Solving All the Wrong Problems

All problems are relative to your frame of reference. For someone who always lived with access to basic needs, some problems might be crippling enough to cause significant impact.

Yeah you can have food, medical care, and a house, but if you take 2h commuting each way to work you'll probably feel miserable. If you have a crippled or distant social network, despite having all physical basic needs, Social Networking tools might be lifesaving for you (eg. depression, isolation).

And I've heard this quite some times: "Todays developed world problems, are going to be tomorrows developing world problems."

But, and this is a big but, the vast majority of people go to work every day and do very little of importance. 99% of people are not changing the world, for the better or otherwise. All the people making coffee, serving food, pushing paper at the DMV, driving trucks, driving cabs, trimming trees and mowing lawns, writing articles for the NYTimes, etc. they aren't changing the world and they aren't making a significant difference in the lives of the least privileged (except maybe themselves and their own families, if they're in that category).

No one writes articles lamenting the fact that a barista isn't changing the world. So, why do techies get blamed for lack of world-changing work?

I'm not saying I disagree, per se. I just wonder what makes us (in the broad use of "us" here, to mean anyone who builds technology for a living) that we get tasked with fixing the world? Maybe it's the way tech entrepreneurs often hype the products of their labor as being world-changing...even while probably knowing it's merely a historical footnote, if even that, in the grand scheme of things.

I want to make a positive impact on the world with my work, sure, but I also find I have to make economic decisions not unlike people who go to a regular job every day. I have to work on problems that I don't consider important, sometimes, just because I know it will keep my rent paid and food on my table this month. I'm not gonna feel guilty for that, but I also would love to know what the author proposes be done to make it so I don't have to worry about stuff like that and can go back to important but not profitable problems.

The whole article is a fantastic example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. It finds a bunch of ideas that fit the authors thesis and ignores the thousands of companies working on hard problems that impact nearly everybody.

Even the examples in the article are sharpshooters. They drew a circle around a set of people and held them out as support for the idea that tech startups are solely focused one demographic. It's bad logic, but it's also wrong.

Single mothers? There's a whole litany of apps targeted at them. Like SupportPay (https://supportpay.com) for child support collections. Or CareLulu (http://carelulu.com) for finding child care options. The rest of the list (rural poor, out of work Americans over 50, and veterans) can all very much benefit from the huge number of startups trying to make educational accessible over the Internet.

Energy startups are out there trying to help folks shave dollars off their energy bills (shamless plug: I work for Gridium at https://gridium.com - check us out!). Healthcare startups are out there trying to solve hard problems with medical record keeping and information access.

Hell those inwardly focused tech companies like Stripe and Gusto have made starting a small business the easiest it's ever been. Want to solve problems for veterans and the out of work over 50 crowd? Remove the friction around starting a small business and let them put a lifetime of experience and knowledge to work.

So ya some people are out there trying to solve the small problems. That's great, because sometimes solving a small problem leads to a big one. Amazon went from selling books to completely redefining how commerce happens for a large number of people. Solving those small problems also creates a class of person with experience in company building. Maybe they'll put that towards solving those generational problems in a couple of years.

Because there's a visceral, emotional response people get when they see the amount that we're being paid to work and the capital that's being poured into what looks like frivolous trivialities. Artless commerce. If we weren't here the focus would remain on Wall Street, except CDOs and complex financial instruments are trickier to reduce to absurdity in the NYT op-eds.