Thank you for a detailed response and an opportunity to debate this issue.
>you're at a much lower figure for net expendable income than the numbers here.
I am from a country where most people earn less than $500/month. Most Americans earn much less than the numbers here. This argumentation always seemed a bit absurd to me.
>and pursue a "moonshot" relying on savings and hopeful future cashflow
While bootstrapping, a top engineer/s is/are always able to do consulting while simultaneously building a product in the same/associated domain. EmberJS/Tilde.io is a great example.
>They might rather solve problems than deal with GAAP vs non-GAAP compliance issues, HR policies, marketing, or revenue generation
Sure. The preferred strategy is to devise solutions for making all of that easier. One solution is to be a CTO/founder while delegating administrative and some business matters to the CEO/CFO/CMO cofounder.
>..similar to a non-profit and we're swimming in them.
The number of tech non-profits is miniscule.
Let's look at the organizations who build popular database software. This is a quasi-random choice without any specific reason.
PG(non-profit), MySQL(for-profit, Oracle), MSSQL(for-profit, Microsoft), OracleDB(for-profit), MariaDB (non-profit), MongoDB(for-profit), RethinkDB(for-profit), Neo4j(for-profit), Complexible(for-profit), Apache Jena(non-profit), Apache Cassandra(non-profit), Couchbase(for-profit), Apache CouchDB(non-profit), OrientDB(for-profit). Those are major SQL, NoSQL, graph and semantic database products.
There are 10 for-profits and 5 non-profits (3 of them are under the stewarship of one entity -- Apache Foundation). The list can be certainly expanded and weighted by userbase for accuracy.
Another interesting domain would be collaboration tools for developers. The list of popular products is much shorter here: Github(for-profit), Bitbucket(Pivotal, for-profit), Gitlab(for-profit).
3 for-profits, 0 non-profits.
My argument is opposite of yours: the number of non-profits is too damn small.
>Why would engineers do a better job at building organizations that maximize social impact...
Technology is a great enabler. Companies with [1-5]0 employees have valuations measured in billions. Obviously, most of them had VC backing (money & network effects) but same principles can be applied to social impact.
>Second, how are we defining "social impact"?
Depends on the domain. Number of people who are able to afford expensive high-tech medical procedures, for example. This is an easy part.
>Think of profit and revenue as an indicator of value provided.... I would argue that is a positive social impact.
Not at all. Think BP, early days Microsoft, Oracle, Linkedin, MongoDB, etc, etc.
>what is a "self-sustaining social enterprise"?
Social enterprises are distinct type of entities with specific incorporation laws, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation as one of the examples.
>..the charismatics and visionaries tend to not be engineers..
One doesn't have to be perceived as a charismatic leader by general population, respect and authority among engineers/programmers/IT professionals/geeks is quite enough. There are millions of these and they possess powerful technological skills to change the world for the better.
> How does it overly benefit megacorps?...
This discussion in the HN format would require too much citations, data and tangents to be efficient.
Income disparity, unemployment, lack of social mobility is increasing locally and globally. Technology, robotics and automation is one of the main reasons for these trends. Corporations are beneficiaries of these trends and won't do much to stop them. I would much prefer non-profits and social enterprises to constitute a bulk of tech businesses while for-profits would be a rare exception.