Where do you provide the most value for kumankind? \ stacker news ~devs

Where do you provide the most value for kumankind?

1294 sats \ 8 comments \ @zuspotirko 18 Apr devs

So in general I personally am kind of the type of person that's pretty interested in the edge of tech. I want to experience new and exciting projects and do what hasn't been done before - or more realistically at least work in a team close to that.

But recently I thought about what my skills are actually the most useful for. So the following scenarios against each other in a thought experiment:

A. Edge: The edge of tech. Working on new stuff, much experimentation, many fails, startups, young dynamic.

B. Corporate: Bringing old corporate environments further towards today. The key thought about this is that maybe enabeling 10 older experienced devs is more value for mankind than only myself doing my best. Simple stuff like introducing Git. Or modern IDEs. Or parsing their own sourcecode with python scripts.

C. Other Industries: Being the techie in other industries where nobody else can code is hard. Finding places where people are open to this is rare. Bureaucracy. And finding places where introducing coding over Excel are rare but can sometimes do 100x for other industries.

So, where do you think of yourself to make the biggest difference?

A73.7%

B15.8%

C10.5%

19 votes \ poll ended

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139 sats \ 0 replies \ @SilkyNinja 18 Apr

I am not a dev! I found this post on the front page.

Something that crosses my mind is the benefit specialization brings to the species in a super-wide spectrum.

I am very interested in cutting edge exercise science as it relates to my work (physical/performing arts). If we were not so specialized across a wide spectrum, professional athleticism, potential later-career applications of that athleticism, and even adjacent fields of study of the human body to develop new perspectives of exercise science would (potentially) not exist.

IMO, new perspectives in exercise science lead to better conclusions about what is physical health, which benefit every body!

Not sure if that helps your problem! Just something I’ve realized - my work benefits greatly from an ecosystem of great athleticism and scientific study of the mechanisms of the human body - neither of those two fields I could fully investigate alone.

As far as my application, I like working on “what’s new” as an artist but in the arts if you don’t understand, appreciate and STUDY the canon of what exists you can get lost. IME, even when working on what’s new you end up iterating a lot on what exists - celebrating what works and iterating on or tinkering with what doesn’t. So I think I would say somewhere between A and B for me, and I’m going to vote B because I imagine that’s an option that’s not going to get a lot of love :)

41 sats \ 1 reply \ @nullcount 18 Apr

Always Be Edging

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @PlebeiusG 18 Apr

🫠

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 18 Apr

I like working on new things!

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Coinsreporter 19 Apr

You don't need to look beyond the first one. It's the best reflection of what we Bitcoiners stand for.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @zuspotirko OP 19 Apr

Have you read the second beyond the title?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 19 Apr

Yes.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TwoLargePizzas 18 Apr

Value can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Value by definition is subjective in the sense that the importance, worth, or usefulness of something depends on who is using it and what they're trying to achieve.

That said, one interesting way to measure value is how many cumulative man hours are saved with a particular technology.

Let's imagine you had an app that 1 million people use everyday to achieve a certain outcome. Let's also assume they each need to spend 15 minutes using the app to reach their outcome.

That equates to a cost on humanity of 250,000 human hours. If you can reduce the time spent in the app from 15 minutes to 14 minutes you've given back 16,666 hours of value to those people.

The point is, sometimes even the smallest improvement has a massive impact.