List of "tech for good" job boards
89 points by EvanHahn
89 points by EvanHahn
From the post:
Not all of these boards are great. In fact, a few of them list tech jobs that I think are bad!
I would particularly be wary of “climate tech”-related jobs. The road to hell is paved with good intentions (and techno-solutionism).
I worked for a “climate technology” company; for a few years I thought it was legitimate, until I started to see that the CEO was mocking and ridiculing the idea that climate change was just another way to get rich these days
That is some next-level nihilism there. Good thing you moved on to something else! I have had first-hand experience (not in climate tech) only of the “good intentions” side of the story.
I also used to work at a small climate company, but the leadership was starry-eyed, which matched my eyes. I learned so much about GHG accounting there. Loved it. Sadly, pay wasn’t great, but that’s what stars in the eyes do to ya.
pay wasn’t great, but that’s what stars in the eyes do to ya.
It is almost as if trying to maximize profit was problematic in itself, isn’t it?
I can echo that, when i worked in vc there were entire funds just focusing on climate and some of the decks you could tell were sus, the whole thing seemed like a racket while they all passed the (very lenient) anti-money-laundering checks…
also ironically quite a few carbon-credits-on-the-blockchain companies raised around that time, I wondered if they themselves offset the emissions from their crypto nonsense (but, knowing “crypto” companies, it was probably just a single postgres db)
ultimately, when you collect your 2&20 (plus flat fees) from unsuspecting investors, you don’t care what you invest in, it’s more profitable to just sell a dream with a disclaimer
It’s not all bad. There are people working in earth observation / remote sensing, climate risk, climate adaptation, and many other such fields doing good work. Just be wary of VC startups wielding magic bullets.
Especially be wary of “green energy (trading)” jobs, I see a lot of those popping up.
These are almost exclusively trading subsidiaries of fossil-fuel energy companies with some marketing spin. Sure, you will be dealing with “green energy” in the sense that 40% of energy is “green”. They will definitely insist that their rube-goldberg finance scheme helps deploy renewable energy by increasing “market efficiency” or whatever (as long as it’s profitable). But at the end of the day it’s just worse paid HFT with similarly dubious value to society.
I’m not sure if it still does, but 80000 hours used to (circa 2017) explicitly state that “Responsible AI” think tanks are a better use of your charity value than feeding and vaccinating people in the developing world. I found that odd.
Yeah.. they’re very involved in the whole “effective altruism”/“rationalism” boondoggle.
Which I guess highlights a bigger problem with lists like these.. trust. It’s difficult as an outsider to suss out whether a “charity organization” is legitimate, or “just” a front for some kind of cult or political movement that I disagree with[^1].
It’s demoralizing, and it’s easy to end up just falling back on “well fuck it, I guess I’ll continue feeding the capitalism machine”, even if I know that that’s probably one of the worst options on the balance, even with those drawbacks.
[^1]: For an example: Sweden has a proud tradition of “study associations”, charitable associations that organize secondary+ education independent of the regular education system. In theory, it’s great: help people who need a second chance, either because they just didn’t jive with the regular system or because they want to pick up something else later in life. In practice… they’re pretty much all associated with some kind of parent movement. Some of them wear this on their sleeves (would you be surprised to hear that ABF (translated: “The worker’s education association”) leans socialist?), but would you expect to hear that Sensus is an outgrowth of the Swedish church and YMCA, or that Medborgarskolan (t: “The citizens’ school”) is related to Moderaterna (t: “The Moderate Party”, Sweden’s main conservative party) and Rojalistiska Föreningen (t: “The Royalist Association”)?
That sounds like loads of BS to me. I find it hard to compete a purely ethical project which direct aims is to provide a better health to the world population…
This ideology, “longtermism”, is fairly popular in tech circles, especially silicon valley. The supposed justification is that it’s irrational to value the lives of people alive today any higher than the lives of hypothetical humans that you think might exist in the future. As those hypothetical humans outnumber actual ones, empathy for anyone suffering today is thus irrational.
There’s a lot of obvious and non-obvious problems with this. It’s a difficult ideology to wrap your head around as you said. I find it much easier to understand in reverse: What is it about the outcomes of this ethical framework that makes it so irresistible to the tech elite. What can it justify that a more conventional system of ethics can not and how does it relate to broader tech ideology?
