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Comment by flashgordon | Hacker News Reader

Q for all who are expressing this. A lot of job descriptions today emphasize a passion for "making impact". What is lost on most of us is impact by numbers rather than impact by percentages. Eg being part of a 1000 person <insert branded platform team> your one line fix is experienced by a billion users for a minute a year. Billion sounds sexy doesn't it? Impact by numbers.

How does one frame the other way. Ie I don't care if only a 1000 users experience it, but I'd rather be part of a 10 person team pushing out while features used by 1000 users for hours each day.

I dunno if such roles exist and pay reasonably enough and are sustainable? And how does one politely disregard other kinds of impact in favor of this?

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I once developed a video game plugin for a niche flight simulator, that was subsequently bought by a few thousand people.

Their response left me flabbergasted: They thanked me! Personally, by email. They actually took out time of their own busy life to write a simple thank you note.

Never in my professional life have I experienced a response anything like this. Not as a researcher, being harassed and scolded by reviewers. Not as an embedded dev, by users or contractors being blissfully unaware of my existence. Not as an open source dev, hidden behind a pseudonym and fake "professionalism" in Github bug reports. The closest thing was perhaps professional recognition amongst colleagues.

I'd rather make a big personal impact on a small number of people than a small incremental impact on a large number of people. It's way more satisfying. Come to think of it, teaching and mentoring work similarly.

They definitely exist. I’m a fairly compensated developer at a biotech non-profit. We only have tens of thousands of users of the product I work on, but the value my changes and features make is impactful because researchers are using our platform for hours every day to do research towards curing genetic diseases.

I work 40-ish hours a week, have ample vacation, and am paid enough to own a fairly basic condo in Boston, all by my late 20s. It’s not glamorous, I don’t earn $300k+ a year, and it’s certainly not a prestigious resume entry, but hey, I like my life so far. It’s definitely sustainable. Enough so that my wife and I will probably start a family soon.

I had a job like this for a few years. Escalated tech support went to the actual developers, so you really felt that impact.

For software to be sustainable with only 1000 users, it's got to be something that a small number of people use to do their jobs. Look for B2B software targeting a small niche.

The other route is software that is trying to get to a billion users, and just isn't there yet. If you get into a startup scene, you can definitely make a career of it.

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