Ask HN: Given that I am a Software Engineer, how could I help humanity the most? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Given that I am a Software Engineer, how could I help humanity the most?

32 pointsbeetsdev38 comments

I am a 27 years old Software Engineer from Central Europe. I want to do something good for humanity.

Given my skills, how could I help society the most? I am not seeking for fame or fortune, I would even work for free in some cases (I have savings to survive for a year or two depending on a country).

I am tired of this capitalistic materialistic society, and just want to give something back as I feel I've been very privileged in my life and already experienced quite a lot (heartbreaks, travelling, working at different companies, living in different countries).

I am a hard-worker, so almost nothing is impossible (as long as you put lots of work and time into it).

I feel I need some guidance, and I can relate to this community a lot. So if I can find any online, it is here.

Thank you very much.

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Start by improving yourself. Are you the best you can be? Are the lives directly around you as good as they can be? Your immediate family? If you can't help your immediate family what makes you think you can help the world?

Not much is worse for the world than people who want to improve it that aren't perfect themselves.

Saw this recently, it seems like it might apply:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

― C. S. Lewis

>Start by improving yourself. Are you the best you can be?

There's a thing called "motivation". You could learn to eat glass chunks and become the best glass eater. But why the hell would you do that?

Being a software developer too, I feel useless for my local community which simply doesn't need those skills. Pretty much all I can do is to earn some money and help others to play an interesting and popular game of survival (no matter whether you need some food or just another car to survive).

For this reason I started learning chemistry and medicine, but the latter one is more about convincing people than having actual knowledge, and the former appears to be just as useless as coding.

So one of the best solutions people find in my region is to run the hell away from here to where you can help yourself, instead of sitting here and realize your helplessness. So might it also be your advise? To move to the place where you can be the best and find the environment where you will be usefull.

I've begun to view my software engineering skills as an amplifier instead of skill that can directly impact the lives of other people. By marrying your software engineering skills with another skill you possess you'll be able to create change quicker, and impact more people than someone without software engineering skills.

>By marrying your software engineering skills with another skill you possess you'll be able to create change quicker, and impact more people than someone without software engineering skills.

You'd better provide some example, because for now I don't really see how the software engineering skills would help. Anybody can gain some basic IT knowledge and use it, but the extensive coding skills I have seem to be surprisingly unwanted locally, although much more demanded abroad.

Let's use natural disasters. While reacting to natural disasters response teams must be able to communicate with each other, however communication is typically spotty during natural disasters. Your knowledge of software engineering will allow you to think of a solution to this problem and implement it.

Here's the process I follow, it's simple, but it takes time.

Get involved in an activity -> Become proficient in the activity -> Notice the places software would be beneficial -> Implement -> Product.

As a former radio amateur I can tell you the emergency services use radio extensively for communication and no IT skills are required there. The simpler solution is more reliable. That's one of the reasons coding skills are not required where I live - those are complex and can be hard to maintain. Already mentioned below, btw:

>You may leave them in a worse situation as now they have less control, less understanding and if they need to change things and you or someone very similar to you (which is a rare combination) is no longer available, they're basically stuck.

I was using disaster recovery as an example. The method is still applicable.

Rescue services were a good example indeed. Software developers are needed for people processing large amount of information, while local communities can do well with simple solutions.

Things that scale

Social media is supposed to allow communication and bring people together, I can't mention a social media site that actually does this, theres a need.

Our broken monetary system that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. But then again theres enough crypto currencies in the world.

Representative democracies are broken there needs to be a distributed cryptographically secure voting system.

Things that don't

Volunteer at local charities, they have lots of stuff they should automate but don't have the skills to do so. Most will get you doing the general volunteer work that can be done by anyone, this is a mistake as they won't understand what you can do you need to make them aware how they should be using you and your skills.

Take your problem solving skills to a new job / career and solve problems with something other than software.

>they have lots of stuff they should automate but don't have the skills to do so.