I think there’s a lot of good answers there: It makes it very easy to justify hoarding massive amounts of wealth (to tackle the “real issues” the pesky commoners aren’t enlightened enough to see). It teaches you to ignore any human empathy for the workers you exploit. It trivializes issues like climate change and global inequality that would inconvenience your business if tackled. It fits in nicely with the greater tech ideology of replacing humans with unfeeling machines as a moral good. You can really get a lot of mileage out of this as a tech billionaire.
https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/ it’s not as upfront as it once was, but the idea is still there. None of the problems they’re worried about currently exist other than ‘global health’ and ‘climate change’, which they rank dead last.
Giving today’s resources to people who are already rich so they can solve tomorrow’s bigger problems is a gamble I’m not convinced is going to pay off, and has a very real cost.
Also, please do better than “that sounds like a load of BS.” You may be surprised by what’s being said sometimes, but there’s no need to be directly inflammatory.
The #jobs channel in the Software Internals Discord I run is pretty good if you’re into databases and distributed systems.
Edit: Whoops I’m sorry I did read the page and there was a clear pattern among the job boards but it wasn’t until re-reading I realized this is about mission-oriented jobs. The #jobs channel I mention above is not about that. I would delete the comment but then it just shows up as deleted without explanation which seemed weird too.
Thanks for posting this (and thanks to whoever posted a similar list a few weeks ago.) My stepson’s out of work; he’s a very smart coder with strong Rust skills and I’m dismayed at what a hard time he’s having. The tech job market isn’t what it was.
I really don’t understand why there’s so few Rust jobs. I guess the established players love debugging segfaults. I cannot wait for the day when they get absolutely crushed by competition that delivers more reliable software products quicker.
My guess would be:
The inherent demand for ‘systems’ developers is already an order of magnitude lower than web/app(lication) development (and has relatively low elasticity, since systems work isn’t something you just spin up in a year to take advantage of a favourable market)
Rust has become extremely popular even outside of the system dev field, encouraging a lot of new entrants into the field
The influx of new Rust-equipped system devs is large enough to swamp demand and make the market for Rust developers a buyer’s market
I cannot wait for the day when they get absolutely crushed by competition that delivers more reliable software products quicker.
I’m not sure the general market has ever cared much about reliability, and in particular most of the market which does care about reliability is either using a memory safe language (yes, I understand that Rust offers more than just memory safety) or they can’t use Rust because they have a dependency on some ecosystem for which mature Rust support does not exist (including various embedded platforms). Other markets, such as games, don’t need mission-critical reliability and don’t care to pay Rust’s development velocity tax to get there (maybe this tax is mostly just the “gamedev” special case of the previous point about immature ecosystem support?).
Sunk cost fallacy is a hell of a drug. “Well we have this pile of flaming shit already…”
Honestly it isn’t flaming. I love Rust - but most companies simply have an existing product with a known set of bugs they can circumvent and where rewriting it will not be possible. Even if changing code might take them triple the time. The other half of the industry isn’t using C/C++ (or not even close enough to make it a problem).
I like Rust and everything but rewrites aren’t free (especially if you have to rewrite an ecosystem of libraries) and neither is maintaining a bilingual build system and architecture. Moreover, there are plenty of other languages that don’t have segfaults.
Maybe we need a job board aggregator for job boards…
We would honestly find that useful.
I wonder if it would be possible to just take new jobs from each one and turn it into an RSS or mastodon feed or something…
Possible using web scrapers but would be a nightmare to maintain. Unless each job board provided some form of API or RSS feed themselves and you aggregate that. Something like devurls.
I built one of these once that specialized in remote jobs in the mid 2010s (remotelyawesomejobs.com) … and you’re right, it was a big PITA to maintain with little upside. :/ But I kinda miss it right now because I’m looking for a remote job again (the impetus behind building the thing way back then).
What I decided to do is to maintain a list of companies. (Basically, I was looking at non-freelancer 100% remote jobs in my country. It was so hard to filter for that anywhere.)
It’s less maintenance, and not so useful, but apparently it works well enough.
I started building this a while ago – I called it the Job Board Board. Never finished the site though.
Related to “tech for good”: Is anyone else aware of more “civic focused” orgs? I want to get involved in open-source projects/groups focused on providing software in that sector.
My dream isn’t a company that’s out to “make the world better”. My dream is to work for a company that’s out to make a product, make it the best damn product of its type, sell it to lots of people who think it’s great, and make a lot of money, without screwing over anyone (except, within the bounds of ordinary practice, the competition).