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Comment by splittingTimes | Hacker News Reader

Humanities supposedly most brilliant minds work on the next e-billing system, AI on how to sell more crap that nobody really needs, keep a glorified message board afloat or enable the cancer that is advertisment.

They should work on how to address the climate catastrophe, the waste/recycling problem, food security, sustainable agriculture and land/water use, medical devices/health care or how to fix the broken participatory political system that has led us to the multifaceted crisis we all find us in.

None of the companies named in that article solve any of the existential threads we as species at large or society in the small face and yet they pay the highest salaries and we are supposed to chase those.

This adds to the dark and heavy ball of despair in my stomach more than anything.

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> They should work on

They work on what society rewards them to work on. Attach massive guaranteed funding to companies that solve this problems and it will attract smart people competing for it.

That's a spin, and a bad one. First, it isn't society that rewards them, it's private companies and investment bankers. Second, you limit reward to monetary compensation. Third, people are not forced to take the best paying jobs. Doing so is selfish, which is the GP's point.

> Third, people are not forced to take the best paying jobs.

Dunno if you’ve seen the prices for even single family houses in the Netherlands?

Anything less than €100k is impossible if you plan to own a house.

100k salary or 100k house?

> Second, you limit reward to monetary compensation.

Only someone who has no issue with money can say that. Get off your high horse.

> Third, people are not forced to take the best paying jobs. Doing so is selfish, which is the GP's point.

Sure they are, if they want to live comfortably in life.

> That's a spin, and a bad one. First, it isn't society that rewards them, it's private companies and investment bankers

That is society. Private companies make money by making products/services for society. Investment bankers are investing your money, public retirement money, etc. Society generally doesn’t want its retirement money in funds with negative returns.

Pretending that what people pay for is not by and large what people are supporting is completely out of touch with reality. This is just classic stated preferences vs revealed preferences. People claim they want to solve world hunger and climate change; but when it comes to what they actually do with their money, they spend it on nicer houses, iphones, cars, and retirement.

> Third, people are not forced to take the best paying jobs. Doing so is selfish, which is the GP's point.

That’s a bullshit position to take unless you know what the person does with the money. A Googler who pulls down 400k a year and gives away 200k of it to effective charities is much better than someone who works for some pet project NGO.

While Google and Facebook's fundamental business model is ads, they don't invest their R&D percentage wise as how much they make from ads.

Google at least does pursue a lot of moonshots, and is by all accounts the closest to true self driving cars.

Both tried to bring internet access to parts of the world that never had it.

Apple changed the world with the iPhone and is trying to do it again with AR/VR devices.

Amazon leads the pack in cloud computing, which itself is a massive force multiplier for other tech innovation AND a sustainable energy use bonanza (Cloud platform are massively more efficient with energy usage than individually operated bespoke data center solutions).

While I agree with you in a lot of specific situations (especially everything with crypto), I do think a lot of big tech companies ARE trying to make a meaningful dent in big societal problems

You can build an advertisement tracking system unilaterally and release it to the world. You don't need permission to do so.

On the other hand, fixing the climate, recycling, agriculture, the political, system, etc. require you to convince other people to change their beliefs and habits. You also might need to raise prices on things they hold dear (e.g. carbon tax) or tell them to stop doing something they find convenient. These are hard problems.

Here's a list of companies that work on sustainability where you can work as a software developer:

https://github.com/pogopaule/awesome-sustainability-jobs

As individuals, and even as companies, we can't do much. Worrying about it is just stressing for no benefit to anyone.

Governments, elected by the citizens, need to address such strategic concerns.

And they actually do. In case it's not clear, most people just don't give a fuck. Hence the weak response to climate change, etc.

So don't stress, just live while you can.

If you want to do something meaningful you have to pay for it in lost income. The same is true for any other kind of work. I don't see why engineering should be any different. But even the tier 1 jobs mentioned here pay enough for an average lifestyle + some buffer. So if you don't care for a luxurious lifestyle, you can devote a lot of time or money to what you care for.

You want programmers to fix climate, recycling, food security and political participation with their crazy coding and math skills? That's hubris, not everything can be solved like a math problem or algorithm, especially not convincing people to take a short term sacrifice for their own long term good.

My goal is to reach financial independence ASAP so I can contribute my effort 100% to something that matters.

What you would put 100% of your effort on, if you had FIREd?

I had worked on personalized cancer treatments earlier but left the field to become a web dev (doh) because it pays a lot more.

Saving the world doesn’t pay as well as helping destroy it through rabid consumerism. Until we figure that out as a society, we’ll stay on a downward spiral with capitalism.

The speed of technological advancement isn't nearly as important as short term quarterly gains.

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