Ask HN: Jobs in Software/Technology Activism?

Not sure where you are based, but I've considered (and interviewed with) the US Digital Service. This is going to be nonpartisan work to help the US Federal government implement new technology.

When I talked to them, examples including building out web applications allowing veterans to apply for benefits more easily, and other things like that. Not exactly earth shaking, but really has the opportunity to improve the interactions between people and the government.

When I interviewed, they did have limits on salaries (due to laws about what the government can pay) and were only doing 2-4 year stints. It's been a while, so not sure where things stand now.

More here:

https://18f.gsa.gov/

https://www.usds.gov/

The salary ranges seem very good to me, according to what's on Glassdoor.

Since 6 months, I have my dream job as per my personal belief value system: making software for the public health industry in my state. I loved the idea (and still do) of being a public servant making best in class software that benefit society through better healthcare services but the reality of the job is vastly different to what I imagined. The reality is the way we build software is broken beyond repair. As an example, my current project which run in the tenth of millions of dollars out of tax money have 0 unit test because my boss and colleagues see automated test in general as a waste of time.

All in all, the culture in here makes it very hard to improve anything as most people I work with have spent their entire professional life in a bubble where every problem is solve through shoehorning various products and framework made by oracle. Ultimately as much as I would love to better use tax money to provide better healthcare services for my state, I'm not in a position to shift the culture.

"All in all, the culture in here makes it very hard to improve anything as most people I work with have spent their entire professional life in a bubble where every problem is solve through shoehorning various products and framework made by oracle."

Government jobs tend to be very secure too. It's possible some people just see it as an easy paycheck and don't want to rock the boat.

That kind of job isn’t that different to get than other jobs but it is a smaller universe. It is like looking for a job in a smaller town or losing for a more senior job which is higher up the pyramid and less prevalent.

So you might need to learn more skills, get better at interviewing, accept worse pay and other conditions, expect to take longer, spend a few years developing industry connections, etc.

The side hustle approach is not ‘settling for less’ but it is the closest thing to a royal road. In the nonprofit sector people are often frustrated with the slow pace of building consensus, getting grants, etc. Today the metropolitan museum of art has a quarter of a million public domain images and an API limit of 80 requests/sec (!) but if you came around a few years ago asking for that they’d have told you there was nothing they could do without getting a grant.

(It seems they got a really big one!)

So your options are to do things on your own that don’t need the grant, spend years getting the grant, walk on the scene when the grant is in.

None of those are easy even if you don’t see other people who succeeded doing the work. If it is your mountain to climb it is your mountain to climb.

If you’re interested in getting into civic tech I can’t recommend this book enough: A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide by Cyd Harrell (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1040593).

I read it about 6 months into my first civic tech job and it was so useful I wish I read it before I started my job search!

https://idealist.org might be a good starting point (it’s a large job board for nonprofit jobs, and includes tech jobs)

I’ve seen tech jobs posted there that were at the EFF and ACLU, among many others.

Also, I just saw this go by (Senior fullstack engineer at MoveOn): https://front.moveon.org/careers/?gh_jid=3331988

Related thought: I'm a person that is really drawn to humanitarian and mission driven causes, but not interested in participating in any kind of activism. When looking for mission-driven software engineering jobs, I find it incredibly frustrating that almost all of the ones I see posted are activism related. Why is it so hard for software engineers to work for humanitarian causes without working for activists?

What is it that you think defines "activism"? I too don't want to just be another wannabe influencer type, but I also want the space to have critical discussions with other people and not simply do as I'm told by upper management.

A lot of dictionary definitions mention "campaigning for change", which lines up with what I mean. I perceive activism as trying to raise awareness or get attention for an issue. I'd much rather work directly on the issues that an activist would raise awareness for. To use environmental causes as an example: doing activism to raise awareness or support for clean water doesn't interest me, but working with a team that is developing a new water filtering technology does interest me.

There are also the negative connotations of extreme activism, which I find off-putting, like anger, riots, terrorism, etc. I want nothing to do with any of that kind of approach, even if it's supposedly "in support" of a cause I care about. But I don't think all activism is necessarily negative.

Try searching for jobs at the Open Document Foundation. They were looking for developers few months ago.

Or search for other FOSS jobs here: https://www.fossjobs.net

HTH

My last job was at a credit card company, which really wore on my over time. So much so that I had to take time off afterwards to re-center myself. I would encourage you to not rule out the possibility of working for a for-profit company. I applied to a handful of companies that I considered a benefit to everyone (the company, their customers, and society as a whole). These companies exist, but you have to be willing to wait for the openings. My current company is making a product that will side the transition to renewable energy, and we’re all really excited about that. We’re also hiring, but I’m sure there’s a lot of company that meet that criteria.

https://www.virtual-peaker.com/talent

Sounds like you might fit into civic tech: https://civictech.guide/

Great suggestion! Good list of job boards on that site: https://civictech.guide/listing-category/job-boards/

What do you think about strengthening labor unions & reducing wage theft of gig workers? Those are some of the results of the work we do at wrapbook, and something that I take pride in. But it's not maybe as "focused" as what you're after, as internally we're very warm and laid back.

But if it sounds interesting, we're hiring for Engineering(Rails) & Data; Email me at russell@wrapbook.com if you want to chat more.

Regardless, there are a plethora of nonprofits (FSF, EFF, AP, etc..) that need expertise, so you could try targeting orgs that do work you favor specifically.

Could you elaborate on how you are strengthening labor unions and reducing wage theft of gig worker? Both of those things are very much of interest to me, but I'm struggling a bit to connect the dots precisely.

Sure!

