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Comment by adhesive_wombat | Hacker News Reader

> companies they’ve worked for are actually providing any benefit to society and are perhaps even a net negative

Right? When I started out, 1/3 of my interviews were with gambling machine companies, another was with a company that only existed to arbitrage betting odds for their own profit, and one was some kind of quasi-AI surveillance thing.

A lot of GDP is generated on completely parasitic activities, and you can do a lot worse for society than running a "soft" business ethically and happily.

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I'm doing that now.

For free.

I've written infrastructure software that has, without a doubt, saved a lot of lives, and will continue to do so, for many years to come. I've been working on a client implementation that leverages that software, for the last couple of years. It's approaching ship (but still a ways off). One of the goals of that project, is to help train a few young friends in the ins and outs of what it takes to create shipping software.

These projects would be worth a lot of dosh, if I were to hang a sticker on them.

But I did them for no money.

Society (especially US society) does not value vocations that help others. Teachers are incredibly well-educated, but treated like dirt. The same with social workers. We value individuality and selfishness. In fact, we actually deify these qualities.

It's an issue, but one I have no ideas how to solve. I think that the right to spend money on what we want is an important one, and I won't gainsay anyone else's right to do that. If driving around in a Model X and having a model (of any gender identification) on your arm is your priority, and you have worked hard for that, then Godspeed and good luck. I have different priorities, and the story of how I got them is long and winding. Not so many folks have backgrounds like mine, and not many that do, have developed priorities like mine.

I am grateful to be in the position I'm in.

> Society (especially US society) does not value vocations that help others. Teachers are incredibly well-educated, but treated like dirt. The same with social workers. We value individuality and selfishness. In fact, we actually deify these qualities.

What about doctors? Nurses? Tenured professors? Blanket statements are fun but probably miss the more nuanced issue.

Systemically public education is broken leading to us undervaluing teachers in many public school districts. The same for social workers -- the US doesn't have robust social safety nets so social workers can provide less help. Perhaps that's why they're not viewed as favorably? The same budget constraints apply to their salaries, making it so the more qualified ones go into private practice perhaps?

>Nurses?

I know a lot of nurses. They make decent (not outrageous) money, but their work environment is frequently a shitshow. Many are quitting.

>Tenured professors?

I know a few. I guess some of them are paid well, but they often make a lot less than their students. They do have job security (like tenured teachers).

Doctors don't make money because they help people. They make money, because people with money think what they do is important.

[UPDATE]: Note the downvotes. I didn't post anything that attacked anyone. I made a "blanket statement" that has been made millions of times, and is, regardless, quite true.

I also talked about some projects that I've done (a few that are easily accessible, for anyone interested). These were not mentioned to be "snotty." They are simply what I have done, out of Gratitude and for deeply personal reasons.

Don't like to look at things that make us uncomfortable? Join the club. However, it often makes us better people.

> I know a lot of nurses. They make decent (not outrageous) money, but their work environment is frequently a shitshow. Many are quitting.

You're conflating recent and broad economic trends with the specific conditions of a specific profession. Millions of Americans all over the country have been quitting and changing careers (it even has a name: "the Great Resignation"). This doesn't mean their conditions are shit, but rather that pandemic-era economic forces have been reshuffling our economy.

My fiancee is a nurse. Conditions are absolute shit, especially in states where the patient to nurse ratio isn't legally protected.

I think that the Great Resignation is even more obvious in nursing because of nursing contracts. Nurse contracting became really popular when the pandemic started because the hospitals were overwhelmed and contracts were ridiculously lucrative. Hospital management is always so short sighted that they just don't want to raise the pay of their core stuff. Core staff is paid on average $35/hour. Nursing contracts start at $60 and can go much higher. This has lead to the situation where the core staff resigns en masse and goes to work as a contractor (sometimes even at the same hospital).

The hospital where my fiancee is contracting now has literally 0 core nursing staff left. There is not a single full time nurse employed in the whole hospital. Problem is that the contractors leave after ~3 months and go look for a more high paying contract so they are rarely at the same hospital for a long time.

The result is that you don't have a single nurse in the hospital that actually knows that hospital's procedures, doctors, people to call, storage lockers, and all of that institutional knowledge that you need to have to be effective.

Nurses are treated like complete shit and work in dreadful conditions in the UK too (public and private), and that certainly predates the pandemic.

Thank you. I see so much that people conflate some issues has having been a direct result of the pandemic. Its like, nope, the pandemic just made the problem surface, but the problem has been there for a lot longer. With nursing, it is keeping the nurses understaffed and hiring travel nurses when they are suddenly backed into a corner. Many hospital systems have been under-staffing nurses for years, it just didn't become apparent until the pandemic. The nurses at my local hospital went on strike a year BEFORE COVID over this exact issue.

What he's describing is by no means a recent trend!

> We value individuality and selfishness. In fact, we actually deify these qualities... (especially US society)

I don't think it's "US society", as much as it is urban and suburban society which has become dominant over the last few decades. Traditionally in the US, people were a lot more communal--neighbors and families would share farm equipment, help each other through busy seasons, watch each other's farm while the other was away, help raise each other's kids, etc. Maybe the problem isn't our Americanism, but rather the lack of it, and maybe the solution is figuring out how to integrate more of it into our modern society rather than doubling down on our increasingly isolated, me-first sub/urban existences.

