Source: Fortune
Summary
The author recounts their journey from law to technology, driven by a search for purpose. After a stint in consulting and startups, they became disillusioned with the tech industry’s focus on convenience over societal impact. They highlight the inefficiencies in social service systems, such as the SNAP program, which faces high error rates due to outdated processes. The author now leads a company that uses AI to reduce administrative burdens for frontline workers, aiming to improve support for vulnerable populations. Their work has expanded to multiple countries, including the U.S.
Our Reading
The announcement sounds familiar.
Author left law for tech, then for social impact.
Found inefficiencies in social services, big error rates in SNAP.
Now uses AI to cut paperwork for frontline workers.
Technology’s purpose is in solving real problems, not just convenience.
Author: Evan Null
The problems we chose to solve instead
In the decade since that trip to San Francisco, inequality has widened. Meanwhile, the technology industry has done next to nothing to address the most urgent of human problems.
What it has done — both brilliantly and expensively — is solve the problems of the people who didn’t have many in the first place. Billions of dollars’ worth of this generation’s finest engineering talent has helped make takeouts arrive quicker while applying the cutting-edge machine learning to serve ads faster and more profitably.
I don’t sneer at any of these developments — I ran a parking app, after all, and I’m glad that my food arrives quickly and conveniently, but it raises a question that we don’t ask ourselves enough. Why does so much effort go towards making our already comfortable lives more convenient, all while so little goes towards the people who are most underserved?
The author’s shift from convenience tech to social services reflects a growing awareness of the imbalance in tech’s priorities.
They argue that the real challenges are not glamorous, but they are urgent and require systemic change.
What we were ignoring
While Silicon Valley was making some lives more convenient, many lives got a lot more difficult. In the fiscal year of 2025, SNAP served an average of 42.1 million people every single month.
That amounts to 12.3% of the U.S. population — roughly one in eight people in the richest country in history — needing help to buy their food.
Now consider how that level of support is administered. In the fiscal year of 2025 the USDA reported a national payment error rate of 10.62 percent, worth $10.1 billion in improper payments.
That’s more than one dollar in every ten. When broken down, around 87 percent of that was overpayment, but that leaves roughly 13 per cent as underpayment.
The USDA is explicit that this is not fraud — these are errors, a truth that is constantly misreported in the media.
The bit the spreadsheets miss
Behind every one of those error rates are people sitting on either side of a desk. One is seeking support, the other is administering it.
A federal study by the Administration for Children and Families published in 2025 found that child welfare caseworkers spend an average of 4.3 hours a day on paperwork and documentation; over half of a standard eight-hour shift.
That translates as recruiting people whose entire vocation is centered on sitting with a family in crisis, and then forcing them to spend two thirds of their working life filling out forms.
We then act surprised when they grow tired, burn out and leave the profession altogether; national average annual caseworker turnover in U.S. child welfare runs at around 30% (roughly 3 in 10).
The person who needed them often slips through a crack that a better-designed system would have helped prevent.
Who technology forgot
These days most of my time goes on one thing: persuading people who have technical skill to point it at something that matters. It’s the conversation I wish I’d had earlier in my career.
There was a time in the early days of the Internet when tech saw itself as being in service of something bigger than itself. Somewhere along the way, that gave way to a race for profit.
By measure of money, Silicon Valley has never done better. But it won’t rediscover purpose by solving the inconveniences of people who are already comfortable.
The hardest problems facing humanity are unglamorous, badly funded, stifled by bureaucracy and full of forms. But they are also right there, in plain sight, on a freezing pavement just round the corner from the money.
The author’s journey reflects a broader shift in tech’s role — from convenience to impact, from profit to purpose.
