Ask HN: Feeling that my work does not affect people in need, what should I do? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Feeling that my work does not affect people in need, what should I do?

2 pointsbrainless2 comments

Hello fellow HNers, I am a software developer who seems to be stuck somewhere in time. I started my work life more than a decade back with dreams to bring positive change to our world. I still want to chase that dream but I am just stuck in the very reality of our capitalistic world.

I understand we need money to run our world, but I want to work for people who need it the most. Software for really small businesses or communities, non profits, etc. would be way better than my recent companies. I work well, but in my free time I always go back to the feeling that I am not contributing to our society.

I am not a seller, but a good team builder, hands on developer. So I am unable to start something on my own, but I have lots of energy to drive things with others. Does anyone have a suggestion for me?

If anyone needs: I am from India, currently live and work in Germany.

I'm spending my weekend with 20 people working on OpenStreetMap. While the administrative boundary fixes or UTF8 issues or test failures for libraries might not sound exciting we know our volunteering has an impact around the world, e.g. https://hotosm.org/projects

Subscribe to http://blog.openstreetmap.de/ (weekly newsletter). At some point there will be project or local meeting interesting enough to participate.

Also check out http://codefor.de/ (German) http://codefor.de/en/ (English) for local groups of technical (but not exclusively) folks working on community projects.

If you're into networking have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk with many local chapters https://freifunk.net/wie-mache-ich-mit/community-finden/

Have you considered contributing to an open source project?

It allows you to bring a positive change to the project and/or world of your choosing.

I personally would love to work on FOSS the whole day... but yeah.. I guess we are all stuck somewhere :)

Just start small and maybe you'll become one of those damn lucky developers with a fulltime FOSS developer job.

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