Recommend employers with positive social impact

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.

Hard to answer without knowing more about your values and perspective, friend. A lot of smart, experienced, well-informed, decent, and sincere people would say you can't do much better than Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, or Exxon Mobil (although maybe not so many of those people hang out here on HN). Less controversially/polarizingly, even more people would point you towards companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, SpaceX, Ford, Atlassian, etc

However, since you mentioned that you think your goal probably rules out FANG, I'm gonna make some rough guesstimates about your values and recommend companies like:

* Wikimedia Foundation

* Khan Academy & to a lesser extent Brilliant.org, and to an even lesser extent Masterclass and Outlier

* edX, YouTube (for the enormous amount of high quality educational content on there) & to a lesser extent Coursera

* MIT & other major research universities, especially ones working actively to expand and improve their free/low-cost online offerings

* Intercept Games, Zachtronics, Wube Software, Giant Army, Klei, Microsoft (cos of Minecraft), SCS Software, Dry Cactus, Fakt Software, and the many other companies making games that inspire, support, and develop intellectual curiosity, creativity, systems thinking, analytical reasoning, etc

* Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, etc

* Raspberry Pi Foundation

* Blink Fitness & other companies that provide and promote low-cost, accessible fitness

* Melodics & other tools that help people build their musical skills and confidence

* Content creation software companies like Procreate, Image-Line Software, Adobe, Affinity, Apple (Logic Pro), Cycling '74, Cockos, etc etc

There are many ways to feed a cat

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 differences between two providers for the same service (or even between two patients at the same hospital) because all pricing is negotiated in a vacuum separately by every insurance company. It leads to a very distorted system with little downward price pressure.

We don't have a magic wand that we can wave to "fix healthcare", but we feel like we are driven by having a positive impact in the most pragmatic way possible. The premise will sound strange to people outside the US where heath care prices aren't defined by what insurance plan your job provides, but it is a huge market in the US where a ton of GDP is mis-spent on healthcare and ripe for disruption.

(And yes, we are hiring!)

For focusing on the world's most important problems in effective ways, please look into 80,000 Hours (an organization named after the approximate number of hours of work in a typical life-long career).

https://80000hours.org/ & https://80000hours.org/job-board/

They are aligned with Effective Altruism which is focusing on effective ways to do the most good - https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

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 differently is we provide a small companion unit, about the size of a flip phone, that houses a much more powerful processor than you can fit behind the ear. Since we have more than three orders of magnitude more compute than a traditional hearing aid, we can run modern deep neural networks to denoise audio in real time.

We are hiring for a variety of roles, but I in particular have been looking to hire a machine learning engineer for my team.

You said "company". Have you considered working for your local civil service?

I've worked on things which have had a positive contribution to society. It can be something as "simple" as making a confusing form simpler, or it can be something as complex as advising on national technology policy.

The salary may not be as high as a private company (although you'd be surprised) - but the pension is usually pretty good. You get to work on things which - nominally - a plurality of your fellow citizens have decided is a priority.

If your national government isn't your thing, then your local government is probably crying out for decent technologists. That way you can make an impact on your community.

Are you going to agree with everything your bosses say or do? No. But that's not much different to any other organisation.

Regardless of where you end up working, consider donating some non-trivial part of your income to cost-effective charities (ones that use research-proven methods to help as many individuals as possible "biggest bang for the buck").

Finding such organizations is easier now than ever, since GiveWell has been working on this problem for over a decade: https://www.givewell.org/

And 10% seems like a good amount to give to charity - join the thousands of others already doing it: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/

The amount of good money can do is tremendous. For example, $3 donated to AMF (Against Malaria Foundation) results in a distribution of an anti-mosquito bednet protecting about 2 people from malaria for 3-4 years (evidence shows: prevents transmission, decreases malaria incidence in the area; kids don't miss school, parents avoid loss of income due to sickness; prevents death, and other good things).

Honestly, most companies have a net positive impact in the world, and if you live in a first world country and are interested in improving the world, one of the most effective ways to do that is make a lot of money and give a lot of it to well-run charities.

But if you want to specifically also work with a company with a "good cause", I'd strongly recommend that you go with a company whose entire mission is focused on a particular cause, as opposed to a more traditional company that says part of its mission is to "do good" or whatever. So, for example, Solar Cookers International could (maybe?) be an example of the former, while General Electric is the latter.

That's not to say GE is in any way bad, but if you want a do-good company and it's not a do-good company first and foremost, then at some point you will likely feel let down by it (or by yourself for working there). Also, it seems that a lot of normal for-profit companies that want to be seen as do-good companies can't help but get mired in politics (usually due to grossly oversimplifying complex social issues).

You could try looking at civic technology organizations. I felt that the work I did at USDS had a huge positive impact, and you can find private firms like Nava or Truss that work on the same / similar projects if you don't want to work directly for the government. There are similar agencies and organizations in Canada, the UK, EU countries, and some Latin American countries, too.

There are also some orgs at tech giants that work on socially impactful products (e.g., sustainable hardware teams at AWS or Azure, like the folks who work on https://natick.research.microsoft.com/), so I wouldn't rule those out entirely.

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.)