The entertainment industry is timecard based - and many of the workers are unionized. This means things like, if they don't get time to take a lunch but work over 6 hours, they're due a certain penalty from the production company for the meal they never had; or if they only got 4 hours of sleep last night before being called back to set - they're owed another penalty to compensate them based on a formula of invaded hours. This in addition to things like retirement benefits that need to be calculated, tracked, and paid into.

Each union, and different roles within unions, and even different cities and states (california especially), have different terms and rates and formulas defined; but currently actually meeting those requires a team of specialists to "breakdown" the time for the given workers union/state/agreement. It's hard, and without that team many production companies just wing it - and some have been making incorrect/noincompliant payments to their workers for years.

At wrapbook, we're automating all of those agreements. There is no guesswork when you submit a timecard - which is great for workers, because they know they'll get paid what they are owed; and good for (most) production companies because they WANT to be compliant, but it's hard to do with all of the requirements involved, and good for unions because they know we are ensuring every T is crossed and I is dotted in compliance with the agreements they defined and everyone involved agreed to.

We do other things as well to make sure payments get paid and that they go where they're supposed to go, another area where there has been problems for workers.

I hope that adds some clarity.

Do a fellowship in Congress, learn the ropes and if you don’t want to stay on the Hill, you’ll still have had a unbeatable crash course on how politics works. https://www.techcongress.io/

Ignorance is bliss

Not a coder, but had similar feelings back in 2017. Didn't see a realistic path to full-time employment that checked all the boxes. What I did was started my own "group," aligned my group with the EFF'S Alliance, and started working on issues locally in my spare time.

4 years on, what seems possible to me now would be to have a non-profit that is capable of doing hard and soft work for community groups and non-profits at discount, while also offering market rate services to paying customers. Especially as a one-person shop, this seems achievable and sustainable in theory.

Have you applied at iFixit?

https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair

"Twitter and Teargas" by Zeynep Tufekc (available in pdf I believe) addresses the issues of how technology works with social movements. Although not directly addressing open source, the principles are applicable. I have two active projects and am looking for help. arthurgarbanzo@gmail.com

What are the projects?

Consider Wikipeidia. Open and free service that is incredibly valuable to the world. Ethical revenue model that still makes lots of money. I've thought before that would be a cool place to work.

According to one of Wikipedia's founders, it's no longer a free and open platform. There are politically strategic topics where no arguments/edits are tolerated other than what fits the mainstream viewpoint.

The owner of the question definitely wants to push things in a different direction than mainstream.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0P4Cf0UCwU

you can look for a job in the real estate sector. Prestige Group's newest project Prestige Great Acres is a good opportunity. https://www.prestigegreatacres.com/

Take whatever job pays the most, use some of the money to donate to people making a difference in the areas you care about.

This seems somewhat backwards to me. If the job that paid the most was part of the problems I was trying to solve by donation (for example) wouldn't that discredit this strategy? Not to mention the old saying, "if you want something done right, do it yourself" comes to mind. How am I really going to vet the donations without being on the team?

>> If the job that paid the most was part of the problems I was trying to solve by donation (for example) wouldn't that discredit this strategy?

No. They're going to hire someone to do the job, you just need to do incrementally worse than whoever would be your replacement and it's a net positive for your cause. Easy to do in most organizations.

>> How am I really going to vet the donations without being on the team?

How are you going to do that with being on the team? Most places you're a tiny part of an organization. There are plenty of ways to vet charities and other organizations to make sure they are doing what they claim to be doing.

And don't forget that being in such a position allows you to be a whistleblower if there's some shady stuff going on.

Our industry is doing quite well (If you leave the ad-economy out - basically Google/Facebook)

Cloud computing, Open Source Software in commercially feasible way and so on. Tremendous growth and innovation is underway.

We do have a problem of wokeness, left in SF destroying the city, teacher unions hurting competitiveness of kids, police unions stopping all police reform in California.

Basically just like USSR, all the do-gooders - claiming to do good in the name of the “people” are the problem.

So, don’t be a protester - do real work, build something, be the solution. Create a small open source project of value. This is really really hard - that’s why do many people protest instead - that is easy.

I honestly agree in part with a lot of your sentiment. But the truth is, I can do both. I can work hard at my day job to, as you say, "do real work", while at the same time standing up for my beliefs.

Just because there are protesters you disagree with doesn't make protest itself a bad thing. I fear the larger issue is that there aren't enough mixed groups of protesting individuals to spark real discussions. But what do I know, I'm still trying to get more involved...

I wonder how many 'small open source projects' really have any value in terms of police reforms, teachers unions, etc...

If you're interested in making a difference I think it's better to look at career resources like https://80000hours.org/ than trying to think of open source software that will, in all honestly, probably make 0 difference.

I feel like this comment is too negative about OSS. My ideal job would sponsor as much open source code as possible. Given the focus on civic and public service in these threads, I think public code is a very natural fit.

To be clear I prefer OSS over closed software. I contribute in my spare time and I've worked on OSS projects in my career.

What I'm saying is there are far better methods to do Good in your career or spare time than starting an OSS project. I don't have stats here but I'd wager 99% of OSS projects die by the way side and 99% of those aren't providing any sort of tangible use in relation to problems mentioned in this post.

Happy to be proved wrong - working on effective things is the driving force of my career.

I think you're coming at this from the wrong angle. Instead of looking for a job in technology activism, I think you should just find a job in technology and then be an activist.

I've had a number of jobs in technology and I also mention asking about how people use their free time. I however would like to understand what targeted roles are out there, in case I find one that's a good fit for me.

Of course you need experience to be an effective activist, otherwise you're much more likely to simply be a microphone for someone else.

Just find a job in oil and then be an environmentalist.

>.<