Ask HN: Are there any software jobs in nature/animal conservation? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there any software jobs in nature/animal conservation?

113 pointspetargyurov101 comments

Hi HN. Lately I have been thinking about what I really want to do in life; what really brings meaning and joy to my life. I am currently finishing up my solo "start-up" project, and we will see where it goes, but in the mean time I have been doing some introspection and thinking about the future.

I am a software developer (mostly backend, some frontend and some data analytics). I personally don't really have any desire to work at FAANG. I also don't really have any desire to write CRUD for some generic company that pays well either.

I want to explore more meaningful avenues of work. Preserving nature, animals and their habitats, is one cause I have been thinking about. I know that most projects are very hands-on, requiring mostly hard labour or specialised research efforts. However, I've been wondering if there is a demand for software in these projects? Particularly in terms of specialised tooling and/or data analytics?

I suspect that most research projects don't have the funding to afford anything beyond the bare requirements. The same probably goes for government sponsored programmes; again, this is all speculation.

Does anyone have experience as a software dev in these fields? Where might one start looking ?

Because I am sure some people will mention it, yes, volunteering is an option. But money is an unfortunate living requirement in today's society (unless you plan on going off-grid entirely).

View on HN

It's most certainly better for your soul, but get ready to take a pay cut. After a short career in game development and a much longer career in museum/library/archives, my take is that our societies values are out of whack: the more your job benefits your community and the planet the less you will get paid, and vice versa. It's even worse for social services.

You'll also take a hit in your reputation among other developers, most of whom seem to have gone into it for money and don't seem to care whether or not their labor is doing anything to benefit society.

Good work is still worth doing of course. You just have to count the work itself as one of the benefits.

"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation."

> the more your job benefits your community and the planet the less you will get paid, and vice versa. It's even worse for social services.

In a free market economy, this is an entirely false statement. People pay for the things they value. They more they value it, the more they pay.

Compare the amount of hours spent playing video games to the amount of hours spent touring museums. It's not close. People value video games much more greatly than museums.

Just because you value certain things more than others doesn't give them any intrinsic value.

Tragedy of the commons

well, if museums would drive the same marketing campaigns (read propaganda or simply media based manipulation), this might easily change... Also generally the amount of time you can spend in museums is somehow limited, as most don't allow you to be active (like videogames do in a sort of lobotomied way).

As for your example: if you compare the amount of time people play in bands/sing in choirs (often without any direct money involved, e.g. around church or school) you've got an obvious example that people don't naturally "pay more for the things they value" (or see the need to pay or get payed at all). I value this very much and if someone was coming up and saying: pay up, I'd say - come on guys, let's do this on our own.

> this might easily change

This is a perfectly testable hypothesis in the free market. You can start a museum and market it, and see if you generate a profit. If you don't, then you have to fund it yourself (pay) or hope a handful of others value it and pay.

> often without any direct money involved, e.g. around church or school

There's much money involved in organizing people and having venues for whatever it is they do inside those venues. In these cases, the people paying for these organized singing events are what you would consider a patron. Churches and schools aren't free.

Modern instruments cost a lot of money, lots of labor to produce.

As far as just some friends getting together and signing because they enjoy it, that's obviously free. But it's not a service that someone else is providing to you, that's just something you're doing because you feel is has value. What would be more analogous would be having a civic center where people perform and.... people pay money to enter the venue and be entertained.

Some people greatly value libraries and museums. I don't. Those people should pay for them. If from time to time, I might want to use their services, I would gladly pay. If there was a membership required, perhaps I would enroll if I felt the cost was worth the benefit. This happens every day for many other industries.

Anyway, the root of the point was that people don't value librarians so they don't get paid as well as programmers. This is true. If it wasn't true, they would be paid more. I know this really hurts the socialist sensibilities of people on this site, but it's the cold hard truth.

> Modern instruments cost a lot of money, lots of labor to produce.

well, I'm not sure, how the trumpet from 1970 differs from a modern instrument (and yeah, people are still using these, where I play), but yeah, "lot of money, lots of labor" ><((((*>

And btw., one of the bands I'm in plays sometimes for money, but incurs no cost for membership or anything. It's just there.