The other half of this picture is that the old farming communities have died, and the whole of the American Midwest is now a giant machine for the industrial production of food, inhabited by just a few people, who maintain the giant sprinklers and combines that stride across the depopulated landscape.

This isn’t true where i hail from (also, which parts of the midwest rely on sprinklers? I’ve only seen them in the west and southern plains. Maybe Kansas and the western Dakotas?

The view from I80 across Nebraska and Iowa.

My grandparents town in the south used to have a vibrant down town with local everything. Then walmart came and wiped out all the stores, then farms became ever less practical financially, all the kids moved away, then the local restaurants closed. Now there's a few streets of closed businesses and a few restaurants hanging on. This is why all those people from the small towns feel the apocalypse is on them, there is no viable financial path for people there anymore, and they have to support politicians who say only they can fix it, but end up hurting them even more. This same thing happened to my great grandparent's farmland and small town in a town 500 miles away.

> But I did them for no money

And I assume you acquired the means to do that for free by.. doing the opposite for long enough to buy you freedom to do so? Or marry/born rich?

> > But I did them for no money

> And I assume you acquired the means to do that for free by.. doing the opposite for long enough to buy you freedom to do so? Or marry/born rich?

By working my butt off for over 30 years, making a rather humble salary, but never living large, avoiding personal debt like the plague, driving old cars, or crappy company cars, living in apartments and a small house, saving 25-40% of my earnings, investing in conservative, yet still a bit aggressive, funds, and then, after leaving a job I stayed at for nearly 27 years (at a famous Japanese imaging corporation, that makes optical equipment), being rejected (sometimes, quite rudely) by every place I applied at, for being too old.

The first project I mentioned was done over a period of ten years, as a "side project," while I worked as an Engineering Manager (a job I hated). I did it because my life was, literally, saved, by an organization, and I wanted to Give Back.

There are many reasons to do things that don't involve avarice, ego, anger, or cynicism. I want to make the world a better place. My resources are limited, but I have some ideas on ways to multiply my impact.

Thanks. Sounds like a ride. Glad you're able to have space to do work well-aligned with your values.

I'm finding it really hard to do. Even if I wanted to make the personal sacrifice (and thus sacrifice my future children's stability and environment..) for more virtuous pursuits for far less compensation, I have a hard time believing in any organization's ability to affect meaningful change.

I'm trying to start small by helping my one friend who is a doctor to streamline her office tech. I think I could give her 20% of her time back performing repetitive tasks.

> I'm trying to start small by helping my one friend who is a doctor to streamline her office tech. I think I could give her 20% of her time back performing repetitive tasks.

Sounds like a worthy cause. The ten-year project that I mentioned was actually ready to go, after a couple of years. All the rest of the time, was spent, talking about it, and trying to help people use it, until it went viral, and was taken over by a fairly accomplished team.

Thanks to them, it has become a lot bigger than I could have made it.

Awesome. If I may ask: what was this project?

I don’t really mention it in public, but it’s no secret. If you visit the littlegreenviper.com Web site, I tell the origin story, under “Miscellany.”

If you contact me, I’m happy to share it. It’s aimed at a very specific demographic.

> I have a hard time believing in any organization's ability to affect meaningful change.

Organisations are generally pretty shit at achieving anything.

But the good news is that individuals can and do make a difference and ultimately change things. It's the small wins that count. Changing one person's habits. Getting one more friend to drop BigTech. Getting one teacher to rethink the effect of over-connectedness on our children. Showing one person the problem of e-waste and seeing them jail-break an old phone instead of buying a new one.

You overcome the myth of "the they" (the hordes of mindless "users" who just want convenience uber-alles that we always hear about on HN) one real person at a time.

Then you start to see friends and colleagues reflecting good values back at you. Help your doctor friend streamline her time with real computing tools, but also make it clear that you're not a charity, or a mug and that what you're doing comes with a message that you expect her to pass on. The health message about harmful technology [1] should resonate with doctors. Encourage her politely to change her lifestyle just as you would commit to changing your diet and exercise if she told you to.

[1] https://digitalvegan.net

> Help your doctor friend [...] but also make it clear that [...] what you're doing comes with a message that you expect her to pass on

I don't really agree with this part. You can't demand that another adopt your morals, certainly not genuinely by offering conditional help. I avoid people like this, because they think they've figured out what's best for someone else and judge everyone who doesn't think the same.

Just aim for the highest good, and course correct since chances are you don't know what that really is. Others will join or oppose you, that's feedback.

Doctors aren’t exactly starving for business, hope you are getting compensated, even if it’s minimal. You it would cost the doctor 10x if they hired a software shop to do the work.

It would cost 10x, and thus they never do. They instead can only pay old crusty companies for software that's passed through all regulatory hoops to which they provide shit support.

I'm not trying to replace that company with my free labor. Mostly looking for ultra low hanging fruit - like scripted replies to FAQs that burn 15 mins/day replying to.

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