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 significant number of well paying jobs in manufacturing with good working conditions, benefiting local communities. For example, all employees across the globe, across manufacturing and offices, were recently given 24 weeks of paid parental leave (https://www.volvocars.com/intl/about/family-bond/).

We’re hiring in multiple locations https://jobs.volvocars.com

>Does your work make at least a small contribution to a better world? If so, where do you work?

I sell used video games online. I make the world slightly better by giving thousands of people each year a bit of fun, nostalgic escape. I also create a good, well paying job for at least one employee so far.

My dad worked in the rockwool/glasswool industry for 30 years as an engineer. He made the world better by helping people insulate their homes.

I'd be very hesitant to say that the average for-profit company doesn't make the world better. I'd be even more hesitant to say that social enterprises, nonprofits and other well-meaning organisations that sell themselves on being ethical are typically effective. And based on the experience of people I know who've worked at the Red Cross and Headspace, to say that a single employee in one of these organisations can actually make a difference (or even achieve anything) is incredibly rare.

Outside of companies that monetise addiction (this includes things like social media and mobile games) or spend huge amounts lobbying the government it's actually really hard to make money these days without providing something people value. It's very easy to burn grants and donations for no gain, though.

At Súper (https://super.mx), we are working to provide insurance to the 100+ million people and families in Mexico to protect them against natural disasters (e.g. earthquakes) and their personal belongings (e.g. theft). Mexico residents are often living without insurance because there are trust issues (people getting ripped off).

We're here to fix that! We are based in Mexico City and are working to show that insurance can be different, not only by being trustworthy and paying out claims when they happen but also by making the products more accessible and friendly for our customers. For example, we simplified our earthquake product by designing it to require NO ADJUSTORS. If you have a policy with us and live within a certain radius of where an earthquake originated, you will get a payment even if there is no damage to your home. It's that simple.

I am the CTO of Súper and would love to tell you more about what we're trying to accomplish! Feel free to email me at stephen.wooten@super.mx - i'd love to chat!

I work at The MITRE Corporation. We're a not-for-profit that runs Federally Funded Research and Development Centers and works directly with industry and government agencies. More specifically, I work in the Center for Advanced Aviation Systems Development on developing AI/ML and applying systems engineering to improve aviation safety and transportation safety (including autonomous vehicles).

It's a really interesting, impactful place to work. We work on everything from tracking illegal fishing, improving microweather meteorological modeling, applying GNNs to model air congestion, preventing aviation safety accidents, addressing inequity in criminal sentencing, and finding gaps in transparency and accountability for federal coronavirus aid.

I like that we have good work-life balance, get to use the latest tech, publish papers and open-source code, work on challenging and impactful problems, and have a strong commitment to working in the public interest making the world a safer place.

My advice is to join a company that is not making a negative impact on the world that pays well.

Many times companies that are trying to make a positive impact on the world can be miserable places to work. Many times there is this unsaid assumption that workers needs are secondary to the larger goal of helping the world (instead of increasing your salary, we could use that money to save even more babies). Also, people who think they are doing good for the world, will excuse bad behavior in themselves, since the good that they have done, so far outweighs the bad).

So I would recommend, going to a job that pays well and doesn't harm the world. Learn skills, make money, and do your own positive impact for the world on your own terms.

I have moved from a well-paid, relaxed job that made rich people even richer to a much harder one that's about making people's life better. It was the best thing I've done with my career. We have people in the company who got burned out in the software industry and rejoined just for participating in the mission. (We're patientsknowbest.com, aiming to provide all the patients all their data without hidden agendas about monetizing it.)

Would recommend looking for companies that are a B Corp. Nick Francis's https://www.helpscout.com/ is one. And otherwise, Natalie Nagele's Wildbit, Claire Lew's KnowYourTeam, and Brendan Schwartz's Wistia work in admirable ways.

I'm the co-founder and CTO at U.S. Digital Response (https://usdigitalresponse.org/) - we're a non-partisan non-profit that started 2 years ago to help state and local governments and non-profits around the US address the challenges from COVID.

We've expanded our work beyond COVID to support these organizations addressing the critical needs of the public and bring the best technology has to offer to these problems. We've partnered with more than 230 government and nonprofit partners on 300+ projects, impacting more than 42 million people across 36 states and territories. As one example, we helped the city of Memphis and Shelby County distribute almost $14M in rental assistance (https://www.usdigitalresponse.org/case-studies/keeping-famil...) in a matter of weeks at very low cost.

One of the things I like about this work is that we are tied directly in with local experts who understand the problems very well, and we can bring the lens of understanding how modern tech can be helpful, rather than trying to lead with solutions.

In doing this work, we've discovered a number of common problems that have scalable solutions that we're working on in both access to benefits and election administration (e.g. our poll worker management tool - https://www.usdigitalresponse.org/projects/poll-worker-manag...) and are starting to scale our team to tackle these challenges.

In addition to our full time roles (https://us-digital-response.breezy.hr/), we are always looking for more volunteers to join projects (https://usdigitalresponse.org/volunteer).

Quartzy (YC S11) makes software for researchers that helps them save time and money, and we're hiring: https://quartzy.com

How about working for an educational institution or other non-profit rather than a company?