> well, I'm not sure, how the trumpet from 1970 differs from a modern instrument

I consider a trumpet a modern instrument. How did you procure said trumpet? Did you pick it from the wild trumpet tree? No, of course not.

Someone mined the copper and zinc, refined them, someone combined them into the alloy brass, someone formed that brass into a trumpet. Of course, the trumpet wasn't conceived magically, it was something that went through countless iterations and revisions as instrument building matured. Then someone had to sell the trumpet to you. Unless you were at the factor-direct trumpet store, it was shipped to a retail location or warehouse where you then purchased it. Money and labor was invested just so you can obtain the trumpet.

How much labor goes into making a trumpet? Lots. Someone realized there was a market for trumpets and invested a good bit of capital to produce them. Improvements in manufacturing (aka, market efficiency) has resulted in high quality trumpets being produced cheaply, same as anything else. I'd say, the entire price structure of the trumpet (or much of anything, really) is entirely labor based. The metals exist in the ground. Digging them up is free (purchasing mineral rights notwithstanding) in terms of needed to pay the earth for them.

Much like libraries, there are places you can rent musical instruments like trumpets. These are often 'required' for education purposes, so why doesn't the government just have a trumpet library same as the book library? Don't you enjoy music? Why don't you demand taxes pay for instruments for the homeless that can't afford their own instruments? They're so enriching and such.

All those things exist because people voted with their money to make sure they exist. It's not because some greater good commanded their existence.

Everything wrong with HN, in a single comment.

a = how much `thing` benefits community

b = how much community values `thing`

a != b

In my statement I wasn't trying to center museums particularly. The OP was asking about nature conservation and museums/libraries are the aspect of preservation of the natural world or care of people and communities that I'm most familiar with. Our capitalist society doesn't place much value on these. [Update: wording]

Sustainable tourism is a good example that is helping add value to the natural world within the constraints of our capitalist society. When an animal is worth more alive than dead then local people are more likely to protect it. Gorilla Trekking in Rwanada and Uganda are examples where the tourism dollars had greatly reduced poaching in the parks. Sadly things are unravelling without tourism money coming into the country and poaching is on the rise.

Unfortunately there aren't going to be many jobs in this sector currently until COVID-19 is brought more under control.

The video games vs museums comparison is kinda terrible though, don't you think? I physically _can't_ just go to a museum after work like I can play a video game or watch a documentary. There's a huge number of literally free museums in my city, but I still have to cook for my family.

I don't mean to pick on video games just for being video games. The place I worked at was actually pretty great when I started: we made these great educational games but then got bought out by another business that changed our focus in a negative way. Like literature and other media, games can absolutely be a tool for good, for exploring all kinds of history and issues and raising awareness. They're also great for maintaining sanity in difficult times.

Simple, black and white mental models of the world may lead a person to draw shockingly wrong conclusions about the world. The pay in non-profit absolutely sucks. It sucks for a number of reasons, not some simple econ 101 reason. It sucks because there just isn't much revenue in asking people for donations. It sucks because all the leaders making pay decision are making sacrifices and feel like everyone else should be as well. It sucks because there are always more young, idealistic people to replace the burned out, cynical ones. It sucks because most of the work is low skilled. It sucks because non-profits are somewhat divorced from competitive pressures and are not forced to pay for absolutely the most talented people. It sucks because the kind of people who take these jobs are happy to take pay cuts.

> In a free market economy, this is an entirely false statement. People pay for the things they value. They more they value it, the more they pay.

Except this is an entirely false statement. In free market economy, there is no easy way for people to pay for many things they value, and know that they will receive the goods in return.

I may value a stable climate, clean air, a stable ecosystem, but the free market alone doesn't provide a way for me to pay what would be required and know that I will get a return, because unfortunately, such things require collective action.

You're making a very broad statement here. A more specific one would demonstrate the underlying problem. Our society relies on the free market to assign value to work, and the free market values video games higher than education or improving the environment that supports us. Capitalism doesn't really support the values people would at least claim to believe in.

