71–80 of 106 posts
Some tangentially relevant observations based on volunteering at a raptor conservation trust in the UK. The trust maintains a visitor park that provides bird displays and experience days for the general public. The gate takings and donations fund conservation activities in the UK (raptor nest boxes, bird hospital, bird surveys) and overseas activities (e.g. reducing poisoning of wild birds by game poachers). The Trus…
When I was working in that field any 'software development' I did was alongside everything else I did. Most of that was online database and website work and some scripts to make analyzing data easier. I still spent far more time doing field work, writing reports and hustling for grant money though.
A few thoughts: - https://4returns.earth/network/job-listings/ is in the regenerative ag space - lists some tech jobs if you search for them. (e.g. try https://4returns.earth/network/job-listings/?searchval=devel... ) - Conservation is only one area, and the term 'conservation' itself is a frame I've been more critical of after reading papers like https://www.uv.es/jgpausas/papers/Pausas-Millan-2019_BioScie... which…
> developing a perspective before jumping into anything
Probably the biggest takeaway here, for me. Each domain is more complex than it appears on the surface.
It's most certainly better for your soul, but get ready to take a pay cut. After a short career in game development and a much longer career in museum/library/archives, my take is that our societies values are out of whack: the more your job benefits your community and the planet the less you will get paid, and vice versa. It's even worse for social services. You'll also take a hit in your reputation among other deve…
when I left Google to work in clean energy, I took a 50% pay cut. But, that's still more than enough money to live very happily on. IMO it's true what they say about there being no marginal improvement to happiness after ~80k.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lobbyists require data. Existing wildlife laws require enforcement. Political support requires mobilization. All of the above can be helped by smart, enthusiastic developers. If more people help out, we can save the tiger and the forest.
All of this requires political support. You can't collect the data if you are not allowed to or if your results are silenced. Enforcement requires political will, otherwise the criminals never get prosecuted or flee to their home countries. Until we get "the establishment" to care about this, doing any work in this field is simply for vanity or to make you feel good.
Making blanketing, dismissive claims about everyone who works in a specific field is a great way to end the conversation.
Start investigating biodiversity informatics. There are a lot of different aspects in this space: genomics, georeferencing, image processing for feature extraction, etc, as well as typical distributed systems infrastructure.
It's most certainly better for your soul, but get ready to take a pay cut. After a short career in game development and a much longer career in museum/library/archives, my take is that our societies values are out of whack: the more your job benefits your community and the planet the less you will get paid, and vice versa. It's even worse for social services. You'll also take a hit in your reputation among other deve…
> my take is that our societies values are out of whack: the more your job benefits your community and the planet the less you will get paid, and vice versa. It's even worse for social services. There is no "what society values" at work here, only supply and demand. What you witness is the fact that jobs that have intrinsic meaning and are more fulfilling are paid less well, because employees are willing to make that…
It's not a question of society being backwards, it's just a function of market based jobs. The cause is amoral and independent of the wishes of the people in the system, though the effects very much have moral relevance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> my take is that our societies values are out of whack: the more your job benefits your community and the planet the less you will get paid, and vice versa. It's even worse for social services. There is no "what society values" at work here, only supply and demand. What you witness is the fact that jobs that have intrinsic meaning and are more fulfilling are paid less well, because employees are willing to make that…
I think you are right about the market effects, but wrong about the causes. The way I see it, it's not that the employees are willing to make the sacrifice per se , it's that there are just more job applicants total. If the supply is increased, the price will drop. It's not that people want to work for a lower wage and then make up for it in the quality of the work, it's that since the population is broader, you find…
Nature and animal conservation is a political issue. The best use of your skills would be to aid in the lobbying efforts for tighter regulations and more money for developing countries. You might save a tiger, but in the year it took you to save him, Brazil cut down 8 million hectares of the rain forest for palm oil.
Why is this downvoted? We need people to do the actual work but we also need people to support the political projects to enable people to do the actual work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
you missed two 0s for our postdocs annual net salary. But hey, generalization is so great. And while I understand that in most parts of the world, it's paid a lot worse and you might have problems making ends met, I don't really get, how you want to solve these problems (interlinked with nowadays capitalism) by getting more kids (wow, just 30t of CO2/year more "output") and helping the 1% redistribute an even larger…
Some people want to have kids