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Show HN: Enviro.Work – Find and fill jobs that benefit the environment (enviro.work)
61 points by ericvanular on April 23, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 54 comments


Hi HN!

Most of us want to do more in the battle against climate change - it’s tough when your work life is unrelated. Right now, if you want to find a job that helps the planet, there’s no clear way to go about that. You could look for environmentally focused companies individually and keep checking their site to see if they are hiring. But that’s tedious and it’s easy to miss new postings. Conventional job boards don’t have a good way of filtering for this. A couple of environmental jobs boards exist, but they have low post volume and are dispersed geographically.

https://enviro.work is the place to come find green jobs in one spot. Think of it like a search engine for all Earth-friendly jobs out there. We aggregate eco-positive jobs from different sources and link you back to the source.

We wanted to help empower purposeful individuals to maximize their potential for the planet. Enviro.Work is linked with the community at https://collective.energy, where you can find inspiration, feedback, and an audience for your eco projects. Turn climate ideas into plans into reality - then build your team with Enviro.Work.

I'd love to know what you think and hear your helpful feedback.

Thanks for caring! Eric (Enviro.Work maker)


There's no way to know who you are from the page, it's completely anonymous. For me that's always a big big warning sign for any site.


Good call, I'll add some kind of About component


;-)

Awesome! FWIW I dug in and found a comment from you on the community forums and found collective.energy and your site, so it's not as bad as I thought at first.

I also want to add that you and your work and community seem really great. Cheers!


Really appreciate the support. Feel free to join us at collective.energy and share with anyone else who you think would benefit from the community


A bunch of accounts created in the last hour or so have left inane comments here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955624 created 20 mins ago 1 comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955469 created 48 mins ago 1 comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955575 created 20 mins ago 1 comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955523 created 44 mins ago 1 comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955323 created 10 hours ago 1 comment


Not intentional or requested on my part. Please feel free to delete those comments mods


I believe you that you didn't request them explicitly, but it's clear from the data that those were posts by friends or fans who thought it would be a good way to help you out.

In reality, booster comments are the worst thing that people can do to help their friends on HN, because the community here sniffs them out at truffle-pig levels and regards them as spamming.


Thank you for the feedback! I'll try to prevent newcomers commenting next time


I'm reading those comments just as a sign that people feel strongly about climate.

There's a lot of talk about the need to do things for the environment, but not much visible work done.

This service is that kind of meta level service, which could in theory create a lot of possibilities for individual people to change the world for better on the grass root level [1].

I think these commenters just created their accounts because they wanted to take part in discussion, due to the subject being special enough for them to make the move from the stance of passive reading to contributing to the discussion.

I think there are valid points.

Then again, maybe I'm just naive.

[1] The change can only happen through the system, and for that, the right people need to be doing the right decisions. It's highly unlikely that we could just scrap the current work and go full tesla on all fields of life. (Not that tesla would be environmentally sound in itself.)


This. Since I don't have enough karma to downvote, I've replied "Spam alert!" under those comments. Update: looks like you included links to the suspicious comments.


Did OP buy upvotes? or is it a coincidence?


These aren't bought upvotes!


I actually have a job writing greenhouse gas accounting software. The pay isn't great, but compared to the local booming software industries in Montreal, (ads, video games, porn, or "AI" which usually means ads again), it seems to be much more socially useful.

I'm never quite sure if my work is actually helping or not. For example, some of our clients are unethical companies such as tobacco companies. I reason that they can't use our greenhouse gas analysis for evil and that refusing to do business with them would only result in them not knowing what their environmental impact is.

I don't know if I'm doing good, but I think it's more likely that I am than if I were doing ads, video games, or porn.


Being aware is the first step in changing. I'm certain that your impact is a net positive. Thanks for caring!


Thanks. I browsed through the job ads with keen interest, hoping to find something that could possibly pay more. Sadly for me, most of the list seems to be in the US. Ah well, hopefully the ecological software job market will expand so that competition for developers will also raise our salaries.

A somewhat sad thing is that ecological analysts (who are the principal users of my software) get paid a lot less than I do because our employers don't have to compete as much in order to hire them. For software developers, employers have to get their pick from the general pool of software developers who can generally get relatively high-paying jobs elsewhere, so that prevents my salary from going down too much. My salary, however, is about 60% more than a greenhouse gas analyst. This somehow seems unfair, but I don't know how to fix it.


We're rapidly adding more sources. I'm based in Canada myself so I'll work on getting some more options for you. We'd love to have your company post their openings on the site as well


Just as an FYI: https://enviro.work/search/?page=2

I clicked on the search with nothing in the search box and then hit the link for page two. You probably want to switch Django debug off and fix the error page.

That said, it looks really cool. It's a great minimalist design that gets right to the point. It loads instantly since you haven't loaded it with crap. It's really a pleasure to click around a site that just loads content without an amount of JS that makes everything slow.


Thanks for the feedback! Fixed the Django debug issue. Really appreciate your support, it's a work in progress but if we can even help a few people find meaningful work - it will be worth it


I think this is a marvellous idea. Environment and climate change is definitely something many of us would want to be able to affect in our daily jobs.

