Ask HN: How is your work making the world a better place?

It’s something I’ve long struggled with in tech, but I wonder if there are things I’m looking past.

There’s the obvious answer “paying the bills for my loved ones,” but I’ve always been searching for something deeper.

To answer your first question, I work on cancer therapeutics. But maybe some perspective from the other end of the “meaningful work” continuum would be helpful in answering the real question.

If your company creates any real utility to a person living a good life (modulo externalities) then I would absolutely consider that to be making the world a better place. We’d all be worse off if everyone at the box factory quit their jobs to go to medical school or run an orphanage or whatever.

So I’d ask yourself: if the thing you work on didn’t exist as a concept in the world, would that be a detriment to anyone? I don’t want to go back to not being able to get an insurance policy online or learning math from youtube. It’s rad that I could email my grandma when I was on the other side of the world. It’s great that I can throw results into PowerPoint (as buggy and flawed as it is) to share with my colleagues at a moment’s notice. There’s a bunch of corporate smarm about bringing people together, but it really is true.

Now, are you making ads more addictive or enabling crypto scammers? Then sure, change jobs. But an economy of our complexity really does take all kinds. There’s no point in saving lives if life isn’t worth living.

2 days agoby jryb

In general, increasing GDP per capita has all sorts of positive second and third order effects on net, likely improving the collective welfare of society.

It's a bit far removed from what you might envision as "doing good" though. It's a bit too abstract to feel on an emotional level.

And true, not all acts are equal. The emotional valence of improving ad rates for Meta can't really be compared to saving a child from cancer on a moral scale that most humans intuitively understand. Nor would I demand that you try to do so.

I often find that "making the world a better place" is synonymous with "looking for meaning in my own life".

Having children is usually a good start, if you don't have any already. Making the world a better place for them does wonders for the soul.

Or so I've been told.

Alternatively, if neither children nor economics appeals to you, you can always just donate money to St. Jude's Hospital or another charity. The money you earn would then make the world a better place in a way you can directly feel.

1 day agoby DantesKite

I think a better question may be, how do I make the world a better place? This means anyone, doing any work, can make a contribution and find value in their work (assuming their work is not illegal or toxic).

13 hours agoby p0d

Mine helps energy companies make better decisions faster. I suppose this helps supply keep up with demand.

Most of my better place activities are through volunteering and being actively decent to strangers.

14 hours agoby fullstick

Work may enable altruism outside of your actual job. For example, I got fulfillment from sharing my journey publishing some open source software over the course of a few months. Having savings helped make that possible.

SMART criteria[1] can help to get out of a rut. "Making the world a better place" is very difficult to satisfy. How many people? What is better? How much better? I don't advocate for quantising abstract ideas in general but sometimes the thought process of coming up with a number and hitting it helps to get going.

My current dayjob involves me wrangling a clunky Java system written like FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition[2]. Keeping this abomination running and getting paid for it feels soulless. Yet I genuinely believe I'm able to stick to my values.

For example, there are 3 components tightly coupled to proprietary AWS systems (AWS Lambda and Simple Queue Service). I feel this has made the world a (very slightly!) worse place; Amazon to me represents the bad side of humanity (greed, scrupulousness). Furthermore, people new to the software dev industry may never know that it's possible to implement these kinds of systems using significantly simpler, portable designs without making a deal with the devil! My goal is to refactor the system to instead use the language's built-in concurrency primitives to perform the same work.

The next person who sees the refactored work can more easily take it and run with it without needing to know anything about AWS. That person doesn't need to care either; I can always share this story with others who I don't work with. Maybe AWS does something so egregious that it's distasteful even to company executives; I can confidently say that we're not as tied to AWS as we think.

I'm not changing the entire world for all eternity. But in a way I am changing my little tiny insignificant slice of this world today in ways that I hope to inspire even just 1 other person in their own tiny insignificant slice :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria [2]: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

2 days agoby olowe

Tell me the company you work for and I can give you a few reasons why your work makes the world a better place. It is not a binary thing. Almost all work we do has some meaning no matter how boring or useless it may seem.

For example, lets take whatsapp. We can talk about how it erodes user privacy and has access to so much data and is more dangerous especially after being owned by FB. However, why do you think it became so big ? It helped connect you with anyone across the world in a second with incredible speed and accuracy. Before whatsapp, there was nothing remotely close (I know because I have family across the world and before whatsapp, it was always a battle to connect with them over a quick call).

So is whatsapp an evil company/product or did it make the world a better place ? You can say both depending on how you look at it. This argument can be made for almost all work in my opinion.

2 days agoby codegeek

I work for organizations that work towards this - usually involving some sort of biotech/research aspect. The idea of working to sell just x more widgets or subs this quarter is really unappealing vs hey we made a life saving thing this quarter!

