Ask HN: Are there any software jobs in nature/animal conservation?
I am a software developer (mostly backend, some frontend and some data analytics). I personally don't really have any desire to work at FAANG. I also don't really have any desire to write CRUD for some generic company that pays well either.
I want to explore more meaningful avenues of work. Preserving nature, animals and their habitats, is one cause I have been thinking about. I know that most projects are very hands-on, requiring mostly hard labour or specialised research efforts. However, I've been wondering if there is a demand for software in these projects? Particularly in terms of specialised tooling and/or data analytics?
I suspect that most research projects don't have the funding to afford anything beyond the bare requirements. The same probably goes for government sponsored programmes; again, this is all speculation.
Does anyone have experience as a software dev in these fields? Where might one start looking ?
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Because I am sure some people will mention it, yes, volunteering is an option. But money is an unfortunate living requirement in today's society (unless you plan on going off-grid entirely).
106 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadIt could be like a combination of Airbnb and Couchsurfing etc. that serves a specific niche.
And since they require an upfront membership fee, has anyone here used Workaway? How was your experience?
So I haven't actually done one of these workaways.
> it seems they do not handle payments between users
Most of the offerings you will find on there will only provide you with housing, maybe food, in exchange for labour. Some do pay, but I strongly suspect that it is in cash.
Ah I do not require payment for myself, I just thought some hosts may request payment for accommodation or the initial moving-in costs (paperwork etc.)
http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
I work with oceanographers. There are many who get by with rudimentary programming skills but love the help of developers who can help them build tools to analyze and disseminate their data. They love spreadsheets because they don't know how to make databases.
Having mechanical or electrical engineering or CAD skills helps them design enclosures for instruments, having software skills helps them add autonomy.
However it is not a field where, at least as I've seen, engineers have free rein to improve processes simply for the sake of improving them.
You are right that research funding is tight and in most of the world it is getting tighter. Right now many projects are burning through funds while scientists babysit their kids; the research vessels are only now trying to resume operation.
You might save a tiger, but in the year it took you to save him, Brazil cut down 8 million hectares of the rain forest for palm oil.
Until we get "the establishment" to care about this, doing any work in this field is simply for vanity or to make you feel good.
Making blanketing, dismissive claims about everyone who works in a specific field is a great way to end the conversation.
active group, good work, and they’re a semi-commercial autonomous wing of st. andrews.
Big NGOs also need technical people, too. Check out the Humane Society, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Compassion in World Farming, etc. They aren’t going to be the highest paying jobs and there are all sorts of downsides but it’s a way to use your skills to make a difference in the world.
You'll also take a hit in your reputation among other developers, most of whom seem to have gone into it for money and don't seem to care whether or not their labor is doing anything to benefit society.
Good work is still worth doing of course. You just have to count the work itself as one of the benefits.
"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation."
In a free market economy, this is an entirely false statement. People pay for the things they value. They more they value it, the more they pay.
Compare the amount of hours spent playing video games to the amount of hours spent touring museums. It's not close. People value video games much more greatly than museums.
Just because you value certain things more than others doesn't give them any intrinsic value.
As for your example: if you compare the amount of time people play in bands/sing in choirs (often without any direct money involved, e.g. around church or school) you've got an obvious example that people don't naturally "pay more for the things they value" (or see the need to pay or get payed at all). I value this very much and if someone was coming up and saying: pay up, I'd say - come on guys, let's do this on our own.
This is a perfectly testable hypothesis in the free market. You can start a museum and market it, and see if you generate a profit. If you don't, then you have to fund it yourself (pay) or hope a handful of others value it and pay.
> often without any direct money involved, e.g. around church or school
There's much money involved in organizing people and having venues for whatever it is they do inside those venues. In these cases, the people paying for these organized singing events are what you would consider a patron. Churches and schools aren't free.
Modern instruments cost a lot of money, lots of labor to produce.
As far as just some friends getting together and signing because they enjoy it, that's obviously free. But it's not a service that someone else is providing to you, that's just something you're doing because you feel is has value. What would be more analogous would be having a civic center where people perform and.... people pay money to enter the venue and be entertained.
Some people greatly value libraries and museums. I don't. Those people should pay for them. If from time to time, I might want to use their services, I would gladly pay. If there was a membership required, perhaps I would enroll if I felt the cost was worth the benefit. This happens every day for many other industries.
Anyway, the root of the point was that people don't value librarians so they don't get paid as well as programmers. This is true. If it wasn't true, they would be paid more. I know this really hurts the socialist sensibilities of people on this site, but it's the cold hard truth.
well, I'm not sure, how the trumpet from 1970 differs from a modern instrument (and yeah, people are still using these, where I play), but yeah, "lot of money, lots of labor" ><((((*>
And btw., one of the bands I'm in plays sometimes for money, but incurs no cost for membership or anything. It's just there.
I consider a trumpet a modern instrument. How did you procure said trumpet? Did you pick it from the wild trumpet tree? No, of course not.
