> It does depress me, daily, that I do not have a career in
> physics or chemistry or biology or medicine where I could
> work on "big problems."
Seconded, though I could never find the words to express this before. How the fuck is anything that I'm doing right now helping to make the world a better place? How could I even begin to make a difference with my life? Making software is the only thing that I'm marginally proficient at--I'll never start a company that sends a man to Mars or discovers the cure to a horrifying disease. Is making the next $BIG_SOCIAL_NETWORK the best that I have to aspire to?
But we all can't work there. Not only are there not enough jobs at That One Company That's Changing The World, someone needs to provide the tools and services the business is built on; all the ancillary things that allow Us to make progress (computers, operating systems ... vehicles and their fuel ... food for the humans ... waste receptacles and their sanitation ... etc)
How am I changing the world? A) By educating a future generation (my own children) in the ways of the world, by supporting their dreams and showing them how the world must function so they can realize their dreams; and B) by working for a company that provides services to its customers to use to make their employees more productive to grease the wheels of innovation and creativity so their own lives are enriched and their own dreams (and their children's dreams) can be realized.
Thank you for this list! It'd be great if there was a resource somewhere that aggregated these companies so hackers could reference it as they look to switch jobs.
Whatever anyone thinks of the periodic surfacing of the feeling that Raganwald was expressing, the fact that it does come up with a degree of regularity indicates there's an unfulfilled need here.
What can be done to help people fill it?
It seems one thing that factors in is that people feel helpless to get started on the path to working on "big problems". What can be done to make it not feel so overwhelming? What can help us all find our way to approaching these questions and actively searching for solutions?
It's called "mid-life", and it ultimately doesn't care what you're actually doing. If you're just making money, you feel bad that you aren't helping people, or that you aren't accomplishing enough. If you're helping people, you feel just as bad about how you don't seem to be helping people, or about all the ways you could imagine doing more.
Many of the JCVI programmers groan and complain that they can't turn that organization around. I am not convinced additional programmers will fix JCVI.
Big problems are solved in small steps and your software could make those steps significantly more efficient.
The folks working on TCP/IP back in the 80s could have shared your worries but now it's the backbone for a technology making all forms of business and science more efficient.
Even if you're working on, say, a dating or pornography site, it's hard to work out what value is or isn't being provided somewhere down the line in the calculus that is human achievement. Even a comment you make here on HN could be the inspiration that leads something into a path to greater things.
Just to remember Bill Gates only made software and he is doing pretty well at the moment trying to make the world a better place and cure horrifying disease.