I love working for a small college that is truly dedicated to educating the next generation. I find it very rewarding to know that my tasks and goals at work are not driven by profits and there are no overpaid executives sitting at the top of my org. There are no shareholders to answer to.

Yes, I am well aware that colleges still have bottom lines, still have 'customers', and are often run similarly to many businesses. I regularly see faculty and staff giving their all to the students. I've been here long enough to see students graduate and begin to make their own positive impact on the world.

There's always a trade-off... In exchange for not 'working to make a rich guy richer' and an almost unheard of balance between work & life, I accept lower pay than I'd make elsewhere. Without hesitation I can say that every member of our IT team could easily make more money working in the private sector.

I rarely work over the 37.5 hours per week expected of me, minus a few hours on the half-day Fridays we get during most of the summer. No org is perfect, but after nearly 20 years at this institution I'm still growing, learning, feeling appreciated, finding new ways to contribute, and am happier than I've ever been.

Sound good? We're currently searching for an experienced Network Engineer. https://jobs.reed.edu/positions/2022/network-engineer.html

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!

I have thought long about this myself in my life (I'm 43) and experienced quite a bit from friends and family who have specifically sought out work to help people and it's complicated.

My best resolution, personally, and advice, is to not worry too much about anything too "big", just about what's around me wherever I am, the people I work with and live with and help them, improve their day, as a start.

For those looking for high impact career pathways, I highly recommend going through 80,000 hours guides, they have a job board they update every week or so as well. More longtermist focused but also plenty of global health, environmental, nuclear stuff too.

https://80000hours.org/job-board/

It depends on your skillset, but something like Givewell would be interesting to look at.

https://www.givewell.org/about/jobs

Bloomberg LP is essentially a revenue generating arm for Bloomberg Philanthropies with >80% of revenue getting donated. The volunteering culture at Bloomberg LP itself is also fairly strong, compared to other medium/large tech companies, so there's a lots of opportunity to give back beyond knowing your revenue is going towards good projects. See [1] below for more info.

Aside from donating time and money, the company's service is also seen as a fundamental piece of the global economy today. Providing a common baseline of financial data and price transparency of assets creates liquidity and helps keep asset prices low. It also allows smaller players to enter the financial services industry without needing to be in the "Old Boys' Club". It also helps developing countries and other emerging markets to list their sovereign debt and manage investors.

1: https://www.bloomberg.org/

I work at Activated Insights — we're a company that helps improve the lives of senior citizens through transparency in senior care facilities.

We're hiring here: https://activatedinsights.com/jobs/software-engineer-remote/

I'm the cofounder of Math ANEX, we help schools better understand how their students are thinking about math so they can offer better instruction/support for their students.

We are about to share a couple more positions in ~a month. A developer, a sales position, and a math question designer. Feel free to email me jeremy@mathanex.com

The techjobsforgood.com jobs board is useful for this, but a lot of the postings are from nonprofits and the pay is often below market (or so it seems to me).

I'm a recruiter at Bowery Farming. Bowery Farming builds smart indoor farms near cities, growing fresher, pesticide-free Protected Produce in precisely controlled environments, 365 days a year. At the heart of each farm is the proprietary BoweryOS, which integrates software, hardware, sensors, AI, computer vision systems, machine learning models, and robotics to orchestrate and automate the entirety of its operations form seed to pack and delivery. As a result, each farm creates far less waste and uses a fraction of the water and land compared to traditional agriculture.

At scale, we provide a reliable food supply chain at a fraction of the resources to traditional agriculture and we are looking to expand into new types of crops like strawberries and other budding fruits.

We are hiring a ton in our NYC office (hybrid/onsite): feel free to message me at colin@boweryfarming.com

I believe that my current work has a positive social impact. I work for ResearchSpace (https://www.researchspace.com/) where we make software for bio-med research labs. Its no change-the-world kind of endeavour, but is is simple, honest work. We're almost always looking to grow the team, for anyone interested.

I sincerely enjoyed my eight years at Mozilla. Like any large organization, they're far from perfect, but my colleagues' hearts were in the right place. https://www.mozilla.org/careers/

Similarly, I just left Element, which is doing really compelling work around decentralized encrypted communication (Matrix chat protocol). Absolutely necessary for free society. https://element.io/careers

Companies exist generally to make money first, and any societal benefit is a side effect. Beware of companies that promise otherwise - they're lying either to themselves or to you. Either take the hit on the paycheck and work for a non-profit or academic/government institution, or just try and find something you find interesting - there's still lots of good stuff that comes out of the bleakest-seeming corporate environments, e.g. learning materials, open source projects.

My employer, Saildrone is growing fast, currently hiring for 30+ open roles (a handful of which are remote-friendly).

https://www.saildrone.com/careers

Our many and varied missions include measuring CO2 in the ocean for global climate science, and patrolling marine protected areas to prevent illegal fishing.

https://www.saildrone.com/missions

I'm a co-founder at PicassoMD[0]. We're working to improve our healthcare system by connecting primary care providers with specialists to better collaborate on patient care. Through our mobile apps, we facilitate more appropriate triaging of patients, seamless transition of care, and ongoing coordination. The result is a reduction in unnecessary referrals and ER visits and better patient experience and outcomes.