2 days agoby conception

I think usually this is difficult unless you "choose your own adventure". My attempt to do this is through various side projects, one of which is going relatively well (I at least shipped it!): https://techposts.eu

It's a tech news and jobs website focusing on Europe. I see it as an attempt to showcase and highlight all the good stuff going on in Europe that otherwise flies under the radar.

We need more optimism here, that's the idea anyway!

2 days agoby davedx

I work for a large video game company. I believe in escapism, it got me into computers as a child and ultimately into my career. I specifically left B2B big tech work and took a paycut just to sleep better at night. I find it difficult to imagine going back.

2 days agoby Ocerge

How will my work make you feel better?

I think what you're really asking is how can your work make the world a better place? And you're looking for ideas?

How many people do you need to "improve" to make you feel self-worth? 1? 10? A billion?

What do your customers think? Do they think their world is improved by spending their money with you? Do you think they're spending money with you because it makes them worse off?

In truth 99% of people make the world better, even at a small scale, even if they don't know it. That person directing traffic, flipping buyers, working on a production line, is contributing to society.

Even traditionally despised occupations (tax collector, adware programmer) perform vital functions that society needs to function well.

In our journey through life its common to reach a point where one seeks to find "significance". Naturally the first place you look for this is work. If you are functionally easily replaced (think payroll clerk) then it's easy to become despondent. But easy replacement doesn't make you less significant to the people who rely on you every month.

Equally you dismiss "paying the bills". As if your loved ones are not sufficient for "making the world better". Or as if the people receiving those bills are not sufficient. That waiter you tip, that grocery you buy, the mechanic who fixes your car - you lean on them for your life, and they benefit from your custom.

I'll close by suggesting that significance seldom comes from work. It comes from how you treat people. "Seeing" people, saying hello, treating them with humanity, that's how you make the world better. Thank people sincerely for the way they improve your life. Acknowledge the hidden people who make your life easy. (Go thank your payroll clerk.) Tell others how they are significant in your life, regardless of how menial their task for you is.

When you find the significance in others, you'll also find it in yourself.

I wish you well.

2 days agoby bruce511

It isn't. It lets the lying media put out fake news and sports ball cheaper. It does provides some of the "obvious answer" though.

12 hours agoby Am4TIfIsER0ppos

At least one way to look at this is from generally agreed upon "world issues" [1], since the subject is "make the world a better place." Survey among the 8,000,000,000, and a large percent would agree that many are issues.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_global_issues

Of those, ones that I personally think are actually meaningful, and less subject to opinion, tend to be mostly "Maslow's hierarchy of needs" [2] as a starting point for evaluation.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

Basic needs that must be met for survival, and which significant portions of the population in many areas have difficulties with.

- air, water, food, heat, clothes, shelter, and sleep

Security needs to not be in a constant state of suffering and worry

- health security, personal security, emotional security, financial security

Of those listed on the article for "global issues" that then speak to many of those.

- poverty alleviation, malnutrition and lack of food / water access, waste (consumer waste, food waste, waste disposal, landfills, recycling, water pollution, air pollution), human rights (exploitation, abuse, enslavement, torture).

Of the climate change stuff, there's a lot that's unfortunately too easy to argue about. However, there's a few that maybe meet standards where large numbers would agree.

- desertification, ecosystem collapses, large scale biome losses / deforestation

Of a lot of the rest, unfortunately (also personal opinion) many are just too easy to argue about, and heavily dependent on where you're from, perspective, and relation to a group or area.

- terrorism, migration, democracy, big data (?), carbon, inclusiveness

Quite a few of the rest, I agree they're issues, just whether they reach the level of global critical / catastrophic issues? Many also seem to be issues that have recently gotten everybody's attention, yet there is suspiciously little mention of things like "lack of shelter / clothing access", "lack of heat sources", "sleep deprivation", "basic needs health care access"

Used to work in the government, and they had a Likelihood / Consequence Risk Matrix [3] for evaluating some of the flight and mission hazards. Most of the stuff listed personally rates somewhere up on the (Moderate, High, Very High) Likelihood / (Moderate, High, Very High) Consequence. Stuff that would almost always be Yellow to Red, and require mitigation actions or attempts. Many of the ones that don't meet my criteria tend to be too easy to fight about the Likelihood or the Consequence results. "Is 'Big Data for Sustainable Development' a near term Moderate+ likelihood / consequence?" Seems too easy to argue about to be on the United Nation's critical list of global issues.

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41526-023-00305-z/figures/2

Anyways, best attempt at providing advice on "make the world a better place." Frankly, think most people's work on Earth probably does not meet the criteria.

2 days agoby araes