This is almost certainly the wrong place to ask this question, unfortunately. The HN demographic is spectacularly disinterested in the well-being of humanity. Try /r/socialistprogrammers or /r/anarcho_hackers on Reddit.
It's crudely phrased, but the quantity of posts which show up in opposition to anything that helps society at large at the cost of profits is remarkably high, and getting higher as time goes on.
I'd say that HN seems extremely interested in the wellbeing of humanity. That's all anyone talks about. The disagreements are over what methodology is most likely to reach that ends.
My guess is that parent sees comments that recommend a different means to the same end we all generally believe in, and views those as disregard for humans.
>"making the world a better place by selling $service" is usually hypocrisy rather than a matter of methodology.
You can't be binary about this.
In many situations, selling a service has made the world (or at least a city/country) a better place.
Private cell phone service in many developing countries, for example. I know countries where, before they came in, people would have to wait years to get a landline (some in excess of 10 years). Private companies swooped in and gave people access (at least those who could afford it). Imagine how limited your life would be if you didn't have any phone (and that includes no Internet).
Sometimes giving to charity is better. At other times, it's non-sustaining and you need some kind of profit model. Both can benefit society.
Indeed. Go read the comments on the "My Family's Slave" article from a few days ago. A large proportion of them were supportive of slavery, or at least identified strongly with the slavers rather than their victim. Furthermore, the admins apparently disabled downvoting of comments, and detached strongly anti-slavery subthreads.
HN and the HN demographic are strongly interested in preserving/advancing a particular social order; one that is largely detrimental to most of humanity.
> Furthermore, the admins apparently disabled downvoting of comments, and detached strongly anti-slavery subthreads.
I checked that thread, and the detached subthreads appear to be either tangential or uncivil. I see little evidence of the pro-slavery agenda you allude to.
> Go read the comments on the "My Family's Slave" article from a few days ago. A large proportion of them were supportive of slavery, or at least identified strongly with the slavers rather than their victim. Furthermore, the admins apparently disabled downvoting of comments, and detached strongly anti-slavery subthreads.
Both of these are outright lies. You can dress them however you want if you dare to reply but these are lies.
And why bother? It's not as if everyone can go check the discussion and see that these are lies. Weird.
You can see it in the many comments claiming that working at an ordinary day job or donating your income to charity is akin to the social good asked for by OP. It's a failure of imagination to assume that you can do more good for the world as programmer #9001 at Facebook who donates some of his income to effective altruism than as a programmer who adds all of her value to some other cause. A good programmer making 100k contributes far more than 100k value to the company she works at, so why not find a charity to which she can contribute similarly?
> You can see it in the many comments claiming that working at an ordinary day job or donating your income to charity is akin to the social good asked for by OP.
If OP doesn't see donating to charity as interest in the well-being of society then let's just admit that the parent isn't so much concerned about whether or not HN is interested in the well-being of society so much as if HN wants to contribute to the well-being of society in the same way the parent would. Thus, parent really should say, "HN doesnt seem to agree with my particular persuasion as to how one creates well-being in society."
Donating to charity is, almost by definition, interest in the wellbeing of society.
Also, if you're going to be paid $100k at Facebook that means the value you provide is >= $100k to Facebook. It does not mean that your work is objectively worth $100k anywhere you could go. There's some correlation, of course, but I think given the context it's an important distinction to make.
As an aside, it's entirely possible for me to imagine a scenario in which the most beneficial thing one could do for society is utilize the scale and reach of Facebook. I doubt that the vast majority of the work at Facebook is that specifically, but it's certainly possible to imagine.
The cost of the donation always exceeds the tax benefit.
People do things like setup foundations and then appoint people to work for them, but that still doesn't allow the money to be kept without paying taxes on it (the foundation has to engage in bona fide charitable activities to maintain tax status).
It's a failure of imagination to assume that you can do more good for the world as programmer #9001 at Facebook who donates some of his income to effective altruism than as a programmer who adds all of her value to some other cause.
It's obviously a failure of imagination to believe this is not possible either. I'm not saying it is the clearly or always the best outcome, but it's clearly possible.
Consider law, for example. To use round numbers, biglaw mid-career in NYC could target $500k/yr, and plenty of lawyers are working for non-profits at $50k/yr. So one could choose to take the $500k/yr, plus donate enough to a non-profit to hire two people full time. Now you have 2x your "more than x value".
The numbers in tech are actually not much different, for certain skill sets. It's also important to remember that skill sets are not fungible this way. I could be really good at something HFT or OR companies really want, but only middling at what a non-profit needs. This affords a sort of arbitrage opportunity.
Another option - chase a high paying career for 10-15 years, retire with a modest but secure income, move to a cheaper location and volunteer the remainder of your working life to charities.
I just took a quick look at these communities: how exactly are /r/socialistprogramm and /r/anarcho_hackers furthering the well being of humanity? For what i see its all about fringe politics (meaning that they keep themselves busy)
Sure, but would be cool to know where to find some particular areas or projects to help.
This is the core problem here: I could personally name a ton of industries and endeavors that could use software to be better - but finding a particular need and someone willing to work with you on fulfilling that need? That feels incredibly hard.
We do that everyday. Maybe indirectly, but we're making a lot of things way more efficient. Information is a huge part of our nature, since the first days, and we're the main collaborators to simplify the access to information.
Said that, you can also think "smaller". Teach someone how to code, and it might be a complete life changer. I run a coding school and we offer free sits for people who need it, and we're greatly satisfied. We've seen students working for McDonald's, for 10 hours per day making just minimum wage, move to a software company with a $+90K salary and changing their lives completely.
