An attempt to say the quiet part out loud. This isn’t a definitive argument yet; still very much exploratory.

Why do so few technologists work on public-good problems? And why do public-good orgs—when they succeed—still struggle to attract the same admiration, talent, or cultural currency as high-growth startups?

Systemic misfit

Technologists are trained in environments that prize speed, autonomy, and abstraction. But hard societal problems often require humility, deep contextual knowledge, and coordination with governments, communities, and regulators. (Even in highly regulated industries, most people only ever interact with bits and pieces of the system.) The two worlds are misaligned from the start.

Onramps into public-good work are also poorly designed. Technologists often don’t know how to enter these spaces, and public-good orgs don’t always know how to work with engineers or designers. They may lack the technical infrastructure or the ability to scope problems in ways that make sense for those skillsets. So even when the intent exists, the architecture to support it doesn’t. Most public-good orgs simply aren’t built to absorb or reward ambitious builders.

The narrative gap

After nearly a decade in tech, I can confidently say that tech culture lionises disruption. It’s fast, future-forward, full of potential. Public-good work, by contrast, often looks like maintenance. It involves navigating ambiguity, coordinating across systems, and staying with problems for years. There’s no Hacker News for public health infrastructure. No YC for field-level experimentation.

We also lack visible archetypes of people who are both materially successful and meaningfully working on systemic good, beyond a handful of founders and philanthropists. Tech, by contrast, has built an expansive cultural mythology: visionary leaders, world-changing bets, status-by-association. Public-good work rarely comes with the same mythology. Its stories don’t scale, and neither does its status.

Even companies that have solved real public problems—WhatsApp, Jio—aren’t considered public-good orgs. I think one reason is that the value they create doesn’t stay in the commons. It’s monetised in extractive ways (surveillance capitalism), used to entrench power (platform monopolies), or repurposed for state control (data capture, censorship). They did public good, but they aren’t public-good orgs.

Of course, “public-good org” is an umbrella term. It covers everything from government bodies and legacy nonprofits to activist networks, open-source projects, climate startups, and philanthropic ventures. Their missions, funding structures, and constraints vary wildly.

But across this spectrum, a few shared realities persist. They tend to be under-resourced. They operate with fragmented incentives. And they rarely have the cultural scaffolding. The specifics differ, but the underlying pattern holds: these are spaces doing consequential work, but with none of the narrative leverage or institutional glamour we’ve come to associate with ambition.

Who gets to be complex?

Tech has spent years constructing a mythos around speed, scale, and meritocracy. But even when big tech companies are slow, political, or bureaucratic, those traits are often framed as growing pains—temporary costs on the road to greatness. Public-sector or nonprofit slowness, on the other hand, is seen as proof that they’re obsolete, inefficient, or unworthy of investment.

One difference is who’s footing the bill. Nonprofits are accountable to donors or governments, which often means high scrutiny, fragmented priorities, and long paper trails. Tech companies are accountable to investors who understand pivots, delays, and complexity as long as growth is on the horizon. The same behaviours are interpreted differently depending on who’s paying, and what they expect. Messiness is more socially accepted in tech than in public systems. The rhetoric is that systems at that scale and impact need to be linear, moral and efficient. But the ones who can ensure that, choose not to.

The social tax of moral work

Tech workers are framed as heroes. Public workers are framed as martyrs. This frame comes with a cost. It:

• Pushes people out of public-good work when they need rest or growth

• Prevents system reform, because asking for better conditions is seen as selfish

• Devalues skill, because when sacrifice is the metric, strategy and craft become invisible

The general feeling is that there’s something almost… radical about a caregiver or climate worker asking to be paid well. The idea that someone embodying compassion* might also demand material security still feels transgressive. Jesus didn’t ask for donations, did He?

But it’s also not just about money, although the prevailing argument is that people don’t go into public-good work because it doesn’t pay well. I’ve met people two or three generations into wealth who could easily afford to spend their careers working on public-good problems. And yet, most don’t.

Why is that? Because the real scarcity is also cultural. It’s not about what you’re paid, but what the work signals. Public-good orgs rarely offer the social markers that define ambition today: speed, scale, intellectual elitism, narrative polish. Tech does. Even when public-good work is harder and more consequential, it doesn’t offer the same shorthand of status. Which means: what deters people isn’t just low pay. It’s low narrative yield. Cultural currency, after all, is about status, narrative control, and proximity to power.

Startups get to frame themselves as future-facing (even when what they’re solving for is glorified hyperlocal delivery). Public-good orgs are perceived as managing the present or, worse, cleaning up after the past. They lack the sheen of novelty. They rarely get to look ambitious.

Part of this has to do with how we frame talent. Tech companies treat talent as something to attract, retain, and grow. Public-good spaces, on the other hand, treat it as something to morally obligate.

There’s also no cultural amplifier for public-good work the way venture capital operates in tech. VC firms don’t just inject money— they set the tone for what’s valuable culturally, who gets visibility, and which problems are worth solving. 

* This framing is gendered, too. Social work is feminised; tech is coded as masculine, elite, and lucrative. That coding shapes whose ambition is seen as real, and whose is seen as ‘nice.’ It also explains why sacrifice is the default metric in caregiving fields—whether it’s teachers, volunteers, or mothers. We admire them when they work tirelessly, live frugally, and don’t demand recognition. If they wanted all that, the thinking goes, they’d be in tech.

Morally loaded work

Public-good work is also morally loaded. Working on climate change, healthcare, or poverty is seen as more than a job, it’s a proxy for your moral stance, a part of your identity. That means:

• People project expectations onto you

• You’re expected to be personally ascetic or ideologically pure

Tech lets you be ambitious without being righteous. It allows you to stay at arm’s length from the ground reality of your product (not everyone chooses to, but it affords that distance). Public-good work doesn’t offer that luxury. The social tax is higher, and the emotional proximity to the problem is often unavoidable. No one asks you about your carbon footprint if you work at Swiggy. But if you work in a climate startup, you’re expected to be beyond reproach.

Even the most trusted public-good orgs are held to impossible standards. Take Wikipedia: a top-10 global website, sustained by volunteers and donations. It’s used daily and relied on widely. But every time it asks for money, people roll their eyes. We expect it to be neutral, lean, and always available, without treating it as an institution that needs resourcing. Meanwhile, we pay convenience fees, operational fees and other subscriptions on apps without blinking. We don’t demand a breakdown of Swiggy’s operational costs. But we do expect a nonprofit to show us exactly where every rupee went.

Ultimately, the only real gate is the public vs private company divide. The difference in expectations isn’t about money, it’s about trust, and who gets to be complex and opaque without explaining themselves. 

A crisis of misplaced energy

All of this contributes to a quiet crisis. The people who want to build meaningfully are often stuck in systems that don’t reward that. The places that need meaningfully ambitious builders don’t know how to absorb or support them.

It reminds me of my days training in journalism. It’s another field that technically qualifies as a public good. People join because they want to tell important stories and be mouthpieces for the downtrodden. The mission attracts idealists, but the machinery burns them out. This is because, among other reasons, journalism is a public-good caught in the jaws of a private-good system. The day-to-day incentives are dictated by TRPs, ad revenue, and attention metrics.

The parallels are clear. Everyone says journalism is a pillar of democracy, but how many fund it? Everyone says education and public health are critical, but who builds ambitious, well-resourced orgs to match that rhetoric? Until we resolve these mismatches in public-good work, we’ll keep starving the commons and making martyrs.

Thanks to Mahima Chandak, for the conversations that clarified many of these ideas for me.