Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by gjolund | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

gjolund

I've worked on:

* Liver transplant protocols

* Military VR for PTSD therapy

* Early R&D for self driving cars

* Long range point to point wifi systems being used in Africa

* VR motion capture studio used in the most of the Marvel movies

* Built several prototype zero net energy homes

* Built several solar concentration array in Haiti with a team after the earthquakes

* Tidal energy generation prototypes

The list goes on.

View on HN

Many software engineers (esp. at a web/comms company) are going to be working on similar frontend and backend problems -- and the fact that these guys are working at SnapChat doesn't marginalize their contribution to the world. They're working on one of the most-utilized, fastest growing communication platforms on earth. If anything, I'd say their "problems" are probably as interesting as any you've listed. They could just as easily end up producing things like React (FB), BigTable (Google), MapReduce (Google), Bootstrap (Twitter), etc.

Respectfully, I find this "other peoples' work is shit and meaningless" attitude off-putting. As someone who does similar R&D work as you (see profile), here's my perspective: Be grateful for getting to work on interesting problems, and don't be so quick to dismiss others just because it doesn't float your boat.

I didn't say "other peoples' work is shit and meaningless".

I did say I would have a hard time motivating myself to work on something so trivial. It is why I turned down the job.

Scale is a solved problem, their whole infrastructure is based on Google. They brag about having 0 ops employees.

What are they actually building in house? A UI, some photo filters, and a mobile photo app.

Not worth $20b and not worth a couple years of my professional life.

And maybe someone who just got a liver transplant that you enabled announces it to their friends and family on Snapchat :)

Totally fine, but what had the bigger impact? What was the problem actually worth solving?

Which had a bigger impact? Almost certainly social media over any kind of liver transplant research. There are 20k liver transplants a year.

You realize that social media has created tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of economic value right? Even Twitter, which has struggled has created billions of dollars of economic value. From a utilitarian perspective that is worth far more.

Your opinion would change if someone you cared about needed a new liver.

I'm certain that if I knew someone who needed a liver transplant that I would then personally value liver transplant tech over social media, that's completely beside the point though. My feelings in a given scenario don't make work on liver transplants more important than work on social media. What matters is net impact.

Jumping in late, but no. High quality problems solved make a stable future where things like like transplants are just "solved." You cannot say the same for social networks, which are actually much more reflective of the current culture. We will not look back 50 years from now and say "oh man, thank god Snapchat came along" the way we'll be saying "thank god we pioneered that medical tech which continues to save lives to this day"

There are compounding effects with economic progress as well that are effectively immeasurable due to complexity. The availability heuristic biases people to think that obviously identifiable benefits are more important than pursuits with less identifiable benefits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com