When I was considering a career path, I thought a lot about this sort of thing. Should I devote my career to helping people in the greatest need? In the end,

When I was considering a career path, I thought a lot about this sort of thing. Should I devote my career to helping people in the greatest need? In the end, I decided I should not. Bill Gates correctly identifies the need for money to do the things he wants to do, but money comes from economic growth. And I believe that technological progress is a big driver of growth. So I decided to make my career in advancing technological progress. Not necessarily hardware, in fact I'm a software engineer, but I want to work on things that push the boundaries. If I can write a library that makes 1% of programmers 10% more efficient, or saves academic researchers 1% of their time, that is probably a bigger contribution than I could make if I worked directly on global health.