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Care Doesn't Scale

’t Scale I met a social worker whose job was to look after four orphaned children. She’d alternate with her coworkers spending 24 hours at a time living with the kids, effectively acting as their parent.

The children, unsurprisingly, had a lot of trauma and so her job was certainly not an easy one, but she found it deeply rewarding and she really cared about the kids, and this way the kids—who otherwise might not have had any consistent parental or sibling figures in their lives—grew up together as a family. So it is that children who feel bad for the guy on the street grow into college students who have strong opinions about socialism or technological development. Software engineering as a field is made up of people who are very conscious of missed opportunities for scale (“why isn’t there an API for this so I don’t have to call in and wait on hold for an hour?”).

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