Easy solution: Put everyone under highly-addictive drugs. The addiction will ensure that people value getting more of the drug far more than anything else, so we can consolidate the complete economy into producing drugs and nothing else. It's alright, cause we're producing what people value, right?

when I left Google to work in clean energy, I took a 50% pay cut. But, that's still more than enough money to live very happily on. IMO it's true what they say about there being no marginal improvement to happiness after ~80k.

Glad you're happy, I also want to get out of my current industry eventually. How much was 50% actually? For all I know, you could have went from 400k -> 200k. Do you live in a HCOL area?

Did you consider instead earn to give?

> my take is that our societies values are out of whack: the more your job benefits your community and the planet the less you will get paid, and vice versa. It's even worse for social services.

There is no "what society values" at work here, only supply and demand. What you witness is the fact that jobs that have intrinsic meaning and are more fulfilling are paid less well, because employees are willing to make that compromise. You could say the increase in happiness is priced in. Same reason game devs have bad working conditions, people still wait in line to work on them.

I think you are right about the market effects, but wrong about the causes. The way I see it, it's not that the employees are willing to make the sacrifice per se, it's that there are just more job applicants total. If the supply is increased, the price will drop. It's not that people want to work for a lower wage and then make up for it in the quality of the work, it's that since the population is broader, you find more people willing to work for a lower wage. You get the less frequent edges of the Gaussian curves because you have more people. You see this in zoos, hospitals, elder care, etc.

It's not a question of society being backwards, it's just a function of market based jobs. The cause is amoral and independent of the wishes of the people in the system, though the effects very much have moral relevance.

> There is no "what society values" at work here, only supply and demand

That sounds as if supply and demand were laws of nature like gravity or speed of light. They are nothing but forces we create (i.e. purely anthropogenic), and appear god-like only because what society solely values right now is the normativity of the market (as opposed to historical normativities such as the state power, religion, morality and so on).

> You could say the increase in happiness is priced in

That sounds further like market essentialism. "If market is paying you less it means you must be compensated in externalities". If only markets were that good at pricing in externalities, we wouldn't have climate change problems for example.

Markets are great tools for deciding the prices under specific conditions, but it is a grave misapplication to try and orient the entirety of human potential around them.

> They are nothing but forces we create (i.e. purely anthropogenic), and appear god-like only because what society solely values right now is the normativity of the market (as opposed to historical normativities such as the state power, religion, morality and so on).

What happens when you start to distort markets with top-down intervention is, in sum, decreased prosperity for all. Communism is just the most extreme example of this.

The market has failure modes that need to be actively corrected, like pricing in externalities or preventing monopoly abuse. But governments usually err on the over-interventionist side. When you look at the world you can’t help but notice this pattern, it is really that obvious.

> But governments usually err on the over-interventionist side. When you look at the world you can’t help but notice this pattern, it is really that obvious.

There can be 3 classes of errors with interventions; 1) intervening when it is not warranted (over-intervention), 2) not-intervening when required (under-intervening) and 3) intervening in a way that ends up not working out (intervention-outcome mismatch).

I think most of the errors are type 3, which are most liable to mis-identified as "over-intervention", but they are not. Mismatched interventions do not prove that there is a magical essence to real-world markets that render them infallible, dynamical, adaptive, self-correcting systems.

A simpler explanation to all this is that it is really hard to come up with the right interventions for the market, but also markets really need interventions when they need it.

60% of the time, they work everytime.

> I think most of the errors are type 3, which are most liable to mis-identified as "over-intervention", but they are not.

The thing is, there is no reliable way to prevent these errors, which means in general it is better to not interfere. If we had a way to ensure good decisions, we wouldn’t need some of the institutions that we have in our modern states.

One especially egregious example: California Assembly Bill 5. You could argue that this wasn’t just incompetence, but union corruption, costing many freelancers their livelihood. Another one was SF mayor London Breed‘s misguided attempt to regulate food delivery during the pandemic, which had the predictable result of cutting off regulated areas from service altogether.

