Ask HN: Transitioning from web dev to more "impactful" tech | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Transitioning from web dev to more "impactful" tech

As I enter the latter half of my career, I'm interested in working on problems that I consider more societally impactful. The first half of my career was centered around enterprise software and e-commerce. Nothing wrong with that but at a personal level I certainly didn't get much personal fulfillment from the end goal of what I created.

I'm curious if anyone with a background in general "web technologies" is either using their skills on more societally beneficial goals, or has transitioned to other skills in those areas.

The kinds of things I'm talking about are anything related to decarbonization (e.g. renewable energy, storage, grid improvements, etc.), curing/treating disease and human ailments, scientific exploration, other environmental improvements, etc.

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May want to consider government contracting roles. After spending about 15 years in what has come to be known as "martech" as a web developer, I realized how soulless and unsatisfying the work is. By random chance I was scouted by a small consulting firm that does work for the fed and couldn't be happier. I'm on a project now that helps countless people everyday, has some interesting domain problems, and nobody tries to convince me I'm part of a corporate family with the expectation that I will lie to my dev team about rewarding them for long hours to make some director look good.

I get to touch a lot of things tech wise, as we take on new projects there is the chance to move around when a project finishes or I've done enough time on it to convince them I'm bored and want to try something new.

Sure some firms specialize in defense... but there are many firms that do work with the EPA, NASA, etc.

Thank you, I found this suggestion very valuable.

Thanks for sharing, the idea of impact is crucial -- creating tools to help other.

> "By random chance I was scouted by a small consulting firm"

Do you know more about this industry now? Could you provide known avenues for getting into this industry?

May want to start with a search on LinkedIn for government contracting firms. Another place to look would be https://www.usajobs.gov which is mostly direct hire into an agency if you have the skill set they are looking for. Sadly I can't give much more information than that as I was brought into my firm by a random recruitment email on LinkedIn. You may be able to also find some leads on the GSA contractor directory, although a lot of these firms have kind of generic names so it may be a bit of a needle in a haystack.

An interesting field you may want to check out is prototyping physical custom assistive devices for disabled / differently-abled people.

Examples: 3D printed bookmark with a "line slot" to allow people with dyslexia to read without distractions, customized wheelchair / scooters for kids (since they are smaller, its hard to find the right size for them as they grow), to prosthetic legs and more.

A plan would be to do a search for "makerspaces in (CITY)", find the one with the best reviews and take a tour. You're guaranteed to meet interesting creative people. Makerspaces always need tech/coders (from setting up apps, to programming robots, to community infra like setting up Discourse servers, helping makerspace entrepreneurs setup an ecommerce site, etc).

Best of luck!

I think a better interface for computers for blind people would be really cool. I have a lot of ideas but without a bunch of money saved up or a concrete plan, I don't really have the time, energy to spend my little off time researching and making prototypes

Webdev can be impactful. It's really a matter of thr domain. Some of my most impactful work work was webdev in health IT. Some of the stuff I did across jobs in order of when I remember:

- Validate covid positive/negative status for reentry into various nations - Dynamic reports that allowed hospitals to understand how in or out of compliance with regulations they were. - Take the data underlying those reports and submitting them to thr government in order to continue funding for the hospital - Integrating various health insurance APIs into a system to vastly speed up approvals for surgeries (we're talking from days down to minutes) - Honestly, every battle I've waged and won around accessibility

That's just off the cuff. I really enjoyed my time in health IT. The technology and regulatory challenges made for interesting problems, and it was nice to understand immediately the good I was doing. It's easy to understand the good in an assignment like, "Identify all the tired doctors/nurses/staff based on this data and flag them for forced time off"

https://jobs.probablygood.org/?skillset=Software+Engineering

Would you volunteer your time?

Recently, there was a FAANG engineer who volunteered his time to do serious programming work for free, not to a charity but to anyone who had a good cause and needed an engineer.

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