> Because “hard technical problems” wasn’t my root goal—my root goal was to use my skills to get the most possible leverage on improving the world.
It got me thinking. I wish it were easier to find problems where I can use my skillset to improve the world. It's not like I'm turning down the world-improving jobs in favor of the unimportant ones. Generally I never even see meaningful jobs, and the best I can do is avoid the 60% that actively harm the world in some small way.
I feel like there should be a forum or online community of some kind for matching up programmers with meaningful problems that need solving. Whether that means paying jobs, or even just charity work.
Anybody know of something like this?
The problem with a forum (or any kind of announcement system) for this is that the people who want your skills most and who can afford it will be the loudest voices (or will pay for the loudest and most convincing voices to broadcast their job offerings).
It's possible to take another approach though - consider it like a search problem.
Start with the kinds of projects you'd like to work on, and then try to find the companies and projects that match those by searching HN's archives, GitHub projects, Google search.
I think people in general tend to get used to the existing career funnels (job search sites where you enter your profile; LinkedIn; or looking at big-name company job listings). There's a lot more out there though.