Share what you know, try to fix the problems that humanity faces. Don't try to do everything just by yourself. But your "tiny" collaboration ads up.
Machine learning is pretty popular right now. With obvious applications in things like biology, you can go into things like gene research (see CRISPR) or AI. Could even go embedded and do medical security things to prevent the next WannaCry.
A recruiter shot a job across my email a few months back about using technology to get people more active in government. Depending on how you feel about government, that could be taken to any number of applications, with some company filling the niche along the way.
I work in education, myself, and I find that pretty rewarding. Being able to use technology to help teachers do something even a little bit easier is a good feeling.
Even though these scenarios are very different, they all help advance individuals and the species in their own micro and macro ways. Tech is useful everywhere, so decide who you want to help, and find companies that exist to help those people and go from there. And if you don't find a company there, then maybe you have your YC interview already cooking.
Local exchange systems.
Mentoring and apprenticeship forums and exchanges.
Grants and sponsorship databases.
Digital permaculture, hydroponics, aquaculture, aeroponics & DIY encyclopedia.
Tools to fight against misleading and inaccurate information and to clarify and annotate ambiguous laws that don't benefit the population.
Better corruption and dark financing graphs about people in power.
I think it makes the point that there are some cases where the cost of negatively impacting society is not worth the benefit of making more money to give to charity.
Did the "taxi mafia" encourage a class of laborers who sleep in their cars for less than a minimum wage while depriving them of any kind of protections normally associated with employment?
There is an early NYT article (early in the context of Uber's lifespan) detailing a day when a cab driver in NYC ended up paying his employer a few hundred dollars for the privilege of working that day. This was after all his fares for the shift.
> But what if drivers don’t make enough to cover their rental charges? The company has clearly considered this possibility, as it’s included in a program FAQ. “No problem,” Uber says. “When you pick up your vehicle, Enterprise will take your valid credit or debit card to place on file. In the event of a difference, Enterprise will automatically charge the outstanding balance to the card on file.” See? No problem.
I believe that over time your environment shapes you. I agree that you should devote your working hours to something more than shareholder value or increased clickthrough rates. Sure you can pull down the big bucks working on the next version of biological warfare weaponry and make large donations to Red Cross or whatever, but not without a personal toll.
Advertising is about creating artificial problems and needs, making the world a shittier place for profit. Maybe pulling your head out of your ass would help?
If you're on HN you're probably also conscious of your philanthropy being used for the maximal good, in which case you may be interested in projects like https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
Yes. Any high paid job actually. Point being don't do this solely because you "want to make a difference".... making a lot of money at a different job and giving to causes you care about is a legitimate way to make a difference.
People are going to shit on the parent comment - but honestly, anyone with more than a few years of experience in a tight tech job market is going to easily be in the top decile of earners. The highly-committed individuals that do the brutally hard work on the ground for non-profits or NGOs make a pittance in comparison. Committing a quarter of your salary would pay the entirety of theirs. Consider that for a moment.
Agreed. Money can't buy everything, including experience and awareness gleaned from personally facing the problems such NGOs target. The knowledge accrued could demonstrate value later.
True, but you need to consider what you care about more - to have the problem solved, or to solve it yourself? Or to put it differently - do you care about increasing utility, or your own fuzzy feelings?
I'll admit that I didn't read the link that you shared. However, I'd like to assert that I feel fuzzies yield utilons to the individual in a similar manner as utilons yield fuzzies, each requiring refinement in their acquisition to be optimal. I think it's a more-grey area than your comment or the title of the article you linked implies (having not read said article).
Please read it, it's not long. In the article, utilons refer to the utility your help brings, and fuzzies to the feelings they generate in you (which indeed you can see as utility for you, but you could also count it separately).
The point of the article is that if you optimize for utilons, fuzzies and status points separately - e.g. by doing one thing for maximum utility, and then another for maximum fuzzies - you'll be more efficient in all of them than if you try to find one thing that maximizes all three at the same time.
To quote 'Eliezer, this is how adults solve problems. Professional specialization has huge leverage. If you can find a way to use your professional skills to help society, go ahead and do it. If you can't, it's more effective use of your time to leverage your professional skills into money, and then use that money to fund professionals helping society directly.
But it's pretty hard to solve a problem without money. There are a lot of people out there already trying to solve problems. But not enough giving them the money they need to do so.
I guess I have the advantage of starting out with close to a decade of low wages doing something that I enjoy ;)... I'm definitely attracted to billboard tech wages -- but I really could get by pretty comfortably with half were I building something I had faith in.
That's great but you have to consider the social cost of the day job, which the parent comment assumes to be neutral even though in practice this may not be the case. I think the OP's real question is how to pick ethically efficient employment, not how to make money in order to be more charitable.
I went through a similar period of soul-searching as the OP (or so I would imagine) back in November, and this is the conclusion I ultimately came to.
Even if you're willing to take e.g. a 50% paycut to write code at a nonprofit, you're likely doing more good taking the obscenely high-paying industry job and donating that half of your salary, as unsexy as that is.
Which isn't to say there aren't meaningful social problems that technology can solve, but rather that the cost/reward curve is often suboptimal if you're optimizing for impact.
Hmm, depends on the non-profit, but in tech-forward non-profits we are often only about 20% below market for most positions: https://www.ctosforgood.org/
Not by design, but by circumstance yes. I'm sure we'd be open to folks joining from other nations though as long as they could travel to our once-a-year in-person meetup.
This is going to sound pessimistic at first but hear me out: Unless you're extremely gifted in many ways and super resourceful, you're not likely to make any noticeable impact on the species.
However, you can still make a big difference for groups much smaller than the whole species (and I think that's actually preferable from a human point of view because it's more tangible). The world is full of problems that could easily be solved by good software. This is especially true in industries that are usually not very technological by themselves.