We work with providers in value based care arrangements[1] so helping providers and patients is the same thing that increases revenue for us. We're a small team so everyone definitely sees and feels the impact of their work.

You can check out our jobs page[2] or reach out for more info (even if there's not an open position that's a great match at the moment).

[0] https://picasso.md [1] https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Ass... [2] https://apply.workable.com/picassomd/

Right now I work for Aledade [1] where we're focused on improving outcomes while lowering cost of care for Medicare patients. The amount of good we do in the world is directly aligned with how we make money, so there's never conflict between doing the right thing and doing the thing that will make us the most money. We have a Python backend and Vue frontend, a lot of unit tests, and a lot of really great people.

Previously I worked at findhelp [2]. I loved the mission, helping people locate community resources, but leadership was really focused on chasing money rather than focusing on user experience. Occasionally customers asked us to do things that would actively hamper the ability of people in marginalized groups to find programs aimed at helping them, and we usually obliged. I know a few people that have moved over to their chief competitor Unite Us [3] and they seem happier there.

[1] https://jobs.lever.co/aledade?lever-via=4Oe9-BZLKF

[2] https://jobs.lever.co/findhelp

[3] https://uniteus.com/our-careers/

Hi op! I work at Angaza, a social impact company. We've built a Saas platform which enables life-changing products, such as solar home energy systems, to be sold on payment plans in off-grid regions around the world. Angaza helped pioneer this industry by creating an embedded software solution, now open source, which connects a solar home system battery pack to a payment plan.

Our product has helped millions of people gain access to clean and affordable energy for their household or microbusiness. We've also expanded our platform to support other impactful consumer products, such as smartphones.

We have U.S. and East African teams. We're still a small, less than 100 people, but we support customers in Africa, Asia, South, and North America. Recently, I've been helping our customers in Sierra Leone handle a currency redenomination by the country's central bank.

One last thing; my team is looking for a full-stack senior software engineer. Here's the job description: https://jobs.lever.co/angaza/8e4f159d-4085-4766-a813-0657eb5.... Good luck with your job search! There are a lot of great social impact companies out there.

You could start by looking at companies that comprise ESG ETFs. Granted many of the companies included in there could be semineutral or debatable as to actual benefit.

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.

I work at a medical device company. I definitely feel our products can change the lives of many people for the better. The business side of healthcare in the US is pretty dirty and work sometimes can be very slow due to regulation and the need to prevent patient harm (no "move fast and break things" here). But overall I think my work contributes to producing technology to make the world a better place.

The Economist recently reported on "The coming food catastrophe". The subheading read "War is tipping a fragile world towards mass hunger. Fixing that is everyone’s business".

Our product is used in commercial and industrial food kitchens to make them run more efficiently. We help everyone from mom-and-pop shops to factories. Our customers use our apps to calculate production costs, reduce waste, calculate nutrition, find suppliers, and order ingredients. The last few months have been particularly busy for us because of inflation and rising food prices. We hope to help as many food SMB's make it through the recession.

Our plan is to be in every business kitchen in the world so our core features are available for free and the subscription price is affordable to all. I18n is one of our biggest considerations because our users are all over the world and majority speaks languages other than English.

We bootstrapped ourselves to 100,000+ kitchens so our customers aren't worried about us folding because we can't raise the next round of funding.

Link in bio.

Hi, I work on the ActivityInfo team where we make software supporting humanitarian relief, from Venezuela to Yemen to the Ukraine and 60 other countries. We have a few open positions: https://www.activityinfo.org/about/careers/index.html

Oden Technologies (https://oden.io/careers/) is hiring... We build data and analytics solutions for manufacturing problems. We help factories improve their digitization; democratize data; and generally help real people make things, better. We work with customers who operate using pen and paper through to real-time streaming machine learning models on the factory floor – a wide range of fascinating technical problems. We're able to help reduce material usage, use less energy, make less "scrap" / throwaway product, and other ways of bootstrapping existing manufacturers to operate at their highest potential, by making their employees better at their jobs and minimizing the negative impact of production.

I've been at OPAL-RT for about a year now, providing real-time simulation tools for power electronics. So clients include electric vehicle manufacturers, renewables companies, grid operators... pretty much everyone who is involved in electricity, which is a lot. The exec team is also directly committed to being good, so work-life balance + conditions + compensation are great and they contribute something like 2% of net profits to local charities and organisations.

And yes we're profitable, demand is going up because of the push for electrification everywhere and we are hiring very aggressively. Roles have geographic designation, but can pretty much be from anywhere

https://www.opal-rt.com/careers-search-job-posting/

My company, Self Financial (https://www.self.inc), offers a credit-building product that helps people get out of the catch-22 where your credit score is so low you can't get the financial products that people normally use to build it. We've gotten lots of testimonials from people who have used it to change their own lives.

We are a VC-backed for-profit company, not a charity. But I wouldn't work here if I thought we were having a negative impact on society, and I genuinely believe we have a net positive impact. I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say about our financials, but from my perspective they seem healthy. I believe it's a positive and sustainable business.

