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Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact

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31–40 of 201 posts

Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact

#31

I'm a co-founder of Turquoise Health ( https://turquoise.health/ ). We are working to improve US healthcare by exposing the prices that are negotiated at all levels of the insurance billing process and building tools where price negotiations happen in a competitive market instead of in secret. The goal is to drive down healthcare prices using the levers that are available. Right now, there are often 10x price differe…

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Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact

#32
A 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 exceptions, not the rule.

Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact

#33

I 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…

Hah! Came here to post about our work. I’m so proud to work here.

Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact

#34
post #25

Here's a list of startups that have a positive social impact while still paying competitive salaries and showing promising growth: Fintech: Forage ( https://www.joinforage.com ), building Stripe for EBT, i.e. food stamps Nearside ( https://www.nearside.com ), banking for small businesses KeeperTax ( https://www.keepertax.com ), tax savings for independent contractors Bio/Pharma/Healthcare: Q Bio ( https://q.bio ), cr…

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Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact

#35
post #22

I work for Volvo Cars. It’s not in any way a charity but I believe my work has a mostly positive impact. Among traditional auto makers were one of the most serious and committed to full electrification by 2030 and 50% electric cars by 2025. We have the same schedule for selling cars online only, so software is not just a cost center or marketing channel, it’s the future of the company. Volvo Cars creates a significan…

Thanks for the link. Loads of software related positions in CA, but also in Denmark and of course Sweden.

Do Volvo make cars out of Shanghai exclusively these days?

Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact

#36

This 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.)

Eye watering to you, close to a normal wage for most of the population at most nonprofits, especially in tech roles.

Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact

#37
I'm a cofounder over at Ideal Medical Technologies, and we're working towards building one of the first fully automated blood glucose control devices for hospital use, which could save hundreds of thousands of lives per year in the US alone!

We're not currently hiring, but once our first human data comes in, we will be looking to scale up our team quite a bit! If that's something you're interested in, drop me a line, email is in my bio.

Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact

#38
post #22

I work for Volvo Cars. It’s not in any way a charity but I believe my work has a mostly positive impact. Among traditional auto makers were one of the most serious and committed to full electrification by 2030 and 50% electric cars by 2025. We have the same schedule for selling cars online only, so software is not just a cost center or marketing channel, it’s the future of the company. Volvo Cars creates a significan…

Thanks for the link. Loads of software related positions in CA, but also in Denmark and of course Sweden. Do Volvo make cars out of Shanghai exclusively these days?

No, manufacturing is across multiple locations globally. We’re building a battery manufacturing plant in Sweden with Northvolt, expected to bring 3000 jobs.

Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact

#39
If 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 is giant! But campaigns need millions of dollars in order to survive. It’s way harder to raise a dollar because in order to donate to campaigns the person usually needs to have discretionary income. And to move the needle financially for a campaign, you need to be fairly wealthy.

At the end of the day, maximizing your salary and donating, say 10k (2.8k direct + 7.2k via PAC) to a political candidate that you believe will make a way bigger positive impact than working for minimum wage or free for that candidate. Because your skills aren’t being used optimally. If you take a paycut from 300k to 60k, are you still comfortable making that donation?

Anyways, my personal mantra is to maximize income at impact neutral companies or positive adjacent. And then commit to donate a significant chunk of income to positive impact organizations. Don’t know if this helps or not.

Re: Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact

#40
If you care about freedom and privacy pls check us out: Abine - the online privacy company

| https://www.abine.com/ and https://joindeleteme.com/

WFH - full stack developers and other positions available.

We are a growing profitable company focused on better, easier, online privacy.

We make two products. Blur is a password manager foundation with privacy aliasing / tokenization built-in from the ground up to help people mask / control their PII credentials like email addresses, phone numbers, and credit cards. DeleteMe is a service for removing private information from many data broker sites that list and sell consumers personal profile data.

We're looking for strong talent across the board as we are growing over 100% y/y and expanding both B2C and B2B divisions. Leaders and mid-level people who are interested in making a difference in the fight for privacy are encouraged to apply. Developers, product managers, growth marketers etc. are encouraged to apply.

Please contact us at jobs at getabine dotcom. 1. no recruiters (please, really, please) 2. helpful if you can include both a full CV and desired comp range

thanks!

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