

Ask HN: What kind of jobs exist for Computer Scientists in social justice? - ff0066mote

Hello.<p>I am a soon-to-be college graduate. I've always been top of my (CS) class, but unlike all of my fellow classmates I won't be immediately jumping into an awesome job to get rich when I graduate. I know they won't actually be doing that either, but I don't even have the desire to do so.<p>Instead, I have a burning desire to work in a social-justice related field. I would like to help the world become a better place -- I know it sounds corny, but I do. I'm so frustrated with it right now I'm shaking. Nobody so far (professors, advisor, or parents) has been able to give me any substantive advice in this regard.<p>I'm college educated and I have a skill which is supposedly indicative of intelligence. I want to do some good with it. I would like to do a lot of good with it. Please give me advice.
======
patio11
All of the organizations you admire have computer systems, and substantially
all of them suck. So you've got that going for you. Word to the wise: they
suck for a reason, and finding out exactly why they suck may not be a pleasant
experience for you.

You're wonderfully fortunate in that you have a skillset which scales to
infinity and beyond. Many of the people who are doing things you think are
important are working in the virtual stone-age. You can alleviate that, and
give them force-multipliers which will let them spend more of their sharply
limited time/effort/money on stuff that matters and less of their
time/effort/money on doing largely worthless things in inefficient ways.

Feeding the poor: worthwhile! Inventory management which relies on having a
woman with a graduate degree count cans and tally them on paper: waste! Human
factors which make eliminating her 'job' sound like you are attacking 'the
cause': substantial!

~~~
ff0066mote
Did you have something particular in mind when you said that "finding out why
they suck may not be a pleasant experience" for me? Or, did you simply mean
that such work would not be easy, ie. because of human factors: _"This is how
we do things here! Why do you want to do everything with computers?"_

~~~
patio11
_something particular in mind_

I do, but I felt it might be impolitic to spell it out. Let me try: say we
have this company that makes widgets. People who want to make widgets go get
jobs at this company. Many of them love their jobs and it is a great place to
work, especially if you love to make widgets. Their departments expand,
recruiting more people to make widgets, and people to manage people making
widgets, and people to raise funds to manage the people making widgets, and
people to promote the people who raise funds to manage the people making
widgets, and people to track the progress of the people who promote the people
who raise funds to manage the people making widgets.

Note that in this hypothetical company, you don't really need to be making
widgets at all, if you're sufficiently skilled at raising money.

As to what relevance this has for organizations you care about -- oh look at
the time, I have to go attend a status meeting.

------
kevbin
Why do you assume that "jumping into an awesome job to get rich" and
"help[ing] the world become a better place" are mutually exclusive?

I'm not sure what you mean by "social justice." If you mean it in the sense of
ensuring equality of outcome, that's a path shown to make things worse for
individuals and the societies in which they live.

If you're using the term to mean social-welfare, then join the Peace Corps, go
to africa. Use your education and skills to make the distribution of resources
and aid more efficient. Or start a company that links resources, aid, capital
to those who can make use of them. Or take the best paying job you can find
and send the disposable part to those in need. Don't avoid getting rich, it's
the best welfare program we've got.

~~~
ff0066mote
My apologies. I didn't mean to imply that getting rich and helping the world
are mutually exclusive.

By "social-justice related field," I meant I do not want to work in a job
where the ultimate purpose is power, profit, or "customer satisfaction."
Rather, I would like to work where I am in some way (hopefully more direct
than indirect) helping people exit the poverty cycle, helping to survive
diseases which are already a non-issue in developed countries, helping to end
human trafficking, etc. Obviously, some of these tie more closely to Computer
Science than others.

You were on the same page as me when you thought of resource/aid distribution
systems. That's the only idea I've come up with for relating social justice to
this field.

------
ig1
There are a huge number of things you could do, what's more important is
finding something you're passionate about.

If you want to work on the US west-coast I'd recommend biotech and cleantech,
also have a look at places like Google.org.

If you'd be willing to work in a developing country then there's lots of
things you could work on. Corruption in particular is something that's often
being tackled by computerization (by taking humans out of the loop, or by
automating checks on them), for example the computerization of land records is
taking place in quite a few countries. Don't underestimate the impact
something like that can have, read Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital
if you want to understand why.

Mobile development is something that's having a major impact in developing
countries at the moment, things like mobile banking are huge in Africa because
they allow people who would never previously had access to bank accounts to
gain access. Information systems are also transforming economies, the fact
that a fisherman can now know what the market prices are in the major city
(often several days walk away) means that not only can he tailor what he
fishes to maximize profit but it also means that the dealer (who buys fish
from him and sells it in the major city) can't rip him off by lying about
market prices. The Economist had a special section on this topic a few months
ago which is worth reading if you find this interesting.

Also have a look at the Grameen family of organizations, they've come up with
a lot of innovative businesses and non-profits in developing countries.

If you're want to be more entrepreneurial there's pretty much opportunities in
any area you can think of. So I'd recommend just reading around various
problems and find something that strikes a chord with you.

One of my interests is social mobility, and from my research I found a major
factors that prevents social mobility is that children from less priviledged
backgrounds often get little or poor careers advice, so as one of my side
projects I'm developing a website which tries to tackle that problem.

If you want to help people and make money at the same time I'd recommend
having a look at self-help web/mobile applications, as there's a lot of
potential in that area.

On a more general level you could consider the problems charities, ngos, etc
have and how you could tackle them. In some cases the answer could be
something as simple as taking standard enterprise software (CRM, ERP, task
tracking, etc) and making versions designed for non-profits.

Think about the more general problems non-profits have as well (try
volunteering for a few or talking to some volunteers to get ideas). From my
experience non-profits often suffer from poor organization and management, how
could this be tackled ?

Handling volunteers is also a major issue, if volunteering has a high barrier
it puts people off from volunteering. Think about ways of reducing this
(perhaps an open source approach where people can "check-out" small projects,
distributed call centres that let people volunteer on an ad-hoc basis, a
mechanical turk for volunteer work, etc).

As you might be able to guess I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about
this sort of stuff, so feel free to email/msn me if you want to talk about it
!