I used to be in that mindset, but as I grew older I've reconsidered. You may leave them in a worse situation as now they have less control, less understanding and if they need to change things and you or someone very similar to you (which is a rare combination) is no longer available, they're basically stuck.

Of course this is very situational, but it's easy to fall into this trap. Charities in and of themselves can be stuck in the same anti-pattern if they leave a void where they used to be.

> Our broken monetary system that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. But then again theres enough crypto currencies in the world.

The monetary system itself is fine as an exchange medium (apart from it being controller by non-neutral, corruptible actors, i.e. the state). It's the distribution of resources that's the problem, and that's a policy issue.

True but the people that hold the resources usually hold the political power with it.

I think it's easier to fix the monetary system than to fix the political one.

Yeah, thought about the same. Many software jobs are just bullshit. They pay super well, but the sense is nowhere there.

I'm super curious what will be the answers.

Let's say:

Now, sometimes it's easiest to work on local scale, especially as this often gives you instant and materialized feedback. I would search for some kind of foundation or open source community. They often have massive outreach.

Personally, I found that technology people (like Silicon Valley or investors) have technology fixation, e.g. they believe (like in god) that technology will solve all problems. The most real, broad problems in the world need a political will to make a change. In this context the question is: can you influence the politics to be good?

>Many software jobs are just bullshit. They pay super well, but the sense is nowhere there

I'm glad someone has the same sense of meaning in software development. However I'm dissapointed at the same time. In the end it's all about selling some crap to people. I'm talking about advertisment, shops, datamining of preferences, handling of orders, etc - nothing that really helped anybody. Countrary, the main goal of this process is to make you more unsatisfied and miserable, and give you a false expectation that a newly purchased crap will help you to overcome your misery.

>I found that technology people (like Silicon Valley or investors) have technology fixation, e.g. they believe (like in god) that technology will solve all problems

It's not about believing, it's about making investors believe so the investors will bring money into another unprofitable bauble.

Reproduce a lot.

The sex is a bonus, the problem it solves: we don't have enough smart, talented people having kids. Everyone that is smart/talented seems to only want to have one or two kids, or none at all.

Maybe forget the "I'm software dev" part. Go out and give attention to people in need, may the be the ones who need food, or are old and have no family etc.

The most needed things in the society of Today isn't material, or something that you can automate with software -- it is time. It is a resource that is very scarce as everybody is busy with their wifes, sisters, brothers, making money, building shit etc.

Talking people on the web isn't anywhere the effect of talking with them in person. The human brain needs human time.

>The most needed things in the society of Today isn't material, or something that you can automate with software -- it is time. It is a resource that is very scarce as everybody is busy with their wifes, sisters, brothers, making money, building shit etc.

And the most demanded things in the society are the ones helping to waste your time, so you can have the feeling your time is precious and you have no time to just sit doing nothing. In the end you would not be so "busy" with your job if you really needed that time.

https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

"Effective altruism is about answering one simple question: how can we use our resources to help others the most?

Rather than just doing what feels right, we use evidence and careful analysis to find the very best causes to work on."

I was thinking exactly about effective altruism! I really like the approach.

I think focus on sustainability matter and even circular economy.

Find how your skills and your passion can help a startup or a community, or social movements

3-4 years ago I had the same feeling, and finally decided to work on an idea which soon will become a startup which will help societies all around the world manage their buildings, especially in building Operation & Maintenance - O&M area which will help global warming and sustainability (SDGs) movements

Hey, I felt the same which led me to create Impact Makers earlier this year. There are various projects there aiming to help fight climate change which you can contribute to. https://techimpactmakers.com/

Also checkout https://fixathon.io - an online hackathon to help fix the climate.

How about volunteering to teach disadvantaged people how to code and help them get a job? For example https://www.hackyourfuture.net is in a few European cities, might not be in your city but perhaps you could try starting one where you are?

That's a good question, reminds me of a good quote:

"What is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now? And if you're not working on that, why aren't you?" - Aaron Swartz

All I can say is look for injustice and pain, that's where humanity needs help...

