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Those engineers won the lottery. The prize was many people switching to a marginally nicer chat app. If you're looking to make the world a better place, choosin
by zurn 11y ago
Those engineers won the lottery. The prize was many people switching to a marginally nicer chat app. If you're looking to make the world a better place, choosing engineering based on this result isn't really an obvious choice.
- aianus 11y agoNo, but it's also not obvious that having a profound impact on 1000 people is better than having a small impact on a billion people.
- zurn 11y agoYou mean, having an one-in-10-million chance of having a small impact on a billion people.
- aianus 11y agoYou could get a job at Facebook tomorrow and have a small impact on a billion people. I'm not referring to the founders exclusively...
- zurn 11y agoYou're moving the goalposts now! To examine the equation in the "work for an existing SV tech giant" case: a hugely smaller impact on people than what the WhatsApp engineers had. And getting a job at Facebook or another similarly impactful place is still at ~ 1:100000 odds for the world's 20 million software engineers. Only this time you'll have even less confidence that you're actually making things better and not worse. At least in the WhatsApp case they made Facebook have $19 billion less money in the end. And if they're really out to make the world a better place they can spend that in some Bill Gates-esque way. I guess we'll see about that.