On a more universal level, a service like this, not just for climate work, but in more general terms helping people find a position matching their passion would do a great service to the world [1].

Frankly, a lot of us have just wound up in our current positions. If that position happens to be our vocation, it's probably just a happy accident, or then that specific field was very precise, and finding a position matching the passion was easy. In general case, it's not that easy to match these two, due to the work and timing required.

The problem is, a lot of people are doing jobs they are not the best match from the point of view of the larger community. They might be good and efficient at their jobs, but if they don't know the full power of their positions, and don't have the passion to push for the change, in the limits of their positions, they might not be the best people for that job.

To make the case even more problematic, a lot of positions, ones that people would consider as meaningless, especially in public sector, but also related to environment, actually could offer a lot of power in the right hands, with proper passion.

World is filled with wasted opportunities, but a service like this could help remedy some of the pain points.

That being said, like mentioned in a comment by mlthoughts2018 [2], this is not an easy problem to solve, given for one that positions might not match their descriptions.

But things have to start somewhere, and I think this is a great start.

[1] As a side note, IMHO, I'd like to think this mismatch between a passion and a position being the missing puzzle piece for making things such as public sector competitive over private sector.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955566


In addition to the service itself looking good, the single act of making environment the central point of the service, works as agenda setting [1]. Because it's the central point of the service, the jobs are viewed through the lens of their impact on environment.

There's a bigger influence, from doing this kind of smaller things en masse that affects the wider discussion in great proportions.

Just a FYI, that all talk about important things, like environment, is more than needed.

[1] Wikipedia describes agenda setting as something only the big media does, but it is something that happens naturally when we discuss about things. Things that are brought up in discussion are implicitly considered important, as they are worth discussing in the first place. Basically agenda setting theory says that by mentioning important things in discussion, and by reminding the participants of the existence of those things, can help change the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory


Thanks for your support. Feel free to share the site around!


While it’s a good idea, what determines if a job “benefits the environment”?

A lot of jobs in the list - particularly any startup jobs - are at best unproven in their effect on anything and at worst are a drain on funding resources and have worse negative externalities to the world than being productive in a job that’s not nominally “about” the environment, as well as the risk you’ll invest years of labor under the assumption the company has a mission to improve the environment only to see it pivot when the business realities crash the party.


websites like this can only do their best to collect links to resources, it's beyond scope for them to perform a detailed environmental analysis of each listing. obviously you'll still need to make your own decisions based on what you believe is worth pursuing.


We do our best based on a few criteria and provide as much information as possible but ultimately this ^


Unfortunately there are even organized astroturfing "think thanks" that exist only as a PR stunt for oil companies & co.


You might consider scraping and including US national park service and forest service jobs. While tangentially related to climate change, I would consider them roles that benefit the environment in a meaningful way. You might consider tagging jobs differently: environmental, climate change, etc.


Tagging is definitely on the product road map! Great suggestions, we'll see if we can get park and forest service jobs


I like the idea/theme, as a developer I always wonder "what good can I do for the world?"

But there more I see these type of job boards, the more I'm thinking. There are so many different job boards created. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing?

I don't know what to think of it.


Totally understand your feeling. I think the crucial part of doing this right is building a purposeful community, which is what we're doing at https://collective.energy


Thanks for making a thing and sharing it here! I get a 500 when clicking on pagination at the bottom (randomly page 4, 11, etc). Also it would be cool to sort by geography, maybe alphabetically, so that a visitor could city/state faster?


Thanks for your feedback! Will start working on those fixes and features


Thanks for this, I'll be keeping an eye on it.

I'm sure you're looking at the idea, but it would be nice to be able to add drop downs to quickly filter by role/location/sector/seniority.


Yes, that is on the product road map for sure. Thanks for your feedback and for caring!


Great Idea. Bug Report: if I search for "Software" and then go to page two, the url does not include the search-term, which leads to a "ValueError at /search/"

That debug/error page shows a traceback and many server settings, which you might not want to share in a production environment.


Fixed the debug traceback issue. Will work now on passing search params to other pages. Thank you!


Awesome idea. Just wondering since I don't see an about-- how are these jobs found / curated?


We did a lot of manual work to vet and curate the sources here. Using our own framework to assess in addition to common sense for what doesn't pass the smell test. Feel free to suggest new sources or provide feedback for any you don't think are a fit!


Now more than ever is the time do something about climate change, this is an awesome contribution. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.


Spam alert!


Can't go to next page and the search function doesn't work. Great mission!


Spam alert!


Theres a valid bug report here


Looks cool!

One very minor suggestion: Make it much easier to filter / search by location.


Thank you! Would you prefer a dedicated location search bar or radio-button style filters?


Reaching in a timely way to connect workers and work,easy to use.


Spam alert!


Thank you!


First job I clicked on was no longer available


We do our best to remove expired jobs but if you let us know which one it is, we can address it quickly! Thank you for your support.


Great idea! And it couldn’t come at a better time with everyone who is looking for work right now.


Spam alert!


This is a great resource for anyone who is interested in an environment based career path


Spam alert!




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