No, the task selection function is dominated by the one's efficacy, not the task's importance. Or to quote Michael Bolton in Office Space (1999), the "question is bullshit to begin with. If that quiz worked, there would be no janitors..."

So how would you go about this? Are you saying trying to find an important problem to help humanity is bullshit to begin with?

Sensibly. I am opposed to the quote. For those of us without Aaron Swartz's talents, saving the world is paying taxes and keeping our kids fed and out of trouble.

> saving the world is paying taxes and keeping our kids fed and out of trouble

That's a reasonable approach I suppose, although rather localised. Is there any merit in thinking what's the biggest problem I can help with humanity?

I would think, even without talents like Aaron Swartz, it's worth trying... but I can understand your point...

I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, "I want to go there."But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in. This is the kind of person I am. - Linus Torvalds

https://80000hours.org/ has a list of most important priorities and an explanation of why they chose those priorities.

Make money and use it as a leverage.

Solve very difficult problems that's good for humanity using computing.

Teach and enable others to be able to do any of the above.

I've had similar thoughts in the past. My conclusion was that education and misinformation is a huge problem these days, so part of my mental/time resources are being spent trying to improve general "information" handling to people. Bad actors are doing too much, and the common person doesn't have tooling to aid them against this endless stream of information.

I'm working on this through implementation(s) that are centered around:

- A UX that focuses on small information (the goal of being easy to consume, while linking back to source material to not lose context)

- distributed / federated (naturally sharable, not platform locked)

- immutable (aspects of it can be immutable and source material from the internet should be archived into the system for permanent reference)

Point 2 and 3 are largely implementation details that I feel are important for a system. The first point, the UX of "small" information is an attempt at reducing the data load on humans these days. To expand:

We've got a world of information at our finger tips. I can spend hours digesting information and forming conclusions but not only do I need to mentally retain my work, but I have to mentally retain the components of my work to back up how I came to those conclusions. I find this extremely difficult. I believe it would be beneficial to promote people recording these conclusions, and conclusions from conclusions (and so forth), in such a way that it can be easily shared, digested, debated further and improved upon.

While I've been slowly planning this for ages, recently I bumped into Kialo[1] and found their UI to be quite similar to what I had envisioned. notably how in the debate, statements are linked to other statements to breakdown conclusions into smaller, digestible components. This is tailored towards debates not specifically generic information, but I think it's all meaningfully related.

My implementation is too early to share, but I'm speaking about this because I believe the information tooling is important to humans. If this interests you I look forward to your contributions in this space :)

I appreciate your desire to help humanity.

note: I should note that my implementation has a bunch of technical aspects that may or may not be worth while to the overall goal. The distributed and immutable nature of the implementation might detract from the overall goal. I believe point 2 and 3 have merit though, but that debate is out of scope haha.

[1]: https://www.kialo.com

I would research on uncensorable internet to help people who are blinded by evil governments.

You're young, hard working, and have a lot of life to look forward to. You're seeking to make a difference. All really great things.

I relate to your disdain of capitalism and materialism, but those operating conditions aren't going away no matter what you do. Collectively people will continue to seek wealth, fame, and power even if you as an individual do not. While capitalism sucks at valuation of human life that is not currently economically productive, it has outlived other economic systems for a reason.

Something the resonated with me a lot is "Elon Musk's Secret Sauce." It's a long blog post but goes through how Musk operates differently from most people, and seems to have pushed many positive changes forward several years / decades through his companies.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-s...

Keep in mind that most of the problems in the world exist because it's somehow profitable for someone more powerful than you for things to be bad. Be prepared for your do-gooding to make you enemies.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.

it is an utopic question

I think politics is where it's at. Americans can join the Democratic party and help get Trump not re-elected. Not just because he is a right-wing bigot but because leaving the Paris agreement was and is an ongoing ecological disaster. People in other parts of the world can of course also join parties they believe in.

Maybe this could be interesting for you: https://climateaction.tech/

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