Depending on your current network you might have gotten to know an industry or two that is not strictly technological. If not, ask your friends who do not program software all day and ask them what problems they have at work that they find annoying and try to come up with a software solution for that.
Once you do that, convince their bosses that it saves them more money to pay for your software than to do things the old way.
I wouldn't be so pesimistic. We started an organisation that builds open source cloud data systems used among other things to track drinking water infrastructure and sustainable food production in Africa and Asia. We started from scratch and we now work with 20+ governments, 200+ NGOs and several UN organisations. We are probably not extremely gifted, but more like middle of the road startup geeks. Still we make an impact.
I'd recommend http://dotimpact.im/, it's part of the Effective Altruist movement—people who want to do the most good with the time/money/resources they have.
Consider working for NGOs like ours - International Alert. In our case, we use software development to analyse data and build mobile apps. Android is particularly sought after skill in the (economically) developing world. Follow me on https://twitter.com/alanthomson to hear about job opportunities. (... when Twitter starts working again!)
Honestly, I think the most effective thing to do is find an organization doing social good, who is hiring programmers, and go work for them. There are plenty of non-profits and governments that do a ton of good, and employ developers to work on their web sites and infrastructures. A good friend of mine is a developer for the ACLU, for example.
There are also organizations like Code for America that do open source work with local governments. Since those projects are open source, you could probably volunteer your time and contribute to those. Or simply volunteer in a non-developer capacity! :)
Doing actual social good -- helping people in ways that will actually solve their problems, understanding the consequences of changing their lives -- requires a ton of context and communication. I think it's very, very difficult to do so without either dedicating most of your time to that cause, or working closely with an organization that is already doing so. (E.g., volunteering for a food bank is a lot more effective than just picking up food and distributing it on your own.)
Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America, has been making the rounds lately.
Good conversations on both the Econtalk podcast [0] (which I know is an HN favorite) and the Long Now Foundation [1].
Procurement sounds absolutely awful at the federal level; she makes a compelling case for how needed modern software design and development processes are in providing effective and cost efficient government services.
Through the Code For Atlanta group I was able start a project with MARTA to make some things better about paratransit customers' access to up to date ETA info for their rides, which is currently a pain point for many customers. The code for America idea is awesome and stuff really does happen!
MARTA seems like they could use some hardware donations - for years the "next train" screens were broken and the announcement speakers on the station platforms were totally unintelligible. Maybe a better use of time would be starting a guerrilla group that fixes their stuff without asking?
I agree with this comment. A friend of mine is a programmer taking a year off of work to volunteer for a refugee aid organization to analyze and improve their databases. It's important work, not necessarily sexy, but helps these organizations do their work. In the end he's likely to emerge a better programmer along with a body of domain knowledge.
It helps to actually be passionate about the field.
This. There are many incredible organizations doing great work in the code for good space, and not solely in the non-profit or government sectors.
I’ll second the reference to Code for America. I have a colleague who did their fellowship and learned a ton while working with some great local governmental agencies. They’ve also recently launched a job board to curate high impact mission-driven jobs and jobs with local government entities: https://jobs.codeforamerica.org/.
I’d also encourage looking at B-Corps: https://www.bcorporation.net/. These are for-profit companies that include positive social impact alongside profit as determinants of success. I work at TechChange, which is a B-Corp. If education and capacity development are your passions, we at TechChange are building a SaaS learning platform that empowers organizations around the world to make their training more effective. We are working hard to push the limits of traditional online learning and are looking for talented folks to help us achieve this goal: https://www.techchange.org/careers/.
Hi! I lead engineering on Code for America's work building services improving the social safety net, so happy to answer any questions. I'd also mention that we're hiring directly for teams at CfA building large-scale services serving the most vulnerable Americans.
My team works on radically improving access to the food stamp program, a massive anti-poverty program, but one with only about 65% of eligible Californians enrolled — we've found a lot of that gap is because the process is really difficult.
If you apply in California, this is the online experience — 200+ questions, 50+ screens, a lot of confusion: http://citizenonboard.com/snap/ca/#2
So we operate a much easier online application which is mobile-first (~50% of search traffic for "food stamps") and which takes on average 8 minutes to complete — you can try it out at https://demo.getcalfresh.org/
We also have a superb team working on safety and justice, namely with the goal of safely reducing incarceration. For example. They operate services that:
- Make it much easier for people to clear their records when the law allows (invaluable for re-entry and getting jobs)
- Allow case & probation workers to text with folks in the justice system and help them do the pre-trial diversion things that keep them out of jail/prison and help them with resources
Are all of these jobs at the same location SF? The jobs page (https://www.codeforamerica.org/jobs) lists locations "Headquarters", "San Francisco, CA, United States", and "San Francisco Headquarters" as if they might be different places.
Do you get any push back on this from the state/gov? Cynically; I can see this process being intentionally obscure and difficult to dissuade people from applying and receiving aid.
Great question! Overall I'd say our gov't partners are incredibly supportive.
A lot of why these processes are hard are not by intentional design, but rather by _unintentional, non-design_.
What do I mean? It's that these systems evolve over time, via massive waterfall IT procurement processes, and you often have someone (say, one county, or one unit) who proposes to add one more question because it makes it better for their unit or a subset of users.
Iterated over years and years — and with no systemic actor responsible for pushing back and saying, "but this creates more burden for the majority of users" — you get overwhelming user experiences. Sometimes I've jokingly called this the "no feature left behind" approach.
What we do is basically design & build a service that puts users at the center, and when someone wants us to add something ask ourselves, "will this help people quickly and easily get through the benefit enrollment process?"