You cannot let people decide these things that have no personal accountability and suffer no downside from this madness. It sure would be nice if it worked, but it doesn’t.

> 60% of the time, they work everytime.

Citation needed.

> The thing is, there is no reliable way to prevent these errors, which means in general it is better to not interfere.

That is not a forgone conclusion. It is only better not to intervene if the expected cost of intervention is higher than the expected cost of not intervening.

> One especially egregious example...

These are relatively minor regulations that you argue gone bad. What do you think would be the realized costs of these misapplications? Would they be in the same order of magnitude with for example the costs of not breaking up monopolies? I highly doubt it.

I get it, in countries like the US the government apparatus has a difficulty representing the welfare of the entirety of the nation, which tends to affect the interventions negatively, but that is not an argument against government intervention but an argument against the government itself, which is culpable of under-regulation just as much as over-regulation. (90's deregulatory Clinton laws on banks and telecommunications come to mind, which led to huge market consolidations and therefore market inefficiencies which we still suffer from.)

As we agree, markets sometimes need serious babysitting, so we ought to pick better babysitters.

> Citation needed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchorman:_The_Legend_of_Ron_B...

> You'll also take a hit in your reputation among other developers, most of whom seem to have gone into it for money

Exactly the environment and people I would like to get away from. I care little for what they think, but yes, I understand how some could see this as "career suicide".

> the more your job benefits your community and the planet the less you will get paid, and vice versa

It's not _completely_ crazy - if both jobs paid the same, most people would take one that benefits society.

The magnitude of the difference is crazy though.

Can you elaborate why you speculate a hit in reputation? I'm pretty sure it would be the opposite.

Meaningful domains in tech jobs are looked up to by peers in my experience.

This isn't my experience. There's a difference between signalling admiration and actual respect.

Of course there are plenty of good people out there, but in my experience the plurality, and probably the majority of FAANG peeps will be made uncomfortable by the implicit challenge to the morality of their choices. Even though they might signal support for your actions; privately dealing with the cognitive dissonance does often result in eroded respect. A common defense mechanism is to see themselves as better than you because you just couldn't take the pressure to work at a "world leader" company, after all if they aren't the best people making the best choices, why would they be paid so much? You just burned out because you couldn't make Level 5.

A friend who has always worked in NGOs/charitable trusts shared an interesting observation about all this.

She said that people in the top at these NGOs and trusts are usually get paid filthy rich like a CEO/Director would get paid but it pretty much ends there. Everybody else down the line are expected to expect and accept pittance. She said a salary negotiation among rank and file is frowned upon, especially by the people who are high up on the ladder and they are the same people who crib about not attracting top talent.

Wish passion alone could fill the belly and pay medical bills.

Yes there are jobs and yes the non-profit industry needs your talents. Software jobs in the industry fall into one of 4 buckets in my experience. Don't expect much career growth or pay. Most of the work is in support of fundraising. Be willing to work at a vendor that serves the non-profit industry.

- Web development. Nonprofits need websites. Sometimes they may have a dev on staff, usually they at least have a digital director that can work with devs at web dev vendors. These vendors are usually solely focused on the non-profit market.

- CRM. Non-profits fundraise and they need people to manage the donor database. Usually this is bought from a vendor that specializes in non-profit CRM and those vendors also have devs/DBAs.

- IT. Non-profits need IT to manage networks, phones and equipment. Often they work with IT vendors.

- Devs for conservation work. This is more rare. Still, some non-profits have staff scientists, GIS people, and devs to build out conservation tools, such as data collecting apps, data visualizations or other things. This is rare because most non-profits are trying to convince the government to do the science because the government has much more money and power to recruit. It's rare and maybe a bit of a vanity project to do any science out of the non-profit, though there are a couple of groups that do that.

In my personal experience working in nonprofits there is a tendency for organizations to have the actual technical work done by vendors rather than staff unless the work is central to the mission of the organization. There's a feeling that this is cheaper than trying to hire and maintain staff with those skills.