I came out of "early retirement" to work with the tech team at TED (the TEDTalks non-profit)

It's a for-real media tech brand with a mission to incubate and spread good ideas. I love it. Find the TED jobs page -- we're hiring people in NYC and remote.

I work at Rescale https://rescale.com/company/careers/. The impact we are providing is one of the main reasons I work there.

The very best companies I've worked at were mostly apolitical. Everybody recognized and respected that politics and religion did not belong in the workplace. (You could be as passionate as you wanted outside the workplace. Once at work, professionalism ruled the day.)

In these environments, it seemed everybody was respected. The most diverse company will be the one that has the greatest variety of employees, including diversity of religion, politics, skin color, sexuality, etc.

To find the company with positive social impact, find one that walks the walk, not just talks the talk.

At https://padam-mobility.com, we make a complete on demand public transport solution : customer and driver applications, backend routing algorithm, management website. To my mind, an easy reliable service push people to reduce their car usage, simply because it's more convenient.

Internally, employees are driven by ecological reasons, but also by taking care of each other : non violent communication and kindness are very important values we put into action every day, it's been quite transformative to me.

Hope you'll find a job that you'll enjoy!

https://techjobsforgood.com/ is where you can also look. I applied but never got a response back (need experience to get experience smh).

Lots of great answers here. I’ll add my employer Indeed, the world’s #1 job website/app. Our mission is simple: help people get jobs.

For a large tech company I find it extremely impressive how much everyone at the company–from senior leadership to L1 engineers–sincerely believe in the mission and what we’re doing.

I’ve got several openings on my team. I’d encourage you to read more about our values. If it aligns with what you care about feel free to reach out.

https://www.indeed.jobs/

I work at a company called GrandPad that makes tablets for senior citizens and a suite of apps and websites that allow companions and caregivers to connect with them. Sometimes we forget that there's a whole demographic of people that technology has left behind. Things that are simple to us, like being able to receive a video call from a child or grandchild, are invaluable for reducing social isolation and loneliness for the folks we serve.

We're always looking for more engineers. Shoot us a message if you're interested!

As others have suggested, it's difficult to assess an organizations values against your own. That being said, it's well worth investing your time/energy/creativity into an effort that improves the world.

In my career, I've been fortunate to work for a variety of companies that have obvious and direct positive social impact. I don't want to start a flame war here, but my last ten years have been in FANG, which I've found to dramatically magnify my ability to have a positive social impact.

As another commenter mentioned, what makes a better world is subjective, depends on what you value.

I joined my current company because I believe that as our species grows (over huge time scales) one 'world' will not be enough, and that our current manufacturing model is too wasteful and slow to adapt to meet our and our planet's needs, which impacts day-to-day life for all of us.

https://www.relativityspace.com/mission

If you stand with Ukraine, consider either Raytheon or Lockheed Martin, as it's a joint venture of those two companies that makes the FGM-148 Javelin.

Or, for the stage the war is now entering, consider instead cranking out M777 howitzers with BAE Systems, either in Barrow-in-Furness, UK (parts), or in Hattiesburg, MS (assembly).

I'm joking, but only half. There's a point in here about non-"social-impact" companies sometimes doing important and worthwhile things.

NPOs can always use help. They are the sharp point of social impact.

But they don't pay well (when they pay). Not a popular option for the HN crowd.

That's why they will often take just about anyone. Good place to upskill.

I work for free, for NPOs (I won't go into detail in public, but it's no secret), but I'm pretty much "retired" (Quotes, because I actually get more done, than I ever did, when making a paycheck). I have learned a tremendous amount, working for free (still am learning -every day).

80,000 has a jobs board that might be of interest [0].

[0] https://80000hours.org/job-board/

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.

Eyenuk (https://www.eyenuk.com) - we are healthcare and AI company, working to prevent the leading cause of blindness among working age adults (diabetic retinopathy). This not only saves people's vision, which is hugely important, but it also helps avoid the societal cost of taking care of those who have lost their vision.

To name a few: https://puri.sm/jobs/, https://archive.org/about/jobs.php, https://freedom.press/jobs/

I work at Featurespace - we stop fraud, scams, money laundering and other financial crimes.

We build software that runs real-time machine learning models at scale, deep in the financial 'rails' that move money around, and we license it to banks and other financial institutions.

A surprisingly large number of my colleagues are here because of similar reasons - we like making a positive societal contribution.

We're hiring!

Impact Upgrade solely works with nonprofits and missional businesses, mainly focusing on process automation and systems integration. If anyone is interested in a small team and big impact, we'd love to chat. https://www.impactupgrade.com or my email is in my bio.

Certara - We have software products for accelerating the development of medicines.

https://www.certara.com/certara-careers/

https://www.certara.com/company/our-story/

I help make furniture for a living. It's a small business making a big impact locally. It's not a grand problem but reducing the cost and increasing the availability of kitchens in my home country is satisfying. We have so many inefficiencies in the industry that we can make a big impact.

Small businesses making lives better for locals can be meaningful.

You can reach out and join us at Stashrun– we're reinventing charitable giving and letting our users take action on causes/nonprofit-backed campaigns without spending any of their own money.

