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You could work as a software developer in the public sector. There is a desperate need in many countries to improve digital services for citizens.

Or, you could have side projects that improve people's lives. I have built software that helps developers build accessible websites, software for adding subtitling to videos and software to help memory institutions archive political debate in social media.

You can get started right now.

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To improve the digital services for citizens you'd first have to be in a position to initiate or convince your superiors to convince their superiors (and so on) to initiate an investment in an improvement. Then wait for about a decade to actually see anything happen.

You don't just show up there all like "if we rewrote this portal in react with all these patterns here (which are really cool, I promise) things would be better for the citizens" and then do just that.

tl;dr if you want to improve the state of public sector software, you're better off entering the domain as a politician rather than software developer.

Sadly, where I live investment into gov/public IT services is done, even a big one, but the product is of very low quality. Money gets diluted and the real work is done by unskilled programmers based on bad specifications.

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