It may be less about it being cheaper, and more that you know what your budget is for a given year but perhaps not what it is three years from now. You can spend this year's budget with confidence and not worry about having to lay off your dev staff next year when donations dry up. It also requires management expertise to manage a software building team - not something a lot of non-profits have.

I learned from your perspective here. Thank you for sharing your experience.

Interesting, because this trade study could be conducted by an engineer and a manager in a small company and still have starkly different results in the weighing of concerns.

Most of my early career was solo. I recognize the importance of a good team, but as a business you (even non profits and myself solo) have to understand the bottom line for all stakeholders.

If anyone else could expand on this person's ideas, please do!

Check out https://enviro.work! I'm the founder and created the site because I felt similarly to you. Aligning personal values and your career is a great feeling

Thanks! From a cursory look I can't see anything that immediately applies to me but it's a good resource to find companies. Will take a deeper look later.

None of these seem to be software jobs though.

thanks

Nice work! May I suggest adding a more detailed page title? When I send or bookmark it, it just says "latest jobs"

Check out Tech Jobs for Good: https://techjobsforgood.com/?q=&impact_areas=Environment&imp...

Big NGOs also need technical people, too. Check out the Humane Society, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Compassion in World Farming, etc. They aren’t going to be the highest paying jobs and there are all sorts of downsides but it’s a way to use your skills to make a difference in the world.

That looks interesting, thanks!

scrolling through the non-JS accessible adverts: it's like 80% of (probably VC-funded) startups offering some vision of "we are making the world a better place" for their usual, "crappy" (yes, they are also advertising) capitalists dream of: - "aggressive ROI goals" [https://techjobsforgood.com/jobs/3172/]

Many would just need, at least me, a decent salary for sustaining comfortably (in my case that would be fine in just 50% of my CTC or even less) but a stellar medical insurance (yeah, I want that covered!) and work-life balance which also includes being treated and respected as a human being.

Not exactly conservation, but there's plenty of computational work (and funding!) in plant biology.

I do web development and data engineering for plant phenomics automation in a plant bio lab. Crop optimization (e.g., for abiotic stress resistance, reduced fertilizer requirements, atmospheric carbon sequestration, yield) basically requires digital surveillance infrastructure on the same scale we've (regrettably) developed for humans, except for plants. Nobody really understands how phenotypes develop as a function of genetic, physiological, and environmental factors; but we need to if we want to maintain the viability of agriculture in the face of climate change etc.

You won't get paid like you would in a more traditional software development position, but it's enough to live on. Let me know if you'd like more information.

I am interested to know details but I am in Pakistan. I work (Ed) on multiple technologies but mostly python these days for ETL and automation. Learning Go too. Check out http://adnansiddiqi.me

Hi Adnan. Unfortunately I'm only familiar with the situation in the U.S. Pakistan may have different agricultural practices and a different funding landscape. Here are a few links about the motivation and current state of the art if you want to read more.

[0]: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/327/5967/818

[1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pce.12107

[2]: https://academic.oup.com/jxb/article/66/18/5429/482901

[3]: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S13601385110020...

[4]: http://www.plantphysiol.org/cgi/doi/10.1104/pp.114.243519

There is a ton of software-oriented work involved, from robotics and embedded devices in the field, to data engineering (containerizing and automating pipelines in grid, cloud, and HPC environments), to web development (creating research portals), to simulation of growth processes and modeling yield as a function of genetic/physiological/environmental factors, etc. Python is very widely used for all of the above. Go not as much, but Singularity (Docker for HPC, basically) is written in Go iirc.

If you want to discuss more let me know and I'll contact you directly.

Sorry for the late response. What I meant that I wanted to know about remote working possibilities. If you could guide or help then let me know.

Your website says you studied science and have built software for spreadsheets and for 3D printing.

I work with oceanographers. There are many who get by with rudimentary programming skills but love the help of developers who can help them build tools to analyze and disseminate their data. They love spreadsheets because they don't know how to make databases.

Having mechanical or electrical engineering or CAD skills helps them design enclosures for instruments, having software skills helps them add autonomy.

However it is not a field where, at least as I've seen, engineers have free rein to improve processes simply for the sake of improving them.

