Let me tell you a little bit about medical software. It is incredibly hard and expensive to get data. It usually involves finding enough people who are dying in a particular way (already hard), and managing to collect comparable data from each (i.e., with the same process: even harder). There is never enough of it to do the statistics you want. Once you have some, and you maybe come up with some way to do some step of the treatment process slightly better, there are a lot of hurdles and it takes a very long time before anything you did can actually be used on a patient. Rightfully so. People's lives are at stake.
With cancer in particular, maybe after a decade in the field you might know if what you did had a positive impact on treatment outcomes. Maybe. That's the best-case scenario. For me, I don't even know if any line of code I ever wrote was actually used to treat a real patient. Oh, yeah, and those dying people whose data you used to come up with and test your idea? Yeah, you could not do anything for them. They got whatever treatments were the best available at the time, and good luck. If they were great treatments, you probably would not have been working on the problem. So that sucks.
Meanwhile, at a browser company, I was able to write a patch and within a month or three it was deployed to over a hundred million people. Software projects I worked on are currently used to encode and decode a non-trivial fraction of the bits on the internet. They are deployed on every Android handset and every iPhone (not just in Firefox), so that's a few billion devices. Every time you make a Zoom call or use probably almost any other video conferencing service, you are using at least one, if not several, of those projects. I understand people are doing a lot of video conferencing these days. Maybe even some telemedicine calls between radiation oncologists and their patients.
So, uh, yeah. I feel like that had more impact. Not to discourage anyone from trying to cure cancer. It's incredibly hard.
P.S., "cancer" is actually a thousand different diseases with a thousand different causes and requires many different treatments. There will never be a "cure for cancer".
There are other problems in healthcare that are more tractable. I built some software a few years back that identified HIV+ patients at risk of developing certain complications, and alerted their clinic/case workers. We were able to show after a year that they were seeing real improvements across their patient population.
This is probably the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done.
Sure thing, my email address is in my profile. I left that job like 2 years ago, but I’m still close with the CEO and have done some other health tech projects.
No disrespect intended but this reads a lot like I tried to cure lung cancer but the challenge was too much so I switched to selling vapers instead. Also, you’re counting your blessings in terms of reach, which is relatively easy to come by. Anybody working on Chrome, at Google, WhatsApp, etc gets this reach for whatever work they do.
Let me tell you a little bit about medical software. It is incredibly hard and expensive to get data. It usually involves finding enough people who are dying in a particular way (already hard), and managing to collect comparable data from each (i.e., with the same process: even harder). There is never enough of it to do the statistics you want. Once you have some, and you maybe come up with some way to do some step of the treatment process slightly better, there are a lot of hurdles and it takes a very long time before anything you did can actually be used on a patient. Rightfully so. People's lives are at stake.
With cancer in particular, maybe after a decade in the field you might know if what you did had a positive impact on treatment outcomes. Maybe. That's the best-case scenario. For me, I don't even know if any line of code I ever wrote was actually used to treat a real patient. Oh, yeah, and those dying people whose data you used to come up with and test your idea? Yeah, you could not do anything for them. They got whatever treatments were the best available at the time, and good luck. If they were great treatments, you probably would not have been working on the problem. So that sucks.
Meanwhile, at a browser company, I was able to write a patch and within a month or three it was deployed to over a hundred million people. Software projects I worked on are currently used to encode and decode a non-trivial fraction of the bits on the internet. They are deployed on every Android handset and every iPhone (not just in Firefox), so that's a few billion devices. Every time you make a Zoom call or use probably almost any other video conferencing service, you are using at least one, if not several, of those projects. I understand people are doing a lot of video conferencing these days. Maybe even some telemedicine calls between radiation oncologists and their patients.
So, uh, yeah. I feel like that had more impact. Not to discourage anyone from trying to cure cancer. It's incredibly hard.
P.S., "cancer" is actually a thousand different diseases with a thousand different causes and requires many different treatments. There will never be a "cure for cancer".