What percentage of Hacker News users are Software Developers? Climate Tech sounds great for a variety of engineers, but software jobs are going to be quite limited. Plus when you compare these more non-fungible industries where software gets paid really well, I imagine many of these climate tech jobs will be quite a hair cut for many devs.
I am a software engineer who spent last summer interviewing at climate tech companies. I found that there are two categories of software jobs in climate tech: A) jobs building tools to support R&D or operations at climate hardware companies, and B) jobs building software that purports to add value to various aspects of the carbon offset economy. I personally am not interested in the latter, as the entire carbon credit system is more effective at corporate greenwashing while enabling the status quo than it is at reducing emissions. As a web developer, it was very hard to find opportunities in climate hardtech, especially ones that could come close to FAANG compensation. I did find what I was looking for, but can confirm that there aren't many opportunities like this.
There is also a lot of work in developing tools for district and grid scale energy modelling, prediction and balancing to find the optimal ways to combine all the different green energy solutions.
No, software jobs in climate are not limited. Take a look at the job board at https://climatebase.org. There’s a lot of work to do, and a lot of it is software.
