I am interested in finding a job at a company that is having a positive impact in the world. I think this probably rules out FANG (MAMAA?) companies. Does your work make at least a small contribution to a better world? If so, where do you work?
Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
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Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#2You could start by looking at companies that comprise ESG ETFs. Granted many of the companies included in there could be semineutral or debatable as to actual benefit.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#3You could try looking at civic technology organizations. I felt that the work I did at USDS had a huge positive impact, and you can find private firms like Nava or Truss that work on the same / similar projects if you don't want to work directly for the government. There are similar agencies and organizations in Canada, the UK, EU countries, and some Latin American countries, too.
There are also some orgs at tech giants that work on socially impactful products (e.g., sustainable hardware teams at AWS or Azure, like the folks who work on https://natick.research.microsoft.com/), so I wouldn't rule those out entirely.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#4I work for Rec Room. While we make a game, millions of kids are using it and "accidentally" learning engineering skills while they think they are making games :)
We have a principal role open on the team right now but may be able to accommodate others. We essentially make a programming language and the gameplay elements on top. The principal role is on the language side but we could potentially make more roles on the gameplay side. Email me (tyler@recroom.com) if you are interested. I've attached a description of the role below.
---- ROLE DESCRIPTION ----
Principal Software Engineer - Programming Language Architecture
Rec Room is a fun and welcoming community where people from all walks of life come together to play, chat, hang out, learn, build, and explore millions of experiences. Circuits is our-in game programming language that brings these experiences to life: it is a game for building games. Children and adults alike use Circuits as a fun and educational programming tool or a pleasant and productive way to unwind after work hours. By using Circuits, many creators learn programming for the first time and gain lifelong skills used for hobbies, college decisions, or even work opportunities.
As a principal software engineer focusing on programming language architecture, you will own key-components of Circuits and work with a team of world-class engineers to build gameplay, compilers, and interpreters. To move the needle on what's possible: you must work with designers to balance modern language capabilities with a focus on usability for all creators, novice or advanced. Join Rec Room and help improve the lives of millions in our community by picking up programming for the first time or building and sharing with friends.
We are looking for:
Proficient in multiple programming languages: Our client code is written in C#, but an understanding of type-safe, functional, and scripting languages is necessary to drive technical discussions. C, C++, Rust, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Lisp are great examples.
Experienced with full-stack programming language development*: Circuits is a key differentiator for Rec Room. It includes a VM, type system, compiler, runtime environment, debugger, and IDE that work across PC, phones, VR and all major consoles. An understanding of language development is necessary to ensure that Circuits retains usability and high-performance while working across existing and future platforms.
Experienced with video game development: 5+ years experience building games on any platform with complex behavior and live updates. Circuits is built, compiled and executed within the game. So an understanding of the performance requirements, design considerations, and execution model of games ensures that Circuits is a cohesive part of the overall game-play experience.
Comfortable working in a fast-paced, autonomous, and ambiguous environment: At Rec Room we bias towards action.
Rather than meticulous planning with an avalanche of meetings we build things when in doubt. As a top engineer you will execute with a high degree of trust and autonomy to cut through our most challenging technical puzzles.
Lifelong learners: Our top engineers across the company keep up with cutting edge articles, papers, and books. As a member of this group you will be expected to learn, improve and help others improve.
*You don't have to match all of the skills above to apply!*
Bonus points:
Experienced with writing unit tests: Circuits is the most heavily tested component of the Rec Room codebase. All major language features are covered with tests such that developers have immediate feedback when they introduce an error.
Experienced with multiplayer networking: Rec Room is an online-only game with a peer-to-peer networking model. Significant architectural thought is allocated to keeping networking simple across the organization. Circuits itself must keep its data structures consistent across all clients in an experience while it is being actively edited to ensure creators run the same thing.
Familiar with data-oriented design: Foundational components of the Rec Room codebase use a data-oriented design. This provides performance benefits out of the gate with future benefits anticipated by taking advantage of Unity's Data-Oriented Technology Stack.
Familiar with type system implementations: Type systems make it easier to write error-free code but have an intrusive nature. An understanding of type systems is necessary to balance correctness with the impact on developer experience. A contributor to an open source language: Whether you have a toy language for personal use or you own the Rust language server, we love to see real world experience.
Company info to know:
Rec Room offers generous medical, dental, and vision plans that cover you, your spouse/domestic partner, and children. We also support your retirement benefits with a company match. Rec room values work-life balance and provides unlimited paid time off. We work hard to ensure Rec Room is a fun and friendly place for people from all walks of life.
Rec Room provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#5[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#6I just want to get paid.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#7The techjobsforgood.com jobs board is useful for this, but a lot of the postings are from nonprofits and the pay is often below market (or so it seems to me).
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#8I work at Activated Insights — we're a company that helps improve the lives of senior citizens through transparency in senior care facilities.
We're hiring here: https://activatedinsights.com/jobs/software-engineer-remote/
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#9I work at Whisper AI, which is a startup building a better kind of hearing aid.
The basic pitch is that by far and away the biggest problem people with hearing aids have is hearing in noisy, crowded environments like restaurants and parties. Classical DSP algorithms have a very hard time in these situations because the spectral properties of the noise look very similar to the signal since both are speech.
What we do differently is we provide a small companion unit, about the size of a flip phone, that houses a much more powerful processor than you can fit behind the ear. Since we have more than three orders of magnitude more compute than a traditional hearing aid, we can run modern deep neural networks to denoise audio in real time.
We are hiring for a variety of roles, but I in particular have been looking to hire a machine learning engineer for my team.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
#10This is actually not as hard as it seems, you just have to be willing to take a truly eye watering paycut. Think 4x. Think enough money over a lifetime to start your own charitable foundation.
Head over to Idealist.org and pick a cause. Choose carefully, you better really f-n love it. Source: been there, done that, got the t-shirt somewhere around here. (And yeah, I changed the world too while I was at it.)