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Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
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Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#92Companies exist generally to make money first, and any societal benefit is a side effect. Beware of companies that promise otherwise - they're lying either to themselves or to you. Either take the hit on the paycheck and work for a non-profit or academic/government institution, or just try and find something you find interesting - there's still lots of good stuff that comes out of the bleakest-seeming corporate envir…
Agreed but you can try to work in healthcare or education that have a more linear potential "good" as opposed to propagating more meme and lols. I agree that OP has to decide to take a pay cut for a more socially focused company goal OR they can take all the fat cash and donate a large portion to a non-profit that is actually doing the work.
Yeah, to be fair it's not as black or white as I suggested. But it's super difficult to gauge the actual impact of your work anyway, most of the time.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#93If you want to work at positive impact companies, Khan Academy is one that comes up in my head. But take it from me, someone who has volunteered for civic tech organizations and have participated in ground work for political campaigns. The most positive impact you could possibly make is money. Political campaigns need thousands of volunteers. But someone who has no skills or education can volunteer. The supply pool i…
Agreed 100%. I have spent my entire ~15 year career working in the clean energy space. Salaries in the industry and pretty low. While I would love to one day own an EV and charge it with some solar panels on my roof, buying a home on my salary is a pipe dream right now.
Another issue is that these problem domains are constrained by government policy, not by private investment. For example, the US solar industry is really hurting right now because of tariffs and a recent anti-dumping investigation[1]. Imagine working at a company in this space and watching all your projects get put on hold over an issue that has bipartisan support in the Senate (a very rare thing), but an executive branch that wants to be "tough on China" (yes, believe or not I am talking about Biden). We are literally putting an entire industry on hold so we can prop up a handful of domestic manufacturing businesses.
If you really want to help, you have a few options. Make a lot of money and become a customer of companies that are doing good. Buy an EV, put solar on your roof, buy clothes and goods that are manufactured sustainably. I am personally not a huge fan of carbon offsets, but even if I don't think they are effective in their current form, supporting that industry does allow for motivated professionals to spend their time on that problem.
You can also volunteer in your free time. Lots of organizations out there that could use some help. I regularly volunteer for beach cleanups. But if you want to use your technical skills I am sure it would be easy to find someone in need of those as well.
And thinking outside the box. It is possible that one of the biggest contributors to reducing our CO2 footprint in this current century was Netflix. "Netflix and chill" was a fun meme, with the idea being that you would hang out at home and watch Netflix (among other things) instead of going out. Imagine the number of vehicle miles avoided because of that meme! So if you want to have your cake and eat it too, consider working on projects that keep people in their home (especially if it keeps people working from home, imagine all those commute miles avoided).
And another outside the box idea. Join a company that is doing bad things (whatever that may mean for you). Then work your way up the ladder and change the company for the better from the inside. If ladder climbing is not for you, simply become an internal advocate for change. Or more cynically, make them less efficient. You could do this by simply being ineffective at your job. Or you could more actively steer projects in suboptimal directions.
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/05/america-first-c...
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#94I sincerely enjoyed my eight years at Mozilla. Like any large organization, they're far from perfect, but my colleagues' hearts were in the right place. https://www.mozilla.org/careers/
Similarly, I just left Element, which is doing really compelling work around decentralized encrypted communication (Matrix chat protocol). Absolutely necessary for free society. https://element.io/careers
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tesla has a lot of issues. It's not a stretch to see their material risks (lithium, cobalt, nickel, plastic aka oil) as being pretty bad. The source of the electric powering the car matters too. As does the fact that they still use oil based or CO2 emitting roadways and the effects of the brake pads and tires. They certainly have problems. Tesla and oil companies have material and process (environmental) risks. Tesla…
> I guess just because I'm critical of Tesla? No, it's because the ESG stuff seems more about virtue signaling than doing actual good, and the fact that that one main list includes oil companies but excludes Tesla is really compelling evidence of this. Other downvotes are probably for stuff like "the fact that they still use oil based or CO2 emitting roadways". I mean... c'mon.