It's essentially applying "products are about saying no," just to a domain where there's currently no one there to say no.
Actually, to follow up -- you mention simplifying the process to be easier on the user. Are myriad of questions one must laboriously answer to enroll in EBT programs a matter of... legislation? taxes? I would imagine that the questions have to do with honing in on a complex placement within the law which determines benefit levels. How do you go about simplifying a process which requires a large number of distinct data points by law or by census design?
That's a fantastic question. There's a few strategies we've used to build a service design that deals with those things:
1. After the initial application, the next step is a phone interview where they're going to ask many of the same questions and verify information anyway. So what we do is focus on the 10-15 questions that make getting someone to that interview as quick and efficient on the gov't side as possible, as well as prepares the interviewer with the best information.
For example, there are complex rules around income and expenses (earned/unearned, self-employed, utilities, child care expenses) but we basically have found that the best situation is — since they'll be talking with someone who knows those rules extremely well — focus on the basics: who's in your household, do you qualify for expedited (emergency) service, etc.
2. Many of those ~200 questions really CONDITIONAL on some (eg, do you have a felony? do you have a felony for DRUGS?) —— but candidly many online gov't forms are just the digitization of paper forms (which obviously can't do conditional showing easily.)
3. We've found that there's a ton of low-hanging fruit. For example, we have an easy way for clients to take pictures of documents they need to submit from their phone (these days, these are often SUPER high quality, even on low-end devices.) We send those to counties via secure e-mail, which means it comes instantly. This has been so successful in one county that they're now using this document feature across ALL programs (health insurance, cash aid) and actually asking clients to send in documents WHILE they're on the phone with them, meaning they can hold for a second, check the email, see the pic, and issue the benefits immediately (rather than waiting for them to mail/fax/scan and upload after creating an account.)
Overall, we've found that despite that "intrinsic complexity," there's still a huge space for simplification just using what computers — and web sites — are good at.
Work with mission-driven businesses. B Corps[0] are a good place to start. There's nothing quite like coming to work every day with a group of like-minded folks who want to make a dent in the universe.
My company, www.grove.co, strives to help families making it easy to buy sustainable products vs. conventional CPG. It seemed a bit crazy when we started, but now literally thousands of families get sustainable products from us every single day. It's hard to make a big impact on your own, but organizations and companies can do great things.
Warning - strong opinions ahead: Provide services and tools without the strings attached.
That is to say, provide email services that don't mine data for profit. Provide a social interaction space that doesn't attempt to manipulate moods, opinions, or sell its user's eyeballs. Provide an aggregation service with strong filtering tools in place of strong moderation. Provide a code repository with great tooling that doesn't include value judgements. Provide anonymous, secure communication between parties. Make mobile applications that provide wanted services without the in-app purchases, ads, or profiling.
The downside is that you're unlikely to get paid for it. You'll probably even lose money on it. In some cases, you'll even face legal pressure to stop or change.
I doubt anyone has ever written anything on the topic. Keep in mind that non-profit is not the same thing as non-revenue. Also, replicating facebook isn't necessarily what I'm talking about, but instead seeing whatever sorts of applications would be developed in the presence of altered incentives.
In some way it is. One can't deny that social networking has pretty huge positive impact on communication and creative output. It would be better if it didn't come with surveillance capitalism in the same package.
Why not? If we're being realistic and ideal simultaneously, one recognizes the immense social impact and shift driven by Facebook, as a social media platform as well as a lexus of modern web programming, at the same time as one recognizes that the user is the product to be sold and could imagine the potential negatives of that paradigm. So why not?
It would be an improvement, but probably not enough to convince many people to switch to it. The network effect gives Facebook too much of an advantage.
My idea was that Google+ should have run ads from the beginning, but donated all profits to some large but approachable goal like eliminating polio. This could have undermined Facebook's drive to create an alternative advertising ecosystem, while giving G+ some hook to encourage people to switch.
The idea you can _do anything_ to _help_. Is mostly a myth people repeat so they don't constantly feel like shit for doing nothing in the face of mass social injustice by which they are (partially) the benefactors.
If you want social change, you need social action. Anything short is just rationalizing your guilt.
I'm sort of intrigued at your belief in the existence of "social action" that somehow manifests without any individual doing "anything" to "help". As if it is some sort of ontological force that exists independent of the individuals participating in it?
I incorrectly worded my post. And placed too much focus on the individual, when I was as attempting to stress the individual AS A software developer.
But nonetheless I do agree with the final output.
An individual is largely incapable of doing anything ALONE. Only thought organized and mass action are things accomplished on societal scale.
Change requires work... this is physics. A large change requires a lot of work. If your force is too small (an individual). You may never over come friction.
I tend to agree with you, but somehow seeing someone else say what I feel made me realize that this is the wrong way to think about the issue. Individuals can do exactly what they can do, and it isn't nothing.
The flaw in this way of thinking is hidden in your assumption about what counts as "doing something." You talk as if the only thing that counts as doing something is what you call "change", which means "changing the way that other people (people with more resources than you) act". It's true that engaging in political action to change the way that other people act is an effective and important part of doing good. The government and large corporations control most of the "surplus" resources in the world and it's foolish to pretend otherwise.
But to approach the problem of "doing good" with the mindset of "the only thing that I can do is to ask other people to make the world a better place" is selling yourself short and in my opinion an anti-democratic way of thinking.
Individuals can do exactly what they can do. You can volunteer at a school, you can start a community garden, you can help just one person in your life who needs it. This counts as doing good, and without the kind of community that forms from lots of people spending their time with others, you have to ask yourself why you should care about the political action at all. Far too much political action today is done out of self-righteousness or anger, rather than out of love. If you've forgotten how to love a stranger in your private life, you may have forgotten how to do it in your public (political) life too.
