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Diminishing returns for your personal enjoyment, sure. But there are plenty of ways any extra money you had could be spent to make a huge impact for other peopl

Diminishing returns for your personal enjoyment, sure. But there are plenty of ways any extra money you had could be spent to make a huge impact for other people: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/high-impact-jobs/#approach-1-earning-to-give https://80000hours.org/career-guide/high-impact-jobs/#approa...

kakarot 10y ago
I wish more people saw it this way. Philanthropy is the only thing driving me to amass wealth. I used to be ok with being poor and spending a lot of free time on side projects but more and more I'm becoming disgusted with myself and those around me for living selfishly when so many people around the world are in pain.
- bjelkeman-again 10y ago
  I found that there are actually relatively few people with the type of experience most of us here at HN have that work in philanthropy. I mean people with IT background, can-do attitude, consider scaling whatever you build to million or billions of people, entrepreneurial and able to pitch well for investments. If I work as a reasonably successful IT entrepreneur (I don't think I am going to be Gates, Brinn or Zuckerberg). At most I will be able to give away few million to charity/philanthropy. That is going to have a relatively limited impact. International development funding is $130 billion / year. Taking my skills and helping spending those $130 billion sensibly, by applying my skills is having a considerably bigger impact, I think. My team is routinely involved in country level data-to-decision work around things like drinking water supply, sanitation access, food security, agriculture efficiency, climate change adaptation, disaster respons etc. If I add up the population of the countries where we our tools are used for rural drinking water mapping and prioritisation of investments, we end up with about half a billion people. For me, the best way to use my time I think is helping others by applying my skills to the problem at hand. Working for a faceless shareholder (mine and your pension fund and a bunch of rich people) on something that may be technically interesting, but didn't make a big positive impact on the world and the people in it, just wasn't enough for me anymore. What I do now is more satisfying and has a much bigger positive impact, I think.
  - stevens32 10y ago
    Sounds really awesome - if you'd care to share, I'd love to find out what company you work with! edit: haha I'm dumb, just checked your profile.
  - therealdrag0 10y ago
    I'd love to be involved in something like that. I feel like most helpful innovation is hardware based or science-research based. I'm not a trained weather data scientist, for example, I'm just a boring backend developer. Have you seen much philanthropy positions for backend devs or any suggestions on where to look?
- deleted 10y ago
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kakarot 10y ago

I wish more people saw it this way. Philanthropy is the only thing driving me to amass wealth. I used to be ok with being poor and spending a lot of free time on side projects but more and more I'm becoming disgusted with myself and those around me for living selfishly when so many people around the world are in pain.

bjelkeman-again 10y ago
I found that there are actually relatively few people with the type of experience most of us here at HN have that work in philanthropy. I mean people with IT background, can-do attitude, consider scaling whatever you build to million or billions of people, entrepreneurial and able to pitch well for investments. If I work as a reasonably successful IT entrepreneur (I don't think I am going to be Gates, Brinn or Zuckerberg). At most I will be able to give away few million to charity/philanthropy. That is going to have a relatively limited impact. International development funding is $130 billion / year. Taking my skills and helping spending those $130 billion sensibly, by applying my skills is having a considerably bigger impact, I think. My team is routinely involved in country level data-to-decision work around things like drinking water supply, sanitation access, food security, agriculture efficiency, climate change adaptation, disaster respons etc. If I add up the population of the countries where we our tools are used for rural drinking water mapping and prioritisation of investments, we end up with about half a billion people. For me, the best way to use my time I think is helping others by applying my skills to the problem at hand. Working for a faceless shareholder (mine and your pension fund and a bunch of rich people) on something that may be technically interesting, but didn't make a big positive impact on the world and the people in it, just wasn't enough for me anymore. What I do now is more satisfying and has a much bigger positive impact, I think.
- stevens32 10y ago
  Sounds really awesome - if you'd care to share, I'd love to find out what company you work with! edit: haha I'm dumb, just checked your profile.
- therealdrag0 10y ago
  I'd love to be involved in something like that. I feel like most helpful innovation is hardware based or science-research based. I'm not a trained weather data scientist, for example, I'm just a boring backend developer. Have you seen much philanthropy positions for backend devs or any suggestions on where to look?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]