~~~
ig1
On a slightly different note, if you're not sure about what to do, I'd
recommend figuring out what skills you're weak at and improving them.

If I was in your situation right now I'd probably think about working as a
consultant for someone like McKinsey or Deloitte which have strong NGO links
(both through alumni and philanthropic consultancy work), where you could get
exposed to a lot of companies and non-profits and develop your problem solving
and people-handling skills at the same time.

Too many developers only see the "small picture" which prevents them from
being able to make a major impact, being able to understand wider issues as
well as pure tech will go a long way in making you better able to tackle your
goal.

------
evgen
Stats. Lots and lots of stats. Get good at doing number crunching on big data
sets using hadoop, R/incanter/etc and learning how to derive meaningful and
defensible insights from all of the public data that is floating around out
there. Pick an org that suits your interests and see if they need help with
general computer systems stuff while you work on a side-project that will
impress them. If you are good at it and this particular skill set interests
you then you will also have a wide range of jobs to pick and choose from if
you decide to go into the private sector.

~~~
ff0066mote
Stats, wonderful. I deplore math. Your advice is interesting and highlights my
major shortcoming.

I've heard the idea to "work on a side-project that will impress" your desired
future employer many times around the HC site. Is that the entrepreneur
speaking, or are you offering that seriously? I have to learn their business
backwards-and-forwards before I can independently produce something which NGOs
may find universally useful. I guess I have to start small to go this route.

~~~
evgen
I was never much into math until after I left university and now I am
constantly kicking myself for not finding the small little subfields of math
that I now find useful and interesting. You can get a long way in stats with a
pretty basic understanding of how it all works; a lot of what you might do
here is the sort of stuff that you can pull out of intro stats books -- you
are not going to be writing the stat anaysis code, you just need to know when
and how to apply it. You would probably also be well-served by learning a bit
about visualization and how to present quantitative information to a lay
audience.

Do not aim for a side-project that will be universally useful to all NGOs or
even to one NGO, aim for a side-project that someone in a position of
authority will think is cool or which can serve some small facet of the
organization. Think mashup or something small like a heatmap that shows where
most of the volunteers/donors live, etc. Don't solve their big problem as your
side-project, solve some small problem that can be used to show them that you
are capable of solving the big problem (if they hired you to do that task, for
example.)

------
mschaecher
Education: Making education cheaper and more effective to more people than
ever.

Health: Tools, apps, and services that make providing healthcare cheaper and
effective throughout the world.

Energy and Environment: Tech, tools, apps, services that help increase access
to reliable electricity and/or help save the planet

Food: Take your pick from growing, distributing, health, or environmental
impact. Scalable solutions that provide healthy food, at low cost, to
everyone, while reducing the food industries environmental impact are
desperately needed.

And more...

The problems are complicated and global, and they require creative and elegant
solutions that scale. Help solve these problems and you can help make the
world a better place and get rich in the process.

------
roundsquare
How about this place?

<http://www.palantirtech.com/government>

You say you hate math, so they may not be right up your alley, but worth a
shot.

~~~
dzlobin
Seconded. I have a friend on the inside and it's a terrific job. Not only full
of insane perks but they do a great job. There is actually a game-demo of
their software, somewhere on the website. FWIW it's actually one of if not the
hardest interviews in the valley. Above and beyond google/facebook

------
dn
It's hard to find advice on this because no one really knows. You're getting
into relatively unexplored territory.

One thing you might consider is applying for Peace Corps (or some other
volunteer development agency). What you end up doing may or may not be
directly connected to CS, but it will put you into an environment where you're
dealing with application of specific knowledge to practical situations. Think
of it as a social justice internship. You get good professional networking out
of it too.

------
statictype
If you're among the top in your CS course, then you probably have the skill-
set needed to excel in technology-related fields and (possibly stereotyping
here) may not necessarily be able to directly apply your skills to whatever
good causes you're passionate about.

Get an awesome job to get rich then use your money for whatever causes you
deem are important.

Your cause maybe the most important thing in your life but that doesn't mean
you can't also enjoy a challenging job.

~~~
ff0066mote
Which technology-related fields are you referring to, or are you just speaking
in general terms?

>> "...may not necessarily be able to directly apply your skills to whatever
good causes you're passionate about."

I'm hoping there's a niche.