Organizations are made of people. People in organizations do things, and the sum of those things create change. Some of those things need technology, or could be done much better if technology was applied to them. OP is looking for such people and organizations in which he could help by doing the things that require or benefit from technology.
2) Using Census 2011 Data I've created a healthy cities and towns league index as well as spatial analysis on commuter behaviour. (6M people drive to work, of which 3.5M live within a 20 minute cycle ride) https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4YARJgso6IxRjd1ZlNDZklGaX...
3) Worked with Bath Hacked and Strava to deliver a year of cycling in the city of Bath strava.bathhacked.org
4) Get involved in your local tech4good meetup.
Do not start from a "hey where can I use my skills for good?". Start with "I am passionate about X, what can I do to help X in anyway?"
I'd like to get involved in this kind of thing in Melbourne, Aus. I'm already a campaigner, but hadn't thought of contributing in a technological sense! I think I'll get in contact with the others I know and offer to help out!
As individuals, we benefit from being in control of our computers. To maintain that control, good security is essential. So I'd say work on that, specifically on sandboxing and limiting the damage untrusted or compromised programs can do, re-writing crucial programs in languages immune to as many exploitable bugs as possible, maybe even try formal verification (for small but essential code, like OS kernels or filesystems), if you're feeling ambitious.
Find a local nonprofit or other organization you like and ask them what tech help they need. Many small nonprofits are starving for IT resources, either for financial or cultural reasons.
It's not glamorous, but if you're willing to volunteer your time helping with an org's Wordpress site or making sure everyone is educated about phishing and 2FA, you can make a meaningful impact in your community.
IDK about helping the species but maybe contribute to open source software in one of the following?:
Disaster Management Software
EMS Software
Assistance software for the blind,deaf,etc.
Of course, not everything becomes magically better from software's involvement. There might be some good opportunities in robotics, robotic medical care and elderly care especially come to mind.
I would love to have the opportunity to explore the concept of hyperlocal. Using the web to help bring local communities closer together. Never really had the opportunity yet.
I myself, work mainly on projects related to museums, culture, green economy... In the projects I accept I try to find a balance between money I can get and how I view it as work for the greater good. A very hard balance and a very subjective one.
Also have some friends that are a lot into open data which is also an interesting area to explore.
Do you have any recommendations for exploring what you call hyper-local work? I currently cook food for a living but even that, with it's immediate (feedback lol) to the local community, is a service that comes as a premium to people who don't need help. Where do you look for projects that fit your worldview as a programmer? Are there any groups of people based in Seattle that you'd recommend getting in touch with?
OP here, actually floored by the rapidity and variety of responses. Thanks HN.
I'll take this opportunity to float an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a long time.
The premise is to:
1) (this is almost certainly the easy part) build out a platform that is like a two-way khan academy - teacher and student, with at least the teacher having a tablet and a stylus that function well, sharing a digital blackboard, with a video chat optional -- where a student of something in a relatively privileged situation teaches a student of the same thing in a relatively less privileged situation -- where the sessions are stored and rewindable, both video and blackboard input.
2) the hard part; selling it as something to invest in and driving it to a point of having an endowment behind it, like Harvard's endowment, that allows the service to pay for moderation of student-teachers something like $12.00 USD an hour to teach, while subsidizing well-chosen students to have to pay something like $2 an hour to learn
it's been an idea for a passion project for a while
You may want to explore this with the folks at freecodecamp. I feel it aligns a lot with what they are doing. I wanted to suggest you to check their initiative to build apps for NGOs as part of the process of graduating from FCC (maybe bypass the learning part and directly contribute?) but this may be even better.
You need to develop this for a market that will pay you for it. Then you 'fork' your code for your favourite causes.
In the world of retail many companies have to train sales staff in third party dealerships, this can be with lots of site visits and with those staff doing some away day thing. The reason for this sales training is so products can be demonstrated and those sales converted by knowledgeable staff.
So you find your market in this type of a business and solve the challenges. There will be plenty in keeping company staff trained and on-board, with a long-term relationship with them selling stuff they get training updates about. You tailor your solution to different verticals and when you have a base product that can be tailored to your customers you then do your project version as that 'base product'.
So maybe do this the hard way, put in some time being that person that does company training materials, build out whatever is needed for doing that much, much better, pioneer it with the company that you work for, and on their clock, put in a lot of work needed to build out the backend and support needed for your big idea, then leave to polish it off knowing you have a commercial version out there and proven to be good (hopefully!).
Whilst you are doing this you might also want to help or support those around you on a friendly basis rather than as part of an organisation. Just being a friend to an elderly neighbour, having time for them and being willing to help them get their teevee plugged in correctly is pretty good. You can also be there for others that have problems of the mind or of the body that you are glad you are not afflicted by. Through maintaining friendships and looking out for a few vulnerable souls from different walks of life to yourself you can learn immense things about the human condition. You can also change people's lives with money and learn the nuances of that. There are no tax deductions or medals for making charity something you do informally, the whole world is not going to care if you walk the old guy's dog for him every morning.
Volunteer for DataKind (http://www.datakind.org/), a charity that connects "data professionals" (in the broad sense of the term) to charities who have problems to solve and the data to solve them, but not the resources to do it!
They organise different types of projects: DataDives, which are hackathon-type events and focus on data exploration and analysis; and DataCorps, longer term projects (a few months), where a team of volunteers will team up on a more project for the client charity.
They are looking for volunteers for a wide range of roles, including data scientists, programmers with experience with ML, dataviz experts, project managers, etc.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadWait, what?
All anecdotal, of course.
