Ask HN: Finding Meaningful Work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Finding Meaningful Work?

4 points_bxg15 comments

I saw this post the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398118

> Because “hard technical problems” wasn’t my root goal—my root goal was to use my skills to get the most possible leverage on improving the world.

It got me thinking. I wish it were easier to find problems where I can use my skillset to improve the world. It's not like I'm turning down the world-improving jobs in favor of the unimportant ones. Generally I never even see meaningful jobs, and the best I can do is avoid the 60% that actively harm the world in some small way.

I feel like there should be a forum or online community of some kind for matching up programmers with meaningful problems that need solving. Whether that means paying jobs, or even just charity work.

Anybody know of something like this?

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It's a good question - and one that hopefully more and more people will start asking.

The problem with a forum (or any kind of announcement system) for this is that the people who want your skills most and who can afford it will be the loudest voices (or will pay for the loudest and most convincing voices to broadcast their job offerings).

It's possible to take another approach though - consider it like a search problem.

Start with the kinds of projects you'd like to work on, and then try to find the companies and projects that match those by searching HN's archives, GitHub projects, Google search.

I think people in general tend to get used to the existing career funnels (job search sites where you enter your profile; LinkedIn; or looking at big-name company job listings). There's a lot more out there though.

> the people who want your skills most and who can afford it will be the loudest voices

Personally I'm looking even for just volunteer stuff. A local charity where I can spend 5-10 hours a week helping maintain their website, or a weekend or two building out a business process tool that makes them more efficient. That sort of thing.

The problem is I don't see this stuff very often on HN either, and on GitHub what you mostly see are highly generic, pure-tech solutions. These may indirectly help a nonprofit down the line, but usually at several levels of abstraction. Most of the SE work out there is getting hands-on with one specific organization's problems. Even if off-the-shelf components are a part of the solution, you still need someone technical at the end of the chain to actually utilize most of those, certainly the kind you'd find on GitHub.

Volunteering sounds like a great way to spend some time, yep. Are there any local (city/regional) volunteer mailing lists or websites you might be able to find?

I've often wondered whether the foundational documents & infrastructure of organizations could be, by default, hosted in public source control as text-files / basic markup.

Technology is still a bit too alien for most people I'd guess - software literacy (and, frankly, software simplicity) still has a way to go. And there's a fear of developing and making mistakes in the open.

But if every organization had infrastructure developed via code -- even if what they actually achieve as a group has a strong basis in the real world -- that'd make it a lot easier for developers like us to contribute back.

Until then, volunteering time and expertise locally sounds good :)

Would be great to hear if you find any useful sites / communities for this.

I'm thinking about building one, honestly. Probably local to my city. Reaching out directly to organizations and listing their current needs. Maybe later I'd add a form they could submit to post new needs or take down ones that are out of date.

Good luck!

I just discovered https://app.code4socialgood.org/ as well which might be of interest to you.

Their codebase is available at https://github.com/Code4SocialGood/c4sg-web

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