivate employees.

I am motivated by an important mission, in fact, but I am more motivated by having ongoing impact on that mission (making a difference). I work in defence, so you'd think there's a lot of opportunity to keep people safe, help leaders make better decisions, etc. So far from my perspective, these companies are not very motivated or successful at solving the missions they boldly claim. As a result, I am motivated to leave these places, that lie or are incompetent at solving these missions.

For example, a defence company says they want to "serve our democracies", but they hardly have any users. Another defence company has been building product for 4 years, yet has 0 users over that time. Then there are other, defence companies with unicorn valuation with also very cool marketing, but very little impact in ongoing crisis. All the mentioned companies have very good publicity, it's not until you work for them you realise they have 0 impact. There is no reason to change their ways, because they can continue to sign more contracts with gov (tens of millions, hundreds of millions).

All you see publicly is cool tens/hundreds of million investment or contracts, cool movie like drone shots, "AI", cool drones, explosions, jets and good music. You don't get to see the 0 impact. Or worryingly, negative impact when these things don't work.

I've been working in defence-tech startups for more than 2 years.

[andrepd]

Pardon me if I misunderstand, but this seems to hed exactly what TFA is talking about: the need to believe you're doing a grand mission to make the world a better place when in fact you're just getting rich off selling death drones to the highest bidder...

[quickthrower2]

Can you really have a noble mission as a defence company or are you effectively a soldier of sorts, paid to execute the aims of the governments you sell to. You are as moral or possible immoral, as those bosses and same for effectiveness. If your customer does something ineffective with your plane or whatever then it ain’t your mission. Your mission is really to provide great equipment to soldiers. Not to protect America. See the sister ship building comment. It is more like that than protecting democracy.

[Freedom5093]

Yes we have to make users happy. But my mission is to build stuff so that bad stuff doesn't happen: Russia doesn't invade Ukraine or China doesn't invade Taiwan.

It depends on the use case. Some of these startups and unicorns ship (and aim to ship) stuff to Ukraine. That's one conflict most people in the west can align with. Imagine building drones or software for Ukraine. Other use cases involve purely intelligence or decision making.

Sure they're building stuff for Ukraine soldiers, but the underlying mission is freedom for Ukraine.

There are other conflicts (building drones, missiles, tools used in Gaza/Middle East) that are a lot more complex.

Or building drones for police pursuits or for searching buildings (like the IDF).