My guess is that parent sees comments that recommend a different means to the same end we all generally believe in, and views those as disregard for humans.
Same goes for making a service cheaper at the expense of the workers and the list goes on...
You can't be binary about this.
In many situations, selling a service has made the world (or at least a city/country) a better place.
Private cell phone service in many developing countries, for example. I know countries where, before they came in, people would have to wait years to get a landline (some in excess of 10 years). Private companies swooped in and gave people access (at least those who could afford it). Imagine how limited your life would be if you didn't have any phone (and that includes no Internet).
Sometimes giving to charity is better. At other times, it's non-sustaining and you need some kind of profit model. Both can benefit society.
HN and the HN demographic are strongly interested in preserving/advancing a particular social order; one that is largely detrimental to most of humanity.
I checked that thread, and the detached subthreads appear to be either tangential or uncivil. I see little evidence of the pro-slavery agenda you allude to.
Both of these are outright lies. You can dress them however you want if you dare to reply but these are lies.
And why bother? It's not as if everyone can go check the discussion and see that these are lies. Weird.
If OP doesn't see donating to charity as interest in the well-being of society then let's just admit that the parent isn't so much concerned about whether or not HN is interested in the well-being of society so much as if HN wants to contribute to the well-being of society in the same way the parent would. Thus, parent really should say, "HN doesnt seem to agree with my particular persuasion as to how one creates well-being in society."
Donating to charity is, almost by definition, interest in the wellbeing of society.
Also, if you're going to be paid $100k at Facebook that means the value you provide is >= $100k to Facebook. It does not mean that your work is objectively worth $100k anywhere you could go. There's some correlation, of course, but I think given the context it's an important distinction to make.
As an aside, it's entirely possible for me to imagine a scenario in which the most beneficial thing one could do for society is utilize the scale and reach of Facebook. I doubt that the vast majority of the work at Facebook is that specifically, but it's certainly possible to imagine.
...or dodging taxes while getting good PR and also giving jobs to people in your own country (instead of elsewhere)?
The cost of the donation always exceeds the tax benefit.
People do things like setup foundations and then appoint people to work for them, but that still doesn't allow the money to be kept without paying taxes on it (the foundation has to engage in bona fide charitable activities to maintain tax status).
Consider law, for example. To use round numbers, biglaw mid-career in NYC could target $500k/yr, and plenty of lawyers are working for non-profits at $50k/yr. So one could choose to take the $500k/yr, plus donate enough to a non-profit to hire two people full time. Now you have 2x your "more than x value".
The numbers in tech are actually not much different, for certain skill sets. It's also important to remember that skill sets are not fungible this way. I could be really good at something HFT or OR companies really want, but only middling at what a non-profit needs. This affords a sort of arbitrage opportunity.
Another option - chase a high paying career for 10-15 years, retire with a modest but secure income, move to a cheaper location and volunteer the remainder of your working life to charities.
etc. etc. be imaginative.
This is the core problem here: I could personally name a ton of industries and endeavors that could use software to be better - but finding a particular need and someone willing to work with you on fulfilling that need? That feels incredibly hard.
Said that, you can also think "smaller". Teach someone how to code, and it might be a complete life changer. I run a coding school and we offer free sits for people who need it, and we're greatly satisfied. We've seen students working for McDonald's, for 10 hours per day making just minimum wage, move to a software company with a $+90K salary and changing their lives completely.
Share what you know, try to fix the problems that humanity faces. Don't try to do everything just by yourself. But your "tiny" collaboration ads up.
A recruiter shot a job across my email a few months back about using technology to get people more active in government. Depending on how you feel about government, that could be taken to any number of applications, with some company filling the niche along the way.
I work in education, myself, and I find that pretty rewarding. Being able to use technology to help teachers do something even a little bit easier is a good feeling.
Even though these scenarios are very different, they all help advance individuals and the species in their own micro and macro ways. Tech is useful everywhere, so decide who you want to help, and find companies that exist to help those people and go from there. And if you don't find a company there, then maybe you have your YC interview already cooking.
Don't know if it's still active, but the idea (and the founder) behind it was really about making the world a better place.
There are plenty of companies 10x worse than Uber. Hivemind.
Are you really unfamiliar with how medallion owners used to treat their drivers?
That said, how are we really in a better place? Same problem, different master.
https://qz.com/563622/ubers-new-car-rental-program-for-drive...
That's much better advice than I'd expect from a sociology professor, if I'm to be honest.
I always thought that was interesting.
Either of those goals are good, but they're better done separately. See also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_sepa....
The point of the article is that if you optimize for utilons, fuzzies and status points separately - e.g. by doing one thing for maximum utility, and then another for maximum fuzzies - you'll be more efficient in all of them than if you try to find one thing that maximizes all three at the same time.
Even if you're willing to take e.g. a 50% paycut to write code at a nonprofit, you're likely doing more good taking the obscenely high-paying industry job and donating that half of your salary, as unsexy as that is.
Which isn't to say there aren't meaningful social problems that technology can solve, but rather that the cost/reward curve is often suboptimal if you're optimizing for impact.
However, you can still make a big difference for groups much smaller than the whole species (and I think that's actually preferable from a human point of view because it's more tangible). The world is full of problems that could easily be solved by good software. This is especially true in industries that are usually not very technological by themselves.
Depending on your current network you might have gotten to know an industry or two that is not strictly technological. If not, ask your friends who do not program software all day and ask them what problems they have at work that they find annoying and try to come up with a software solution for that.
Once you do that, convince their bosses that it saves them more money to pay for your software than to do things the old way.
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/
• Free phone operating system: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/free-phone
• Decentralization, federation, and self-hosting: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/decentraliza...
• Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/hardware-fir...
• Real-time voice and video chat: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/voicevideoch...
• Encourage contribution by people underrepresented in the community: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/contribute
• Free software and accessibility: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/accessibilit...
• Internationalization of free software: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/internationa...
• Security by and for free software: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/security-by-...
• Intelligent personal assistant: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/personalassi...
• Help GNU/Linux distributions be committed to freedom: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/help-gnu-lin...
• Free software adoption by governments: http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/free-software...
There are also organizations like Code for America that do open source work with local governments. Since those projects are open source, you could probably volunteer your time and contribute to those. Or simply volunteer in a non-developer capacity! :)
Doing actual social good -- helping people in ways that will actually solve their problems, understanding the consequences of changing their lives -- requires a ton of context and communication. I think it's very, very difficult to do so without either dedicating most of your time to that cause, or working closely with an organization that is already doing so. (E.g., volunteering for a food bank is a lot more effective than just picking up food and distributing it on your own.)
Good conversations on both the Econtalk podcast [0] (which I know is an HN favorite) and the Long Now Foundation [1].
Procurement sounds absolutely awful at the federal level; she makes a compelling case for how needed modern software design and development processes are in providing effective and cost efficient government services.
[0]http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/05/jennifer_pahlka.htm... [1]http://longnow.org/seminars/02017/feb/01/fixing-government-b...
It helps to actually be passionate about the field.
I’ll second the reference to Code for America. I have a colleague who did their fellowship and learned a ton while working with some great local governmental agencies. They’ve also recently launched a job board to curate high impact mission-driven jobs and jobs with local government entities: https://jobs.codeforamerica.org/.
I’d also encourage looking at B-Corps: https://www.bcorporation.net/. These are for-profit companies that include positive social impact alongside profit as determinants of success. I work at TechChange, which is a B-Corp. If education and capacity development are your passions, we at TechChange are building a SaaS learning platform that empowers organizations around the world to make their training more effective. We are working hard to push the limits of traditional online learning and are looking for talented folks to help us achieve this goal: https://www.techchange.org/careers/.
My team works on radically improving access to the food stamp program, a massive anti-poverty program, but one with only about 65% of eligible Californians enrolled — we've found a lot of that gap is because the process is really difficult.
If you apply in California, this is the online experience — 200+ questions, 50+ screens, a lot of confusion: http://citizenonboard.com/snap/ca/#2
So we operate a much easier online application which is mobile-first (~50% of search traffic for "food stamps") and which takes on average 8 minutes to complete — you can try it out at https://demo.getcalfresh.org/
And we're hiring:
- Senior Engineer (Ruby/Rails, TDD, pairing): https://www.codeforamerica.org/jobs?gh_jid=502640
- Product Manager: https://www.codeforamerica.org/jobs?gh_jid=652829
We also have a superb team working on safety and justice, namely with the goal of safely reducing incarceration. For example. They operate services that:
- Make it much easier for people to clear their records when the law allows (invaluable for re-entry and getting jobs)
- Allow case & probation workers to text with folks in the justice system and help them do the pre-trial diversion things that keep them out of jail/prison and help them with resources
They're also hiring for a Senior Engineer role: https://www.codeforamerica.org/jobs?gh_jid=525208
Happy to answer any questions about these!
Yes — San Francisco (SOMA) is the location for all of those.
A lot of why these processes are hard are not by intentional design, but rather by _unintentional, non-design_.
What do I mean? It's that these systems evolve over time, via massive waterfall IT procurement processes, and you often have someone (say, one county, or one unit) who proposes to add one more question because it makes it better for their unit or a subset of users.
Iterated over years and years — and with no systemic actor responsible for pushing back and saying, "but this creates more burden for the majority of users" — you get overwhelming user experiences. Sometimes I've jokingly called this the "no feature left behind" approach.
What we do is basically design & build a service that puts users at the center, and when someone wants us to add something ask ourselves, "will this help people quickly and easily get through the benefit enrollment process?"
It's essentially applying "products are about saying no," just to a domain where there's currently no one there to say no.
1. After the initial application, the next step is a phone interview where they're going to ask many of the same questions and verify information anyway. So what we do is focus on the 10-15 questions that make getting someone to that interview as quick and efficient on the gov't side as possible, as well as prepares the interviewer with the best information.
For example, there are complex rules around income and expenses (earned/unearned, self-employed, utilities, child care expenses) but we basically have found that the best situation is — since they'll be talking with someone who knows those rules extremely well — focus on the basics: who's in your household, do you qualify for expedited (emergency) service, etc.
2. Many of those ~200 questions really CONDITIONAL on some (eg, do you have a felony? do you have a felony for DRUGS?) —— but candidly many online gov't forms are just the digitization of paper forms (which obviously can't do conditional showing easily.)
3. We've found that there's a ton of low-hanging fruit. For example, we have an easy way for clients to take pictures of documents they need to submit from their phone (these days, these are often SUPER high quality, even on low-end devices.) We send those to counties via secure e-mail, which means it comes instantly. This has been so successful in one county that they're now using this document feature across ALL programs (health insurance, cash aid) and actually asking clients to send in documents WHILE they're on the phone with them, meaning they can hold for a second, check the email, see the pic, and issue the benefits immediately (rather than waiting for them to mail/fax/scan and upload after creating an account.)
Overall, we've found that despite that "intrinsic complexity," there's still a huge space for simplification just using what computers — and web sites — are good at.
We already have some State of CA jobs on there, but I'll pass along this link to the folks who run the gov't job board!
My company, www.grove.co, strives to help families making it easy to buy sustainable products vs. conventional CPG. It seemed a bit crazy when we started, but now literally thousands of families get sustainable products from us every single day. It's hard to make a big impact on your own, but organizations and companies can do great things.
