Show HN: Enviro.Work – Find and fill jobs that benefit the environment

I actually have a job writing greenhouse gas accounting software. The pay isn't great, but compared to the local booming software industries in Montreal, (ads, video games, porn, or "AI" which usually means ads again), it seems to be much more socially useful.

I'm never quite sure if my work is actually helping or not. For example, some of our clients are unethical companies such as tobacco companies. I reason that they can't use our greenhouse gas analysis for evil and that refusing to do business with them would only result in them not knowing what their environmental impact is.

I don't know if I'm doing good, but I think it's more likely that I am than if I were doing ads, video games, or porn.

Thanks. I browsed through the job ads with keen interest, hoping to find something that could possibly pay more. Sadly for me, most of the list seems to be in the US. Ah well, hopefully the ecological software job market will expand so that competition for developers will also raise our salaries.

A somewhat sad thing is that ecological analysts (who are the principal users of my software) get paid a lot less than I do because our employers don't have to compete as much in order to hire them. For software developers, employers have to get their pick from the general pool of software developers who can generally get relatively high-paying jobs elsewhere, so that prevents my salary from going down too much. My salary, however, is about 60% more than a greenhouse gas analyst. This somehow seems unfair, but I don't know how to fix it.

We're rapidly adding more sources. I'm based in Canada myself so I'll work on getting some more options for you. We'd love to have your company post their openings on the site as well

I think this is a marvellous idea. Environment and climate change is definitely something many of us would want to be able to affect in our daily jobs.

On a more universal level, a service like this, not just for climate work, but in more general terms helping people find a position matching their passion would do a great service to the world [1].

Frankly, a lot of us have just wound up in our current positions. If that position happens to be our vocation, it's probably just a happy accident, or then that specific field was very precise, and finding a position matching the passion was easy. In general case, it's not that easy to match these two, due to the work and timing required.

The problem is, a lot of people are doing jobs they are not the best match from the point of view of the larger community. They might be good and efficient at their jobs, but if they don't know the full power of their positions, and don't have the passion to push for the change, in the limits of their positions, they might not be the best people for that job.

To make the case even more problematic, a lot of positions, ones that people would consider as meaningless, especially in public sector, but also related to environment, actually could offer a lot of power in the right hands, with proper passion.

World is filled with wasted opportunities, but a service like this could help remedy some of the pain points.

That being said, like mentioned in a comment by mlthoughts2018 [2], this is not an easy problem to solve, given for one that positions might not match their descriptions.

But things have to start somewhere, and I think this is a great start.

[1] As a side note, IMHO, I'd like to think this mismatch between a passion and a position being the missing puzzle piece for making things such as public sector competitive over private sector.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955566

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