Yes. Everything I do.

I (along with many others) write lots of software to help small and midsize businesses compete more effectively. They, in turn, provide value to their customers, jobs for their employees, and pay taxes to their communities. If that's not a "real, tangible, positive net effect on society", I don't know what is.

Not everyone has to find a cure for disease or discover how to provide clean air and water for the masses. You don't have to change the whole world, just a little piece of it.

A mentor once suggested I think of it like a football team. Some pass, some catch, some run, some block, and some tackle. All you have to do is "your job" well, for the team "the rest of us" to succeed.

Please don't be such an "idealist" that you never find your calling. Just pick something close enough and go for it.

The real heroes are in the pits every day, helping others do their thing. You oughta join them.

From the original post:

working in business software typically means writing code to line a few peoples' pockets...

You're talking like a person for whom earning money is some kind of option. In most of the world, "lining your pockets" is a necessary precondition for things like "eating" and "paying rent".

Perhaps you need to get a job in a factory. (Not that this is always an easy thing to do, in the 21st-century USA.) I used to work in a factory, as part of an engineering team that was desperately trying to get a brand-new class of product to market. We were acutely aware that, if our product turned out to be unmanufacturable, everyone in our division -- from the local senior management to the hundreds of hard-working blue-collar folks who ran, fixed, and cleaned the equipment on the night shift -- was at risk of being laid off. In fact, just to inspire us, many of the folks at our local site got laid off anyway, thanks to the dotcom bust and the resulting slump in telecom.

I'm proud of the software I wrote for that project. Not because it was particularly elegant -- which it was not -- but because it helped keep the fabs alive, the products alive, the company alive, and hundreds of American and Malaysian workers alive.

We're mostly mechanical engineers, but we do a lot of embedded systems programming for photovoltaic manufacturing equipment. We're currently working on a solar tracker controller that uses YUI, Python, and Debian on a small single-board computer. One of our employees was a YC guy from a few cycles back who had the same desire as you.

Or start a renewable energy company that competes with Fat Spaniel-- they seem to have missed the web 2.0 thing. Or compete with us. We could use some hungry competition to keep us from getting lazy.

> I might be too idealist.

Are you really?

If you really and truly want to have a net positive effect on society, write some open-source software and contribute it to the FOSS community. Aim for things that will help others, e.g. for the 100$ laptop program.

The only problem I see with FOSS is that a very very tiny portion of people, as a whole, will ever actually use it. Perhaps if it lead to cost savings for municipal governments that helps to pay for social programs?

> the 100$ laptop program.

I was going to mention that, but it has been usurped by Microsoft and real benefit has yet to be seen.

Or more precisely, only a very very tiny portion of the people will ever actually knowingly use it. How much of the internet utilizes the linux kernel? or Apache? Or MySql? or gcc/gdb/glibc?

The impact of a single significant gcc change reverberates all over the computing world.

Perhaps it could provide a means of informal electronic voting. Perhaps it could standardize the way government officials communicate with their constituencies. Perhaps that would lower the barrier of entry so more people would be involved in their government.

I disagree that Web 2.0 social software is "merely a distraction". 1) Enhanced communication has substantial benefits, and 2) even glib developments can later form the basis for meaningful impact on lives - the telephone was probably a distraction at first, but where we would be without 911 ?

We want to do it in different ways. Our first way is through http://bug.gd where we do everything in our power to be sure no one ever has to solve error messages that have already been worked-around.

We have long-term plans to grow this into local system resources, embedded in your OS and included in software-- when there's a system fault, you always have access to how others solved the problem.

If we eventually make money on it, great-- but really I was just sick and tired of this endless waste of human resources, repeating the same things over and over again.

Anyone who feels the same should install the Firefox extension in my profile-- if you don't, well everyone else's solutions are indexed by major search engines so you get the benefit anyway.

I think it's pretty much what edw519 already said: Build something of value and you are already making a difference.

I think the step one for you is to figure out what community (target user) you feel connected and want to serve. Then, step two is to find a solution that A) you can realistically build; and B) it is sustainable (resource-wise)

The world is full of problems for you to solve. Just pick one and do it!

The startup tanked, but I don't regret anything, and I plan to get right back into bioinformatics.