[0] https://www.bcorporation.net/
Shameless plug: we at https://www.patientsknowbest.com/careers.html are also hiring and are a B Corp -- our mission is to give patients control over their own medical data.
That is to say, provide email services that don't mine data for profit. Provide a social interaction space that doesn't attempt to manipulate moods, opinions, or sell its user's eyeballs. Provide an aggregation service with strong filtering tools in place of strong moderation. Provide a code repository with great tooling that doesn't include value judgements. Provide anonymous, secure communication between parties. Make mobile applications that provide wanted services without the in-app purchases, ads, or profiling.
The downside is that you're unlikely to get paid for it. You'll probably even lose money on it. In some cases, you'll even face legal pressure to stop or change.
The idea you can _do anything_ to _help_. Is mostly a myth people repeat so they don't constantly feel like shit for doing nothing in the face of mass social injustice by which they are (partially) the benefactors.
If you want social change, you need social action. Anything short is just rationalizing your guilt.
But nonetheless I do agree with the final output.
An individual is largely incapable of doing anything ALONE. Only thought organized and mass action are things accomplished on societal scale.
Change requires work... this is physics. A large change requires a lot of work. If your force is too small (an individual). You may never over come friction.
If you want social change, you need organization.
Effort exerted without results is technically doing something. You are burning energy. But you are not making change happen, you are NOT doing work.
But to approach the problem of "doing good" with the mindset of "the only thing that I can do is to ask other people to make the world a better place" is selling yourself short and in my opinion an anti-democratic way of thinking.
Individuals can do exactly what they can do. You can volunteer at a school, you can start a community garden, you can help just one person in your life who needs it. This counts as doing good, and without the kind of community that forms from lots of people spending their time with others, you have to ask yourself why you should care about the political action at all. Far too much political action today is done out of self-righteousness or anger, rather than out of love. If you've forgotten how to love a stranger in your private life, you may have forgotten how to do it in your public (political) life too.
1) https://cyclebath.org.uk/map/ This one has gone national and is up for a Creative Bath Innovation Award.
2) Using Census 2011 Data I've created a healthy cities and towns league index as well as spatial analysis on commuter behaviour. (6M people drive to work, of which 3.5M live within a 20 minute cycle ride) https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4YARJgso6IxRjd1ZlNDZklGaX...
3) Worked with Bath Hacked and Strava to deliver a year of cycling in the city of Bath strava.bathhacked.org
4) Get involved in your local tech4good meetup.
Do not start from a "hey where can I use my skills for good?". Start with "I am passionate about X, what can I do to help X in anyway?"
Cheers for the insight!
It's not glamorous, but if you're willing to volunteer your time helping with an org's Wordpress site or making sure everyone is educated about phishing and 2FA, you can make a meaningful impact in your community.
Disaster Management Software EMS Software Assistance software for the blind,deaf,etc.
Of course, not everything becomes magically better from software's involvement. There might be some good opportunities in robotics, robotic medical care and elderly care especially come to mind.
I myself, work mainly on projects related to museums, culture, green economy... In the projects I accept I try to find a balance between money I can get and how I view it as work for the greater good. A very hard balance and a very subjective one.
Also have some friends that are a lot into open data which is also an interesting area to explore.
I'll take this opportunity to float an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a long time.
The premise is to:
1) (this is almost certainly the easy part) build out a platform that is like a two-way khan academy - teacher and student, with at least the teacher having a tablet and a stylus that function well, sharing a digital blackboard, with a video chat optional -- where a student of something in a relatively privileged situation teaches a student of the same thing in a relatively less privileged situation -- where the sessions are stored and rewindable, both video and blackboard input.
2) the hard part; selling it as something to invest in and driving it to a point of having an endowment behind it, like Harvard's endowment, that allows the service to pay for moderation of student-teachers something like $12.00 USD an hour to teach, while subsidizing well-chosen students to have to pay something like $2 an hour to learn
it's been an idea for a passion project for a while
In the world of retail many companies have to train sales staff in third party dealerships, this can be with lots of site visits and with those staff doing some away day thing. The reason for this sales training is so products can be demonstrated and those sales converted by knowledgeable staff.
So you find your market in this type of a business and solve the challenges. There will be plenty in keeping company staff trained and on-board, with a long-term relationship with them selling stuff they get training updates about. You tailor your solution to different verticals and when you have a base product that can be tailored to your customers you then do your project version as that 'base product'.
So maybe do this the hard way, put in some time being that person that does company training materials, build out whatever is needed for doing that much, much better, pioneer it with the company that you work for, and on their clock, put in a lot of work needed to build out the backend and support needed for your big idea, then leave to polish it off knowing you have a commercial version out there and proven to be good (hopefully!).
Whilst you are doing this you might also want to help or support those around you on a friendly basis rather than as part of an organisation. Just being a friend to an elderly neighbour, having time for them and being willing to help them get their teevee plugged in correctly is pretty good. You can also be there for others that have problems of the mind or of the body that you are glad you are not afflicted by. Through maintaining friendships and looking out for a few vulnerable souls from different walks of life to yourself you can learn immense things about the human condition. You can also change people's lives with money and learn the nuances of that. There are no tax deductions or medals for making charity something you do informally, the whole world is not going to care if you walk the old guy's dog for him every morning.
They organise different types of projects: DataDives, which are hackathon-type events and focus on data exploration and analysis; and DataCorps, longer term projects (a few months), where a team of volunteers will team up on a more project for the client charity.
They are looking for volunteers for a wide range of roles, including data scientists, programmers with experience with ML, dataviz experts, project managers, etc.