Comment by byko3y | Hacker News Reader

Comment by byko3y | Hacker News Reader

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>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.

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