<story><title>Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?</title><text>Say I want to apply what I know to better our chances as a species and&amp;#x2F;or as individuals. What problems do i work on?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>peacetreefrog</author><text>Just read all the top line comments here.  Interesting that no one had mentioned the one thing that has probably done the most to &amp;quot;better our chances as species&amp;quot; in the last few hundred years, and has helped hundreds of millions in India and China get out of backbreaking poverty and accumulate some wealth.  And that is...&lt;p&gt;Work hard, accumulate skills, and become better at your normal job.  Even if you&amp;#x27;re not writing open source software to help local governments in third world countries have free elections and fight malaria or donating 50% of your salary, you&amp;#x27;re creating value and &amp;quot;bettering our species&amp;quot; just by doing something that someone is willing to pay you for.  In fact, that&amp;#x27;s how most of the world&amp;#x27;s wealth is created.&lt;p&gt;Not saying you shouldn&amp;#x27;t volunteer or donate your salary (I personally try to donate a decent chunk of my salary to givedirectly) but -- unless you&amp;#x27;re a nigerian hacker or malware developer or something -- just because you&amp;#x27;re getting paid or working on something that isn&amp;#x27;t an absolute necessity doesn&amp;#x27;t mean you aren&amp;#x27;t doing social good.  Just something to think about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tryitnow</author><text>I couldn&amp;#x27;t disagree more.  There&amp;#x27;s a lot of jobs that add little to no value.  In a fictional efficient market economy that conforms to neoclassical assumptions, sure, every job is value adding.  But does anyone believe that that is the world we live in?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s comforting to think that just going to work and doing your job is actually contributing to something, but I just don&amp;#x27;t see how that can be generally true and definitely not universally true.&lt;p&gt;Even if we just measured contribution in purely capitalist terms, e.g. shareholder value, I don&amp;#x27;t think your claim is true.  I think there have been several studies showing that the average company destroys shareholder value on net.  It&amp;#x27;s likely that a lot of employees in such companies are also destroying shareholder value.  And this is just shareholder value - to say nothing of the value destroyed for other stakeholders.&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is possible to lead your life in such a way that even if you work very hard, you&amp;#x27;re still a net drain on humanity.&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but we have to think much harder about how we can create a net positive contribution.&lt;p&gt;We need to go beyond high school guidance counselor nostrums like &amp;quot;work hard! study hard!&amp;quot; and really struggle with the issue of how we can contribute.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?</title><text>Say I want to apply what I know to better our chances as a species and&amp;#x2F;or as individuals. What problems do i work on?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>peacetreefrog</author><text>Just read all the top line comments here.  Interesting that no one had mentioned the one thing that has probably done the most to &amp;quot;better our chances as species&amp;quot; in the last few hundred years, and has helped hundreds of millions in India and China get out of backbreaking poverty and accumulate some wealth.  And that is...&lt;p&gt;Work hard, accumulate skills, and become better at your normal job.  Even if you&amp;#x27;re not writing open source software to help local governments in third world countries have free elections and fight malaria or donating 50% of your salary, you&amp;#x27;re creating value and &amp;quot;bettering our species&amp;quot; just by doing something that someone is willing to pay you for.  In fact, that&amp;#x27;s how most of the world&amp;#x27;s wealth is created.&lt;p&gt;Not saying you shouldn&amp;#x27;t volunteer or donate your salary (I personally try to donate a decent chunk of my salary to givedirectly) but -- unless you&amp;#x27;re a nigerian hacker or malware developer or something -- just because you&amp;#x27;re getting paid or working on something that isn&amp;#x27;t an absolute necessity doesn&amp;#x27;t mean you aren&amp;#x27;t doing social good.  Just something to think about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a good one, but the caveat is stronger than you mention. Just because someone wants to pay you for something, doesn&amp;#x27;t mean it&amp;#x27;s good to society. Some things are unambiguously socially harmful - cigarette industry, gambling industry - but there are also many things that are harmful by perpetuating waste of resources and man hours. Be wary of zero-sum games, where your effort goes mostly to cancel out the effort of others. Some areas of adtech come to mind, for example.&lt;p&gt;So in short: use judgement. There&amp;#x27;s a lot of social good to be done in mundane jobs - but just because someone is willing to pay for something, doesn&amp;#x27;t mean it should be done.</text></comment>