Making Social Good Your Work’s Priority
The intersection of tech and social good captures the attention of many aspiring coders and engineers. But how can students make social good a greater priority in their lives? And what sorts of lessons can be gained from a short stint in this space?
Why Tech for Social Good?
Through college, and especially through my time in Blueprint, I’ve gotten exposed to social impact and nonprofit work a lot more than I would have otherwise. I didn’t come to college necessarily looking for a service organization, but I realized that working on actual engineering projects for a social purpose was incredibly rewarding. This exposure has significantly changed my thinking process on career choices and the aspects of my work that I prioritize.
I think the important thing that students must realize is the remarkable privilege they have as a result of working in tech — and that they have a moral obligation to use that to give back.
Some people view tech as being increasingly used for superficial and unrelatable problems, but there is a growing trend towards connecting tech to socially impactful causes.
One way is to literally pursue a career in technology at nonprofits. That’s what drew me to intern at Watsi last summer
Watsi is a global funding platform for medical treatments that is impacting people everyday. They are 100% transparent with how they use their funds and are committed to providing more information to their donors. Most importantly, Watsi is a technology company that recognizes the potential for tech to make a meaningful difference in the healthcare sector.
Even so, Watsi isn’t simply a group of tech people prescribing a solution with little understanding of the space. Instead, they’re nonprofit people who’ve identified the best aspects of the valley to further their mission. As a result, Watsi is lean and adaptable but also uncompromising in its vision.
Evaluating Coding’s Impact
The work I did last summer was not very different from previous intern experiences: Watsi.org is a pretty standard web application. But even though the actual engineering wasn’t drastically different, the purpose behind it was very different from my previous internships. In terms of looking at the impact of each project, there are two ways to evaluate Watsi’s success—donor happiness and patient outcomes.
- With donor happiness: ideally the features I added improve their experience and increase their confidence in supporting a patient on Watsi.
- With patient outcomes: since Watsi doesn’t provide treatment itself, what we can affect is input — ideally the features I added make it easier for medical partners to submit more patients to Watsi and motivate donors to donate more money to patients.
It’s important to note that I was simply one person among a number of people from operations, product and design. Everyone plays a role in the development of any given feature.
The features I worked on directly improved the experience of our medical partners and revealed more information to our donors. My projects meant something very different because of their context than the work I would otherwise do outside of Watsi.
It’s cheesy, but not entirely untrue, to say that the work I did helped provide life-saving care for people around the world.
The Rewards From Nonprofit Work
To be honest, it’s always going to be hard to define exactly what my motivation or inspiration is. If I knew either of those answers, figuring out my post-college life would be much easier.
What I do know now is this: in tech, we have the luxury of high pay and a fantastic job market. The opportunity cost for trying to do work that you find meaningful is negligible. Tech has dramatically improved for-profit companies, but many of the organizations doing important work for society, like governments and NPOs, simply lack the talent to improve their operations with technology.
Software engineering, like any job, can get boring with plenty of grunt work that needs to get done. However, when working for a nonprofit, even that grunt work felt meaningful, because it had a purpose and I knew why it mattered to the people we help.
This isn’t to say that working at a nonprofit is the only way to do good. There’s a lot of meaningful projects being undertaken in governments — city, state, and national— where they need a lot of great technical expertise. Plenty of private companies also do beneficial work for their community as part of a type of CSR — a great example is Palantir’s philanthropy engineering team (note: not endorsement of Palantir’s other business practices). Beyond that people can also volunteer to help their community in ways that take advantage of their unique skill set.
Ultimately, it’s hard to complain if you can save lives with a few lines of code — no matter how simple that code seems.
Vivek Raghuram is a senior studying computer science at UC Berkeley. He is currently Blueprint’s Expansion Director, working to help other campuses serve the community in similar ways.