Someone mined the copper and zinc, refined them, someone combined them into the alloy brass, someone formed that brass into a trumpet. Of course, the trumpet wasn't conceived magically, it was something that went through countless iterations and revisions as instrument building matured. Then someone had to sell the trumpet to you. Unless you were at the factor-direct trumpet store, it was shipped to a retail location or warehouse where you then purchased it. Money and labor was invested just so you can obtain the trumpet.
How much labor goes into making a trumpet? Lots. Someone realized there was a market for trumpets and invested a good bit of capital to produce them. Improvements in manufacturing (aka, market efficiency) has resulted in high quality trumpets being produced cheaply, same as anything else. I'd say, the entire price structure of the trumpet (or much of anything, really) is entirely labor based. The metals exist in the ground. Digging them up is free (purchasing mineral rights notwithstanding) in terms of needed to pay the earth for them.
Much like libraries, there are places you can rent musical instruments like trumpets. These are often 'required' for education purposes, so why doesn't the government just have a trumpet library same as the book library? Don't you enjoy music? Why don't you demand taxes pay for instruments for the homeless that can't afford their own instruments? They're so enriching and such.
All those things exist because people voted with their money to make sure they exist. It's not because some greater good commanded their existence.
b = how much community values `thing`
a != b
Unfortunately there aren't going to be many jobs in this sector currently until COVID-19 is brought more under control.
Except this is an entirely false statement. In free market economy, there is no easy way for people to pay for many things they value, and know that they will receive the goods in return.
I may value a stable climate, clean air, a stable ecosystem, but the free market alone doesn't provide a way for me to pay what would be required and know that I will get a return, because unfortunately, such things require collective action.
There is no "what society values" at work here, only supply and demand. What you witness is the fact that jobs that have intrinsic meaning and are more fulfilling are paid less well, because employees are willing to make that compromise. You could say the increase in happiness is priced in. Same reason game devs have bad working conditions, people still wait in line to work on them.
It's not a question of society being backwards, it's just a function of market based jobs. The cause is amoral and independent of the wishes of the people in the system, though the effects very much have moral relevance.
That sounds as if supply and demand were laws of nature like gravity or speed of light. They are nothing but forces we create (i.e. purely anthropogenic), and appear god-like only because what society solely values right now is the normativity of the market (as opposed to historical normativities such as the state power, religion, morality and so on).
> You could say the increase in happiness is priced in
That sounds further like market essentialism. "If market is paying you less it means you must be compensated in externalities". If only markets were that good at pricing in externalities, we wouldn't have climate change problems for example.
Markets are great tools for deciding the prices under specific conditions, but it is a grave misapplication to try and orient the entirety of human potential around them.
What happens when you start to distort markets with top-down intervention is, in sum, decreased prosperity for all. Communism is just the most extreme example of this.
The market has failure modes that need to be actively corrected, like pricing in externalities or preventing monopoly abuse. But governments usually err on the over-interventionist side. When you look at the world you can’t help but notice this pattern, it is really that obvious.
There can be 3 classes of errors with interventions; 1) intervening when it is not warranted (over-intervention), 2) not-intervening when required (under-intervening) and 3) intervening in a way that ends up not working out (intervention-outcome mismatch).
I think most of the errors are type 3, which are most liable to mis-identified as "over-intervention", but they are not. Mismatched interventions do not prove that there is a magical essence to real-world markets that render them infallible, dynamical, adaptive, self-correcting systems.
A simpler explanation to all this is that it is really hard to come up with the right interventions for the market, but also markets really need interventions when they need it.
60% of the time, they work everytime.
The thing is, there is no reliable way to prevent these errors, which means in general it is better to not interfere. If we had a way to ensure good decisions, we wouldn’t need some of the institutions that we have in our modern states.
One especially egregious example: California Assembly Bill 5. You could argue that this wasn’t just incompetence, but union corruption, costing many freelancers their livelihood. Another one was SF mayor London Breed‘s misguided attempt to regulate food delivery during the pandemic, which had the predictable result of cutting off regulated areas from service altogether.
You cannot let people decide these things that have no personal accountability and suffer no downside from this madness. It sure would be nice if it worked, but it doesn’t.
> 60% of the time, they work everytime.
Citation needed.
That is not a forgone conclusion. It is only better not to intervene if the expected cost of intervention is higher than the expected cost of not intervening.
> One especially egregious example...
These are relatively minor regulations that you argue gone bad. What do you think would be the realized costs of these misapplications? Would they be in the same order of magnitude with for example the costs of not breaking up monopolies? I highly doubt it.
I get it, in countries like the US the government apparatus has a difficulty representing the welfare of the entirety of the nation, which tends to affect the interventions negatively, but that is not an argument against government intervention but an argument against the government itself, which is culpable of under-regulation just as much as over-regulation. (90's deregulatory Clinton laws on banks and telecommunications come to mind, which led to huge market consolidations and therefore market inefficiencies which we still suffer from.)
As we agree, markets sometimes need serious babysitting, so we ought to pick better babysitters.
> Citation needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchorman:_The_Legend_of_Ron_B...
Exactly the environment and people I would like to get away from. I care little for what they think, but yes, I understand how some could see this as "career suicide".
