Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

In the short term, get the highest-paying software engineering job you can, and donate a meaningful part of your income to charitable organizations working on anti-aging research such as SENS. (Check if your employer matches charitable donations, as well.) Much more efficient and effective than rethinking your entire career just so you can add one person's worth of time to such an effort.

(That's not to say "don't work on the problem directly", and there are jobs in that effort for software engineers, but don't feel like you can't contribute unless you can directly work on the problem.)

I'm currently sponsoring a matching fund for new recurring supporters of SENS, starting in November: every new recurring donation gets matched for a year, up to $24k. See https://www.fightaging.org/fund-research/

And much appreciated your help is!

I'm in much the same boat. I have great admiration for those who have pulled off the mid-life career switch into biotechnology. There's one of those folk at the Buck Institute working on senescent cells with Judith Campisi of UNITY, in fact, transitioned over from a former entrepreneurial business career. He quit that, went back to school, and there he is, being a scientist and advancing the state of the art: http://www.buckinstitute.org/content/kevin-perrott

But for me, the math works out such that the road of greatest efficiency is to channel money into research funding via organizations like the SENS Research Foundation that I know are going to make good use of it, and have a great track record of making good use of past donations.

There are undoubtedly other efforts that could benefit from parent's CS skills -- much more than just at this company: university labs, startups, non-profits, etc. We need more people to combine CS with other fields to make this world a better place -- not just CS for CS' sake (or fintech, apps, web, etc).

meerkats1, I assure you: The "work to donate" mantra commonly touted for charities does not apply. There are plenty of organizations looking for top CS talent, and they're willing to pay real salaries. Get out there and ask friends for introductions, send emails to biotech people in your area, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com