You are right that research funding is tight and in most of the world it is getting tighter. Right now many projects are burning through funds while scientists babysit their kids; the research vessels are only now trying to resume operation.

A few years ago Bret Victor wrote a long and wonderful essay lamenting the lack of attention to climate change in the tech industry. No specific job opportunities, but it's a wonderful read about how technologists can contribute to solutions.

http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

I don’t know of any opportunities, but if anyone’s taking ideas for products in this domain then I would like an app or website that links volunteers with animal shelters, farmstays and other places that could use a few extra hands.

It could be like a combination of Airbnb and Couchsurfing etc. that serves a specific niche.

https://www.workaway.info is what you're looking for

Thanks. From a quick scan of the site and their safety information page, it seems they do not handle payments between users like Airbnb does, or do they?

And since they require an upfront membership fee, has anyone here used Workaway? How was your experience?

Yes, the membership fee is a bit annoying but I paid because my girlfriend and I were planning on volunteering abroad - then the pandemic hit.

So I haven't actually done one of these workaways.

> it seems they do not handle payments between users

Most of the offerings you will find on there will only provide you with housing, maybe food, in exchange for labour. Some do pay, but I strongly suspect that it is in cash.

> Most of the offerings you will find on there will only provide you with housing, maybe food, in exchange for labour. Some do pay, but I strongly suspect that it is in cash.

Ah I do not require payment for myself, I just thought some hosts may request payment for accommodation or the initial moving-in costs (paperwork etc.)

There is this development company that’s doing good work (the “improve people’s live in developing country kind of development”):

https://catalpa.io/work-with-us/

They are based in East Timor and were founded by an Aussie and an American (U.S.) and they allow remote work.

That looks very interesting, thank you. And they need a backend dev!

Start investigating biodiversity informatics. There are a lot of different aspects in this space: genomics, georeferencing, image processing for feature extraction, etc, as well as typical distributed systems infrastructure.

As a Python developer I once used BioPython for rNA/DNA related data exploration and liked it. Could not figure out how I could explore this niche further due to lack of domain knowledge and a clear path.

Some tangentially relevant observations based on volunteering at a raptor conservation trust in the UK.

The trust maintains a visitor park that provides bird displays and experience days for the general public. The gate takings and donations fund conservation activities in the UK (raptor nest boxes, bird hospital, bird surveys) and overseas activities (e.g. reducing poisoning of wild birds by game poachers). The Trust itself is very much an outdoor organisation, with key staff supporting bird care and site infrastructure. There is a small back office that supports ops, marketing and merchandising, using COTS software. Academic research is conducted but in conjunction with local universities, which is where data crunching, etc, happens. There are a small number of on-site student placements, primarily for those in biology / zoology courses, and the placement activities seem fairly practical in nature. I suspect that most similar organisations follow a similar pattern, with a relatively small COTS software footprint and a focus on practical tasks rather than software development / data analysis.

That said, I started volunteering to support an office-based marketing function: management of a massive photo library and video editing to support marketing and outreach functions. After six months of doing this, COVID-19 happened and most office staff started WFH, with office-based volunteering suspended because it involves hot-desking. When the park started to reopen, I switched to COVID-related activities such as queue management (‘space marshal’) and cleaning. Although some tasks are menial, I’ve learned much more about how the trust works on a daily basis and I’ve got to know the key bird staff much better.

One of my key insights, as an ex-software professional, is how much I didn’t know about how conservation actually works, and how specific conservation organisations actually operate. But getting hands-on with some of the less glamorous tasks is a good apprenticeship and a way of building trust in the industry, if you have a long-term interest in directly supporting conservation.

Thanks, that was insightful and encouraging.

Bay Area listing service, world scope?

http://www.greenjobs.net/

ps- contact them and help with the cert!

Find a grad student working on research projects in the field. Every area of focus will have different requirements but almost all wildlife related field work involves some form of data entry that involves transfer from data in a notebook to excel or some CAD program. Challenges include no access to cell data, wet environments, battery management, etc. That being said, if it cuts down on tedium, most researchers will find a way to pay for it.