Beyond bringing in new donations, the nonprofits receive more money per dollar, and it scales. It is truly a three-sided marketplace that benefits all parties

Come join us at eidu.com we impact education for children in low income countries, by providing an android phone to teachers and kids. We don't drop it from the sky but work with governments and have passionate coaches on the ground.

It will be an epic journey from the 39k students we've covered in Kenya today to 600m who deserve it (3x every year).

Hustle (hustle.com) helps Democratic campaigns, progressive advocacy groups, nonprofits, schools, and other organizations mobilize their constituents via text and video messaging.

We are hiring remote US-based software engineers: https://hustle.applytojob.com/apply

Check out Prepform! We're an AI-based Edtech company expanding access to education for students of all backgrounds: https://prepform.com. We're not currently hiring, but we're looking to hire soon! If you're interested, feel free to send me a message.

consider first determining exactly what kind of impact you would like your work to have

looking for something "positive" without principled and reasoned motivation to prefer any particular outcome is a great way to get yourself taken advantage of, or to make yourself a cog in a machine that takes advantage of others

do you know how you want to change the world? if so, go work on it. if you're not sure how to achieve a well defined objective, then read, study, try things, and talk to people until you have a better idea. if your objective is vague, think about it until it's not

if you want something "positive" but don't really know what, the first step is emphatically not to go join somebody else's movement, the first step is to determine precisely what positive means to you, then reason from first principles how to get there

I work for Nova Credit - we're a fintech with many roles open. We work on expanding financial services to immigrants (most immigrants need to start over financially when they move) and those without credit scores.

https://novacredit.com/

A few resources I've found useful in finding impactful civic tech jobs:

https://civictechjobs.codeforamerica.org/

https://civictech.guide/

Most businesses are social good. They're providing goods/services to people. Stripe is enabling customers and entrepreneurs on a massive scale. Pretty much any legitimate business from your local bakery to General Electric is providing value to people. They're improving the world.

There are a handful of people in the Elm Slack that work for companies that fit this description. I've seen everything from education to green energy and more. Might be a good place to ask. I know each of those companies needs back end devs, and likely had some non-Elm code as well.

Check out Joby Aviation! Currently hiring all types of engineers. Developing zero-emission aircraft.

The company is very social/environmental-impact conscious, and has an incredible culture.

https://www.jobyaviation.com/

Companies by their nature are driven by profit motives and in almost no circumstances have a positive impact on the world. They exist to exploit people and resources to the benefit of their owners. Even the most well meaning startups I've worked with eventual devolve into doing "harm with a smile" to their customers. In my experience, as a rule of thumb, the more altruistic the mission the more horrific the actual behavior (be more skeptical of CEO/Founders pitching a desire to "help people", it will start that way but one day you'll be selling your user info to big pharma to exploit them for every penny).

I've worked for the Federal Government, thinking it would provide some "good work", and I personally found that to be pretty off putting. Most of the people I interacted with were bureaucrats obsessed with defending and expanding the little bit of power they had, with very little interest in serving the public. However there were a high number of people who were seriously committed to changing the world. So if you want to meet some of these people government work can open some other doors (just bewared it might leave you ultimately disenchanted).

The best place I've found for doing "good" work is the odd, small team doing research at a university. I say this a someone who has a lot of frustrations with academia as well, but there are small pockets of people doing cool research to make the world better that need technical skill to help (academia is much better on the non-tenure faculty/staff side). This can be anything from biologists working to cure cancer to academic libraries building tools for students/the world. This is the most likely chance you have to be in a room filled with smart people all seriously interested in doing work for the benefit of the world. I have long hoped to find the right team to one day land on, but that will have to wait until later in my career because...

One major, major catch: expected to severely cut your comp. Salary information is public for both publicly funded universities and the federal government. Go look up what software engineers make at these places and you'll see sub-100k salaries are far more common than not. 15 years ago the gap wasn't as big (and the recession might send us back to that world), but today you have to really, really not care about comp.

I used to do meaningful work for universities, I had a lot of fun interacting with students and brainstorming with clever people not driven by any profit motive. Unfortunately the gap in pay became too much. I make more than 5 times what I used to back then, but do miss waking up in the morning as asking "what's the best thing I can do for the world with my time today?"

Upwork, they are doing good as the leading freelancing platform which helps people make side income or even establish their fulltime freelancing business

As employer, they are mostly remote

Disclaimer: I work for Upwork, this is my own genuine comment though

Good Here is a directory of social impact organisations at https://goodhere.org/ with a heavy lean towards organisations tackling climate change.

Work in the healthcare / life sciences world.

I choose to work mainly with oncology related life science companies and it is a great feeling know that I am helping patients live longer and help with the treatment of cancer.

Openup.org.za and civic tech in general. I work there.

See code for all and code for america.

We're hiring at Gravity, a carbon accounting firm. Shoot me an email if you're interested in helping us fight climate change and grow revenue fast: ted@gravityclimate.com.

Im not sure they hire or anything but freecodecamp changed my life for the better and I think they also helped a lot of people out there, some of them are friends of mine.

One field I haven't seen anyone mention yet is cybersecurity. It's a huge problem, and one that could really use more people (and not just security researchers).

hey! I'm a software engineer at Down Dog, an app for at home yoga & fitness.