It's not _completely_ crazy - if both jobs paid the same, most people would take one that benefits society.
The magnitude of the difference is crazy though.
Meaningful domains in tech jobs are looked up to by peers in my experience.
Of course there are plenty of good people out there, but in my experience the plurality, and probably the majority of FAANG peeps will be made uncomfortable by the implicit challenge to the morality of their choices. Even though they might signal support for your actions; privately dealing with the cognitive dissonance does often result in eroded respect. A common defense mechanism is to see themselves as better than you because you just couldn't take the pressure to work at a "world leader" company, after all if they aren't the best people making the best choices, why would they be paid so much? You just burned out because you couldn't make Level 5.
She said that people in the top at these NGOs and trusts are usually get paid filthy rich like a CEO/Director would get paid but it pretty much ends there. Everybody else down the line are expected to expect and accept pittance. She said a salary negotiation among rank and file is frowned upon, especially by the people who are high up on the ladder and they are the same people who crib about not attracting top talent.
Wish passion alone could fill the belly and pay medical bills.
I would suggest you to assure first a well paid job and use your free time for volunteer activities. Nobody should be doing science before 50 Yo. Not at this moment when postdocs are being paid 300 euro/month. Is committing economical suicide and starting a family first and having kids should be your priority.
About oceanography. If you can read spanish (if not, you can always google-translate it) you may find interesting this recent piece of news.
https://elpais.com/ciencia/2020-06-30/dimite-la-cupula-del-m...
Your mileage may vary
And while I understand that in most parts of the world, it's paid a lot worse and you might have problems making ends met, I don't really get, how you want to solve these problems (interlinked with nowadays capitalism) by getting more kids (wow, just 30t of CO2/year more "output") and helping the 1% redistribute an even larger fraction of the wealth to themselves (which are imho the only really "richly"-paying jobs.)
Okay. Good bye, science.
https://catalpa.io/work-with-us/
They are based in East Timor and were founded by an Aussie and an American (U.S.) and they allow remote work.
No, there's not a demand for software in this arena. All this stuff is dominated by grants and politically charged funds.
- Web development. Nonprofits need websites. Sometimes they may have a dev on staff, usually they at least have a digital director that can work with devs at web dev vendors. These vendors are usually solely focused on the non-profit market.
- CRM. Non-profits fundraise and they need people to manage the donor database. Usually this is bought from a vendor that specializes in non-profit CRM and those vendors also have devs/DBAs.
- IT. Non-profits need IT to manage networks, phones and equipment. Often they work with IT vendors.
- Devs for conservation work. This is more rare. Still, some non-profits have staff scientists, GIS people, and devs to build out conservation tools, such as data collecting apps, data visualizations or other things. This is rare because most non-profits are trying to convince the government to do the science because the government has much more money and power to recruit. It's rare and maybe a bit of a vanity project to do any science out of the non-profit, though there are a couple of groups that do that.
Interesting, because this trade study could be conducted by an engineer and a manager in a small company and still have starkly different results in the weighing of concerns.
Most of my early career was solo. I recognize the importance of a good team, but as a business you (even non profits and myself solo) have to understand the bottom line for all stakeholders.
If anyone else could expand on this person's ideas, please do!
http://www.greenjobs.net/
ps- contact them and help with the cert!
You could also dive into the world of Effective Altruism which is broad and has a lot of tech related jobs. Check out https://80000hours.org and https://www.gfi.org
Drop me an email at nhh@downforce.com. We don't have a framework for hiring at the moment but might do very soon.
I've seen a plant identification app disrupt the process of species identification with field guides. I suspect that there are a lot of tedious classification projects that professors assign to undergrad researchers (find photos with wildlife) that can be entirely automated.
The trust maintains a visitor park that provides bird displays and experience days for the general public. The gate takings and donations fund conservation activities in the UK (raptor nest boxes, bird hospital, bird surveys) and overseas activities (e.g. reducing poisoning of wild birds by game poachers). The Trust itself is very much an outdoor organisation, with key staff supporting bird care and site infrastructure. There is a small back office that supports ops, marketing and merchandising, using COTS software. Academic research is conducted but in conjunction with local universities, which is where data crunching, etc, happens. There are a small number of on-site student placements, primarily for those in biology / zoology courses, and the placement activities seem fairly practical in nature. I suspect that most similar organisations follow a similar pattern, with a relatively small COTS software footprint and a focus on practical tasks rather than software development / data analysis.
That said, I started volunteering to support an office-based marketing function: management of a massive photo library and video editing to support marketing and outreach functions. After six months of doing this, COVID-19 happened and most office staff started WFH, with office-based volunteering suspended because it involves hot-desking. When the park started to reopen, I switched to COVID-related activities such as queue management (‘space marshal’) and cleaning. Although some tasks are menial, I’ve learned much more about how the trust works on a daily basis and I’ve got to know the key bird staff much better.
One of my key insights, as an ex-software professional, is how much I didn’t know about how conservation actually works, and how specific conservation organisations actually operate. But getting hands-on with some of the less glamorous tasks is a good apprenticeship and a way of building trust in the industry, if you have a long-term interest in directly supporting conservation.