Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

Where would you like to work next?

- Make it so that people in your community have access to clean water. Surprisingly, it's a problem even in the most advanced countries.

- Contribute to something in healthcare that reduces costs, improves availability, or makes more people survive a procedure, an illness, etc.

- Make firefighting safer, or more efficient. Make it less needed in the first place.

- Make the air clearer. Make the energy cheaper. Make the roads better and safer. Etc.

- (Meta) make the market less ennui-generating.

I found that "what pays" is not a good proxy, because often what pays best is solving problems for a group of people, which also generate further problems for other groups of people. Usually, the benefits for the first group are purely financial.

To use a simple example - advertising. There's lots of people who would pay you for your work in this space, because your work will earn them more money. What your work will do downstream, however, is most likely one of those:

- It'll create more work for someone else to cancel the effects of your work; a lot of advertising is playing a zero-sum game, i.e. simply wasting natural resources and human time. (Conversely, often your work is only needed to cancel out the effect of someone else's efforts.)

- It'll disturb the market, promoting a worse solution over a better solution, leading customers to make wrong choices, and thus lose some amount of money and/or happiness.

- It'll add to the noise we all have to endure, also slowly eroding happiness.

Occasionally, you might end up promoting the right thing to the right crowd for the right reasons, but I doubt that happens very often ;).

Conversely to all of that, I feel that solving what I see as "social problems" pays less, if at all, again making "what pays" a bad proxy towards finding ways to address those problems.

As a discipline, we're too young and our technology is too immature to support a true split between engineering/science and computer programming.

If you want to work on interesting problems you're passionate about, there's a few ways to do it.

First, you can do research. Years ago I joined a lab as a professional researcher to follow my passion for machine learning and sensor networks. It's not the easiest path, but labs need disciplined programmers to complement the skills of PhD students.

Second, you can consult. If you're passionate enough about a topic that you have encyclopedic knowledge, I guarantee there's someone out there who will need that expertise and will pay for it. It might not cover all your bills, but it gets you exposure (and potentially a job if they need your skills a lot).

Third, you can start a company. I followed my passion for the challenges of learning from sensor data at scale into entrepreneurship and eventually started a company, http://sentenai.com . As a technical founder, I chose carefully the technologies we use (Haskell) and the problem we were tackling (making it fast and natural to combine multiple sources of time series data and find temporal patterns). You still need to solve somebody's problem and build a business, but you can at least lay the foundation.

These days, one of the bigger thing the market rewards is writing a web-based CRUD that's 99% chrome, 1% of actual functionality. Extra points if you can get some user data to sell to adtech industry.

I don't think they are rewarded on the grand scheme of things. Software has always showed a winner-takes-all structure and most software disappear. Take for example the game industry. 15 years ago, you would have talk to anybody, they would have told you the market is mature and they are making money on making movie-based games. Today, most players (publishers, studios, etc) of that era have disappeared (Im too lazy to get the long list of publishers that are gone).

Also innovation can act in a subtle way. Take the iphone for example. People are more productive because of it. That means that hospital, universities, research labs, non-profits, etc, all are doing better jobs which means we cure more disease, teach, help and study better, etc. because of the iphone.

But yeah, if you dont work in innovation, then you work for the current "government", the current group-thinked direction made by some smart "politicians" (by "politician" I mean that guy who lick asses all day long, who goes always in the direction that's well accepted and who use words to seduce people and get what he wants). It's either innovate (rare) or maintain.

Maybe our civilisation has finally crushed my soul, and I noticed it just now. But it feels to me that the revealed goal of our market-driven world is to abstract everything away with money.

There is a passage in the movie "1492: Conquest of Paradise" by Ridley Scott that I love:

"Look outside, what do you see?" ask Colombus to some royal acolyte

"I see towers, I see palaces, I see steeples, I see civilisation. And I see spires that reach to the sky!" answer the politician contrasting with the wild america of that time.

"All of them created by people like me" say Colombus

Panera Bread gross revenue $2.8B, McDonalds gross revenue $22.8B

Nordstrom gross revenue $14.4B, Walmart gross revenue $500.3B

Payday loan revenue in the rich burbs roughly-zero, Payday loan revenue nation wide mysteriously between $6B and $46B depending on data source

Now can you get a cool and trendy very high social status hipster job to brag about on social media in the coolest office with only the best "personality fit" coworkers helping poor people, oh heck no you'd be savaged here if you admitted to working for McD, but the market of poor people products, at least in some areas of business, is about ten times as large as rich people products.