We get users who write in thanking us for our work every day, so I feel very good about the positive impact we've had (made the apps free for 3mm+ people during the lockdowns in 2020, all apps free for students & teachers forever, etc).

And we're hiring! https://www.downdogapp.com/jobs

BotBuilt (W21) we build robots that build homes. Always looking for software and hardware types that want to take on the massive housing shortage!

In my experience, the companies that have spent the most time touting their positive social impact wound up being the most disappointing to work for. The thing is that you will always find people who will justify poor company behavior because it benefits them financially (just look at all of the Meta people that hang out here and make excuses about what that company is doing to society.)

I hate to say this, but your ability to find a company making a positive impact in the world will largely depend on your tolerance for corporate PR and what you'll see behind the scenes. Because no matter what your company does, you're gonna see stuff you don't like. Capitalism is simply war by other means.

I doubt this will get much traction here on HN, but: LinkedIn. Their hiring and recruiting division has made huge efforts to make LI useful for small businesses, blue collar workers, artists, everyone. They get a bad rap for historical behavior but the modern LinkedIn helps thousands of people find jobs every day, and not just in tech or management. And a lot of the employees there are incredibly passionate about and proud of that.

Thorn - https://www.thorn.org/

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), creating a more data-driven approach to health

Reverie Labs (https://www.reverielabs.com), accelerating drug development with ML

PathAI (https://www.pathai.com), increasing diagnosis accuracy

Benchling (https://www.benchling.com), cloud for biotech R&D

Mental Health:

Alma (https://helloalma.com), providing easier access to therapy

Headway (https://headway.co), same as Alma

Juniper (https://www.juniperplatform.com), workflow tools for autism providers

Real Estate:

Orchard (https://orchard.com), buy your next home before you sell

Ribbon (https://www.ribbonhome.com), cash offers to improve home access

Hardware:

Sofar Ocean (https://www.sofarocean.com), collecting ocean data

Climate:

Watershed (https://watershed.com), platform for enterprises to reduce carbon emissions

Sweep (https://www.sweep.net)

Pachama (https://pachama.com)

Defense (if you believe that Western influence is positive impact):

Anduril (https://www.anduril.com), building high-tech defense products and reducing gov waste

Palantir (https://www.palantir.com), building data products for government

Anyone in the medical device, medical tech, or bio tech spaces.

mullvad is always looking to hire more people: https://www.mullvad.careers/

What about US Digital Service?

I work for Rec Room. While we make a game, millions of kids are using it and "accidentally" learning engineering skills while they think they are making games :)

We have a principal role open on the team right now but may be able to accommodate others. We essentially make a programming language and the gameplay elements on top. The principal role is on the language side but we could potentially make more roles on the gameplay side. Email me (tyler@recroom.com) if you are interested. I've attached a description of the role below.

---- ROLE DESCRIPTION ----

Principal Software Engineer - Programming Language Architecture

Rec Room is a fun and welcoming community where people from all walks of life come together to play, chat, hang out, learn, build, and explore millions of experiences. Circuits is our-in game programming language that brings these experiences to life: it is a game for building games. Children and adults alike use Circuits as a fun and educational programming tool or a pleasant and productive way to unwind after work hours. By using Circuits, many creators learn programming for the first time and gain lifelong skills used for hobbies, college decisions, or even work opportunities.

As a principal software engineer focusing on programming language architecture, you will own key-components of Circuits and work with a team of world-class engineers to build gameplay, compilers, and interpreters. To move the needle on what's possible: you must work with designers to balance modern language capabilities with a focus on usability for all creators, novice or advanced. Join Rec Room and help improve the lives of millions in our community by picking up programming for the first time or building and sharing with friends.

We are looking for:

Proficient in multiple programming languages: Our client code is written in C#, but an understanding of type-safe, functional, and scripting languages is necessary to drive technical discussions. C, C++, Rust, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Lisp are great examples.

Experienced with full-stack programming language development*: Circuits is a key differentiator for Rec Room. It includes a VM, type system, compiler, runtime environment, debugger, and IDE that work across PC, phones, VR and all major consoles. An understanding of language development is necessary to ensure that Circuits retains usability and high-performance while working across existing and future platforms.

Experienced with video game development: 5+ years experience building games on any platform with complex behavior and live updates. Circuits is built, compiled and executed within the game. So an understanding of the performance requirements, design considerations, and execution model of games ensures that Circuits is a cohesive part of the overall game-play experience.

Comfortable working in a fast-paced, autonomous, and ambiguous environment: At Rec Room we bias towards action.

Rather than meticulous planning with an avalanche of meetings we build things when in doubt. As a top engineer you will execute with a high degree of trust and autonomy to cut through our most challenging technical puzzles.

Lifelong learners: Our top engineers across the company keep up with cutting edge articles, papers, and books. As a member of this group you will be expected to learn, improve and help others improve.

*You don't have to match all of the skills above to apply!*

Bonus points:

Experienced with writing unit tests: Circuits is the most heavily tested component of the Rec Room codebase. All major language features are covered with tests such that developers have immediate feedback when they introduce an error.

