Ask HN: Jobs in Software/Technology Activism?
What I'm looking for is this:
- Champions of Free and Open Source Software / Hardware, Right to Repair, and other like causes - A full-time or part-time role (with other programming responsibilities) within a product or consulting company which gives time and resources to a team of like-minded folk, or - A full-time position as a writer / evangelist / technology new reporter, or - A policy oriented position with a US politician, or - Everything else that I'm not thinking of...
I'm a coder by training and at heart, but I currently am having a hard time turning a blind eye to the state of our industry. I'm thinking I should at least try and ask about way I can devote my time to the solution.
On that note, if a paying job addressing these issues isn't really in the cards, I'd be curious to hear how others are making meaningful impact in their free time.
Thanks.
41 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 97.2 ms ] threadBut if it sounds interesting, we're hiring for Engineering(Rails) & Data; Email me at russell@wrapbook.com if you want to chat more.
Regardless, there are a plethora of nonprofits (FSF, EFF, AP, etc..) that need expertise, so you could try targeting orgs that do work you favor specifically.
The entertainment industry is timecard based - and many of the workers are unionized. This means things like, if they don't get time to take a lunch but work over 6 hours, they're due a certain penalty from the production company for the meal they never had; or if they only got 4 hours of sleep last night before being called back to set - they're owed another penalty to compensate them based on a formula of invaded hours. This in addition to things like retirement benefits that need to be calculated, tracked, and paid into.
Each union, and different roles within unions, and even different cities and states (california especially), have different terms and rates and formulas defined; but currently actually meeting those requires a team of specialists to "breakdown" the time for the given workers union/state/agreement. It's hard, and without that team many production companies just wing it - and some have been making incorrect/noincompliant payments to their workers for years.
At wrapbook, we're automating all of those agreements. There is no guesswork when you submit a timecard - which is great for workers, because they know they'll get paid what they are owed; and good for (most) production companies because they WANT to be compliant, but it's hard to do with all of the requirements involved, and good for unions because they know we are ensuring every T is crossed and I is dotted in compliance with the agreements they defined and everyone involved agreed to.
We do other things as well to make sure payments get paid and that they go where they're supposed to go, another area where there has been problems for workers.
I hope that adds some clarity.
So you might need to learn more skills, get better at interviewing, accept worse pay and other conditions, expect to take longer, spend a few years developing industry connections, etc.
The side hustle approach is not ‘settling for less’ but it is the closest thing to a royal road. In the nonprofit sector people are often frustrated with the slow pace of building consensus, getting grants, etc. Today the metropolitan museum of art has a quarter of a million public domain images and an API limit of 80 requests/sec (!) but if you came around a few years ago asking for that they’d have told you there was nothing they could do without getting a grant.
(It seems they got a really big one!)
So your options are to do things on your own that don’t need the grant, spend years getting the grant, walk on the scene when the grant is in.
None of those are easy even if you don’t see other people who succeeded doing the work. If it is your mountain to climb it is your mountain to climb.
Of course you need experience to be an effective activist, otherwise you're much more likely to simply be a microphone for someone else.
https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair
I’ve seen tech jobs posted there that were at the EFF and ACLU, among many others.
Also, I just saw this go by (Senior fullstack engineer at MoveOn): https://front.moveon.org/careers/?gh_jid=3331988
When I talked to them, examples including building out web applications allowing veterans to apply for benefits more easily, and other things like that. Not exactly earth shaking, but really has the opportunity to improve the interactions between people and the government.
When I interviewed, they did have limits on salaries (due to laws about what the government can pay) and were only doing 2-4 year stints. It's been a while, so not sure where things stand now.
More here:
https://18f.gsa.gov/
https://www.usds.gov/
Cloud computing, Open Source Software in commercially feasible way and so on. Tremendous growth and innovation is underway.
We do have a problem of wokeness, left in SF destroying the city, teacher unions hurting competitiveness of kids, police unions stopping all police reform in California.
Basically just like USSR, all the do-gooders - claiming to do good in the name of the “people” are the problem.
So, don’t be a protester - do real work, build something, be the solution. Create a small open source project of value. This is really really hard - that’s why do many people protest instead - that is easy.
If you're interested in making a difference I think it's better to look at career resources like https://80000hours.org/ than trying to think of open source software that will, in all honestly, probably make 0 difference.
What I'm saying is there are far better methods to do Good in your career or spare time than starting an OSS project. I don't have stats here but I'd wager 99% of OSS projects die by the way side and 99% of those aren't providing any sort of tangible use in relation to problems mentioned in this post.
Happy to be proved wrong - working on effective things is the driving force of my career.
Just because there are protesters you disagree with doesn't make protest itself a bad thing. I fear the larger issue is that there aren't enough mixed groups of protesting individuals to spark real discussions. But what do I know, I'm still trying to get more involved...
These people caused the fake ass "pandemic".
4 years on, what seems possible to me now would be to have a non-profit that is capable of doing hard and soft work for community groups and non-profits at discount, while also offering market rate services to paying customers. Especially as a one-person shop, this seems achievable and sustainable in theory.
The owner of the question definitely wants to push things in a different direction than mainstream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0P4Cf0UCwU
All in all, the culture in here makes it very hard to improve anything as most people I work with have spent their entire professional life in a bubble where every problem is solve through shoehorning various products and framework made by oracle. Ultimately as much as I would love to better use tax money to provide better healthcare services for my state, I'm not in a position to shift the culture.
Government jobs tend to be very secure too. It's possible some people just see it as an easy paycheck and don't want to rock the boat.
I read it about 6 months into my first civic tech job and it was so useful I wish I read it before I started my job search!
https://www.virtual-peaker.com/talent
Or search for other FOSS jobs here: https://www.fossjobs.net
HTH
No. They're going to hire someone to do the job, you just need to do incrementally worse than whoever would be your replacement and it's a net positive for your cause. Easy to do in most organizations.
>> How am I really going to vet the donations without being on the team?
How are you going to do that with being on the team? Most places you're a tiny part of an organization. There are plenty of ways to vet charities and other organizations to make sure they are doing what they claim to be doing.
There are also the negative connotations of extreme activism, which I find off-putting, like anger, riots, terrorism, etc. I want nothing to do with any of that kind of approach, even if it's supposedly "in support" of a cause I care about. But I don't think all activism is necessarily negative.