If you suddenly had 20K workers available, what you have them do?

Question

The company I am currently working for is paying approximately 20,000 employees to stay home. These are smart people, most are college educated and smart. Many worked in Retail stores and other similar jobs, they are pretty smart and all have broadband (free from our company) and want to do something.We are being asked to brainstorm on what we could put them to work doing. Ours is a large corporation and we do not want to lay these people off because they are valuable and smart but they are people who want to do something.We are brainstorming and I thought it would be interesting to poll HN and see what this HN "think tank" would come up with.(BTW we are cool with stuff that is not profitable but for the good of society type things.)

jdale27 · Accepted Answer

You said three times that they are "smart", but that doesn't really say much about what they are capable of doing. They may be great managers, writers, economists, musicians, chefs, or whatever, but if I suggested that they should build a nuclear reactor or an atmospheric carbon capture device, those skills wouldn't really help much would they? It would help if you could give a bit more background on the range of roles and expertise in the company (presumably you're not able to just name the company).
In the absence of that, I'll mention a quote attributed to Steve Jobs: "It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do."
So if you really have smart people, maybe you should let them decide what to do. Start by setting up an internal "idea market" where people can post ideas, comment on them, and self-organize into teams based on their interests and skills. Then watch as the ideas that are the most engaging rise to the top, and put the company's resources behind those.

sherabi · Answer

1. Build an open source UI layer that can be used to display open street map. This can potentially help track covid-19. Kinda like google maps.
2. Build an open source Tesla type AI for lidar.
3. Open source DRM free Netflix alternative.
4. Contribute to coreboot.
5. Fully functional open source OS written in Rust. There are several attempts out there but with a 20k strong workforce sitting idle you can really make a dent here and give linux a run for its money.
Bottom line, whatever you do make it opensource. It's in everyone's best interest.

jonrjohnson · Answer

Start a service to help others scrub and clean database entries. Fixing bad data, removing duplicates, etc.

jonrjohnson · Answer

Start a service to help people scrub and clean database entries of bad data and duplicates.

orionblastar · Answer

Work on my dream project. But where is the money coming from to pay them is my question?