Relevant Google talk on sloppiness of ESG arguments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6b7K1hjZk4
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#96As others have suggested, it's difficult to assess an organizations values against your own. That being said, it's well worth investing your time/energy/creativity into an effort that improves the world.
In my career, I've been fortunate to work for a variety of companies that have obvious and direct positive social impact. I don't want to start a flame war here, but my last ten years have been in FANG, which I've found to dramatically magnify my ability to have a positive social impact.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tesla has a lot of issues. It's not a stretch to see their material risks (lithium, cobalt, nickel, plastic aka oil) as being pretty bad. The source of the electric powering the car matters too. As does the fact that they still use oil based or CO2 emitting roadways and the effects of the brake pads and tires. They certainly have problems. Tesla and oil companies have material and process (environmental) risks. Tesla…
> I guess just because I'm critical of Tesla? No, it's because the ESG stuff seems more about virtue signaling than doing actual good, and the fact that that one main list includes oil companies but excludes Tesla is really compelling evidence of this. Other downvotes are probably for stuff like "the fact that they still use oil based or CO2 emitting roadways". I mean... c'mon.
"the fact that that one main list includes oil companies but excludes Tesla is really compelling evidence of this."
This doesn't seem like compelling evidence without diving into why. Tesla is quite shady in trying to avoid things. For example, not complying with battery laws in Germany, working conditions issues, etc.
The ESG score also include "S" and "G". It's not all about "E".
But I agree that the scores don't mean much. Which, for the third time, I recommend looking into the companies because their "benefits" are generally debatable.
"I mean... c'mon."
Well I guess I'll like to evaluate from a systems thinking standpoint. N-order impacts are relevant.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#98Honestly, most companies have a net positive impact in the world, and if you live in a first world country and are interested in improving the world, one of the most effective ways to do that is make a lot of money and give a lot of it to well-run charities.
But if you want to specifically also work with a company with a "good cause", I'd strongly recommend that you go with a company whose entire mission is focused on a particular cause, as opposed to a more traditional company that says part of its mission is to "do good" or whatever. So, for example, Solar Cookers International could (maybe?) be an example of the former, while General Electric is the latter.
That's not to say GE is in any way bad, but if you want a do-good company and it's not a do-good company first and foremost, then at some point you will likely feel let down by it (or by yourself for working there). Also, it seems that a lot of normal for-profit companies that want to be seen as do-good companies can't help but get mired in politics (usually due to grossly oversimplifying complex social issues).
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#99A typical company is having a positive impact on the world, because it's providing some good or service to people that they are willing to pay money for. The global economy is built on this. It's why we have material and ultimately scientific abundance as a species. I get that casinos, cigarette companies, Google, and Facebook (and others) appear to be in a different category. But my point is that those are the excep…
Yep, you're being downvoted but this is the truth.
It would be interesting to build a model of specific HN users who downvote unpopular but true statements, and then use that to search for comments that may contain unpopular truths. Could be useful.
I guess we'd need access to data about how individual users vote, but it could be anonymized.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#100I'm founder and CEO at ODK and we are hiring ( https://getodk.org/jobs )! ODK is an open-source mobile data collection platform. The common use-case is a data collector in the field fills out a form while offline. Whenever a connection is found, the data gets sent to a server where it can be seen and acted on. ODK is basically the Land Cruiser of mobile data collection apps. It's designed to be very reliable in chall…
> "The common use-case is a data collector in the field fills out a form while offline. Whenever a connection is found, the data gets sent to server where it can be seen and acted on." is there any user control over this? otherwise, this is an totalitarian's dream come true. i'd suggest thinking about this capability a little more in relation to "positive impact".
The vast majority of users are staff who are hired to collect data for a non-profit. The vast majority of servers are self-hosted by those non-profits. It's very opt-in in that regard. Think of say a census worker counting households or farmer measuring plot yield. And even in those cases, yes, users have a lot of visibility in what is being collected and a fair bit of control.
Sensitive data that is collected from participants that users interact with are typically governed by policies set by Institutional Review Boards or Ministries of Health.