I've seen a plant identification app disrupt the process of species identification with field guides. I suspect that there are a lot of tedious classification projects that professors assign to undergrad researchers (find photos with wildlife) that can be entirely automated.

There are several startups working on conservation/anti-poaching initiatives using image recognition and/or drones.

https://airshepherd.org/

https://wildlifeprotectionsolutions.org/

https://observer.com/2017/05/artificial-intelligence-can-sto...

I applied to and was interviewed for a non-profit in the area that serves to connect volunteers with non-profits that need their help. Maybe they just really didn't like me in the interview (I didn't get that impression at all) but even offering my senior software developer skills for free to any non-profit, I have not heard back with anyone wanting my help and it's been months.

https://oceanmind.global/careers/

I'm about to start at Optimal (in London). It's not exactly conservation, but I like to think it's not far from it. Some details on the Who's Hiring post [1]. Best of luck otherwise.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702401

I wouldn't say I "write software" but I have a computing job in the field of animal/landscape ecology research with a pure CS background. I guess I'd say it's part scripting ETL type jobs, some parallel processing stuff, and ... I guess I'll call it DevOps to keep it short.

Make friends with people in national-level government organizations (whatever would be most like USGS wherever you live) or university "geomatics" type people. A good start would be those involved with remote sensing (satellite [radar or optical]/drone/other sensors). These are the people that know of or are sitting in these types of jobs.

If you want a web dev type job find a way to get experience with scripting for ArcGIS Portal.

It depends on the country, probably.

I would suggest you to assure first a well paid job and use your free time for volunteer activities. Nobody should be doing science before 50 Yo. Not at this moment when postdocs are being paid 300 euro/month. Is committing economical suicide and starting a family first and having kids should be your priority.

About oceanography. If you can read spanish (if not, you can always google-translate it) you may find interesting this recent piece of news.

https://elpais.com/ciencia/2020-06-30/dimite-la-cupula-del-m...

Your mileage may vary

you missed two 0s for our postdocs annual net salary. But hey, generalization is so great.

And while I understand that in most parts of the world, it's paid a lot worse and you might have problems making ends met, I don't really get, how you want to solve these problems (interlinked with nowadays capitalism) by getting more kids (wow, just 30t of CO2/year more "output") and helping the 1% redistribute an even larger fraction of the wealth to themselves (which are imho the only really "richly"-paying jobs.)

Some people want to have kids

yes? if you want to have kids by 30, a PhD probably isn't right for you. A career in science might as well probably not work out. So what, not everyone needs to procreate?!

Do I need to sacrifice my children to have the privilege to be allowed to solve your problems?

Okay. Good bye, science.

Not sure about preserving nature and animals directly, but there are lots of software jobs in clean energy (I'm hiring SWEs for Kevala right now). These could indirectly have a big impact on preserving nature via slowing climate change.

If you’re in the UK look at SMRU. http://www.smru.st-andrews.ac.uk/

active group, good work, and they’re a semi-commercial autonomous wing of st. andrews.

Remote sensing is being used as a tool to help fight deforestation by a few startups and tech companies. There aren't many jobs yet as I think it is still mostly an academic area but it's something to look into.

This is not directly answering your query but you might sometimes be surprised at the positions available at major companies that work towards your goal of nature conservation. For example, I had a stint at Siemens working on an project that managed customer site environments. This meant doing things to help them conserve energy and helping them save money by reducing power waste. I am guessing Siemens doesn't come to mind as an environmental pioneer in spite of their work on wind power, etc. but there you are: it was functionally one of the more gratifying jobs I had.

> However, I've been wondering if there is a demand for software in these projects?

No, there's not a demand for software in this arena. All this stuff is dominated by grants and politically charged funds.

When I was working in that field any 'software development' I did was alongside everything else I did. Most of that was online database and website work and some scripts to make analyzing data easier. I still spent far more time doing field work, writing reports and hustling for grant money though.

May I ask where that was? That sounds like a good deal to me, to be honest with you - I don't mind getting my hands dirty - it breaks up the monotony of development sometimes.