Experienced with multiplayer networking: Rec Room is an online-only game with a peer-to-peer networking model. Significant architectural thought is allocated to keeping networking simple across the organization. Circuits itself must keep its data structures consistent across all clients in an experience while it is being actively edited to ensure creators run the same thing.

Familiar with data-oriented design: Foundational components of the Rec Room codebase use a data-oriented design. This provides performance benefits out of the gate with future benefits anticipated by taking advantage of Unity's Data-Oriented Technology Stack.

Familiar with type system implementations: Type systems make it easier to write error-free code but have an intrusive nature. An understanding of type systems is necessary to balance correctness with the impact on developer experience. A contributor to an open source language: Whether you have a toy language for personal use or you own the Rust language server, we love to see real world experience.

Company info to know:

Rec Room offers generous medical, dental, and vision plans that cover you, your spouse/domestic partner, and children. We also support your retirement benefits with a company match. Rec room values work-life balance and provides unlimited paid time off. We work hard to ensure Rec Room is a fun and friendly place for people from all walks of life.

Rec Room provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

Thoughtworks, pillar 3

TL;DR; Take a look at Octopus Energy [1] and the other companies within the Octopus Energy Group [2]. Be a part of tangible and real-world progress toward a clean and sustainable global energy system (not just renewables!) backed by smart software and technology.

You can find a list of global openings at: https://jobs.lever.co/octoenergy

---

I went through a similar journey after feeling incredibly guilty and unhappy working for a company that helped others extract even more oil and gas from the planet. It completely changed my outlook on what I wanted from a job, and made me determined to refocus my career toward things that have a tangible benefit on society and the planet. I could spend the rest of my life working on stuff, or I could spend it on things that actually matter.

It turns out that there are surprisingly few companies around that not only do something "good", but also deliver on that with tangible results.

Renewable energy is a fantastic area to be involved in right now, we're just at the start of a monumental shift toward not only more renewable generation (eg. wind farms), but also the surrounding technology, infrastructure and policy that's required to make it happen in a reliable and cost-effective way (eg. batteries, EVs, smart energy grids, change in consumer behaviours).

I've been working at Octopus Energy since January doing visualisation (eg. 3D graphics, dataviz), who are involved in nearly every aspect of the transition to a modern and clean energy system around the world. They started in the UK but are now spread across many other countries (eg. Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, US and others).

What I love about the Octopus Energy Group is that there's something for everyone. Want to work with electric vehicles? Check out Octopus Electric Vehicles [3]. Want to work on the core software that is already in production, enabling the transition to smarter energy systems? Check out Kraken Technologies [4] and Kraken Flex [5]. Want to be involved with the physical assets of a smart and clean energy system? Check out Octopus Energy Generation [6]. And there's plenty more.

It's the first time in 10 years (since working at Mozilla) that I've felt part of a shared mission for good. It's both fulfilling and highly addictive. And it also helps that the Octopus ethos is to treat people like adults, so the trust and work-life balance is fantastic. We're all here to work together towards the same goal, and it genuinely feels that way.

Long story short, there's something for everyone and I've never been happier. Come join us!

[1] https://octopus.energy [2] https://octopusenergy.group [3] https://octopusenergy.group/octopus-electric-vehicles [4] https://kraken.tech/ [5] https://octopusenergy.group/kraken-flex [6] https://octopusenergy.group/octopus-energy-generation

Give Well.org

Mozilla

There are not many anti-capitalist options in the market, if you want to talk about systemic impact

There is no such thing as ethical production under capitalism.

I'm founder and CEO at ODK and we are hiring (https://getodk.org/jobs)!

ODK is an open-source mobile data collection platform. The common use-case is a data collector in the field fills out a form while offline. Whenever a connection is found, the data gets sent to a server where it can be seen and acted on.

ODK is basically the Land Cruiser of mobile data collection apps. It's designed to be very reliable in challenging settings and it's trusted for that reason. ODK is unique because the tool is generic, but it's primarily used by organizations working in humanitarian aid and global health. It's also unique because it's got a very friendly community of developers and users who hang out at https://forum.getodk.org.

You asked about impact? The impact of ODK on global health alone is pretty wild.

* ODK was a key tool in the eradication of wild polio in Africa (https://www.africakicksoutwildpolio.com/the-top-five-tech-so...)

* ODK was used to collect the clinical trial data for the recent malaria vaccine (https://forum.getodk.org/t/odk-s-role-in-the-first-malaria-v...)

* ODK is used to measure the global burden of disease through verbal autopsies (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/19/health/death-records-afri...)

And that's just global health...

* Jane Goodall Institute uses it to track the health of apes (https://www.google.com/nonprofits/success-stories/jane-gooda...)

* Red Cross uses it in most crises they respond to (https://americanredcross.github.io/2019/01/08/odk-collect-im...)

* Carter Center uses it for election monitoring (https://getnemo.org/)

* Honduras uses it to track education progress of students (https://proceso.hn/imperdonable-invisibilizar-casi-2-millone...)

* Sierra Leone is using it to monitor the planting of millions of trees (https://blogs.worldbank.org/sustainablecities/freetownthetre...)

So yeah, if you want to work on something that is objectively having positive impact, ODK is a great option!

I just want to get paid.