Nature and animal conservation is a political issue. The best use of your skills would be to aid in the lobbying efforts for tighter regulations and more money for developing countries.

You might save a tiger, but in the year it took you to save him, Brazil cut down 8 million hectares of the rain forest for palm oil.

Lobbyists require data. Existing wildlife laws require enforcement. Political support requires mobilization. All of the above can be helped by smart, enthusiastic developers. If more people help out, we can save the tiger and the forest.

All of this requires political support. You can't collect the data if you are not allowed to or if your results are silenced. Enforcement requires political will, otherwise the criminals never get prosecuted or flee to their home countries.

Until we get "the establishment" to care about this, doing any work in this field is simply for vanity or to make you feel good.

> doing any work in this field is simply for vanity or to make you feel good

Making blanketing, dismissive claims about everyone who works in a specific field is a great way to end the conversation.

Why is this downvoted? We need people to do the actual work but we also need people to support the political projects to enable people to do the actual work.

I assume it was downvoted because it attempts to reduce a complex issue down to a single dimension while providing nothing of substance for the OP. It's also misinformed, by creating the false dichotomy of saving a tiger or saving a forest, and by ignoring that wildlife conservation is a lightning rod for public support that leads to wider initiatives.

I worked on a forestry grant platform for a while. It was interesting, but at the end of the day it was the same software problems I solve everywhere else

Hey, we are working on this www.bexbox.cc

Drop me an email at nhh@downforce.com. We don't have a framework for hiring at the moment but might do very soon.

I've sent you an email :)

I would have to imagine a large amount of work in the animal conservation space would be in the hardware market.

What country is this?

I am in the UK but I am willing to relocate.

I would not bother with the US if you would need work visa sponsorship. No non-profit I've ever worked with ever had the resources to do that. You might have better luck with consulting where they don't need to relocate or sponsor you.

droneseed

inaturalist

Cornell ornithology lab

eesa

Caltech JPL

USFWS

MBARI

blue point conservation science

NOAA

Sitka technology group

conservation x labs

sail drone

uw escience institute

greenridge sciences

Oregon carbon

m science (marine research)

Tortuga agtech

conservation metrics

Thank you for listing these. It's a great starting point.

I always find it easier to find companies once I have a list to work from, even if they're not in the geographic area that I'm looking for

A few thoughts:

- https://4returns.earth/network/job-listings/ is in the regenerative ag space - lists some tech jobs if you search for them. (e.g. try https://4returns.earth/network/job-listings/?searchval=devel... )

- Conservation is only one area, and the term 'conservation' itself is a frame I've been more critical of after reading papers like https://www.uv.es/jgpausas/papers/Pausas-Millan-2019_BioScie... which have been making me think some of the problems we have might be more with abandoning land for the city. Another frame of thinking about about is how/where you want to live and go from there - I'm really questioning whether one should live in "today's society" - that doesn't mean going off-grid entirely but living in a way that's local/bioregional oriented..

- I'm skeptical of the tech-focused effort on only looking at co2 because it doesn't account for the other problem areas (google "planetary boundaries framework" to learn about biodiversity collapse/nutrient flows and how those are much bigger problems), but there's the airminers folks: http://www.airminers.org . Again, while this falls more in the tech frame I'm not sure I'd spend time on it.

- While I disagree with some of the recommendations around 'effective altruism', it's another path worth considering if your survival requires making money at the moment. You could say, work at a mapping or weather-related company spend then leverage the experience later on for more direct action. At the moment I haven't quit my dayjob yet but am taking an "Ecosystem Restoration Design" course (https://www.gaiaeducation.org), donated to various things, and participate in a study group around these topics (https://earth-regenerators.mn.co) and feel like that so far has helped in developing a perspective before jumping into anything.

- almost forgot, Patagonia's Action Works seems to have a really good platform for finding tech volunteering on environmental projects: https://www.patagonia.com/actionworks/

Thanks, that's very useful! Will read through those links.

> developing a perspective before jumping into anything

Probably the biggest takeaway here, for me. Each domain is more complex than it appears on the surface.

You mean making conserves?

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