Comment by hamburglar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hamburglar | Hacker News Reader

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> The ethics and morality of giving is kind of complicated.

No, it's really quite simple. It's the ethics and morality (and circuitous justification) of being upset by others giving that's complicated.

I built a friend of a friend a billing system for his fledgling business. Didn't charge a dime. I even got sucked in to support for much longer than I really wanted, since no good deed goes unpunished. Was it unethical of me to undercut the other people who might have wanted to provide those services for money?

I did some free consulting last week. A friend is starting a company and hasn't hired devs yet, so I met him for a half day and we worked on system architecture. I told him ahead of time that I was happy to do it for free. He had the money to pay a consultant, but every bit he saves now extends his runway. He bought me a beer. Unethical?

Last year my water heater failed catastrophically and dumped its water all over the floor. I went to my next door neighbor and said, "hey, is there a plumber you recommend around here?" and his response was "don't waste your money on a plumber. That's an easy job, and I can help. Let's go to Home Depot." He spent the whole day helping me. Literally took a paying job that I was planning to pay a plumber to do. Should plumbers be upset about their work being devalued?

> Should plumbers be upset about their work being devalued?

The problem stems from contributions that have a big impact. Big impact can be achieved by one person contributing a large amount, or many people contributing small amounts.

Another comment referred to this article where a Florida business man donated a million t-shirts to Africa that resulted in the textile industry bankruptcy: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1987628,00...

Was it bad just by giving away t-shirts? I don't think so. Was it bad just by giving away that many t-shirts? I don't think so either.

It was bad because his actions created a dependency on an unreliable source while removing the main income source that sustains reliable ones. If he subsidized the income loss of the textile industry, the consequences would not have been as devastating.

That's really the crux of the argument; giving away things for free generally takes income from dependable sources of labour. It's only when it has a big impact that people pay attention.

Going back to the topic, the same can be said about volunteering. I think it's okay if volunteering dislodges an entire industry as long as the volunteering is sustainable and reliable.

I think the big mistake people make when criticizing this $1 contract is imagining the logical conclusion if everyone worked for $1 instead of realizing that this is a one-off giveaway and it has zero impact on actual rates for this type of work. This guy is not going to continue doing $1 contracts, and nobody is going to respond by reducing their prices to below what they deserve. People can give things away. The reason plumbers aren't concerned about neighbors helping each other with their water heaters is that nobody is going to make a career out of competing with them by doing full-time gratis plumbing jobs.

Complaining about this is like saying the apocryphal jilted wife who sold her husband's prized Porsche for $1 has affected the price of Porsches.

It's okay to talk about everyone working for $1 after all it has to start from somewhere right?

I think the spirit of the complaining is more of a warning to keep an eye out for the trend rather than stop these one-offs altogether, but that's a lot harder to say and act on than "stop these one-offs".

I think this is the most apropos objection: 18F is trying to trial a reliable source of contracting for small-scale IT work.

If it turns out that volunteerism is reliable, then awesome! 18F just discovered that by spending time to nail down detailed reqs the govt can let patriotic citizens contribute to their society by helping on projects! Everyone wins and things are awesome!

If on the other hand your intuition is that volunteerism is unreliable, then this just short-circuited an early experiment by 18F to figure out a reliable piecework system for doing IT development.

My intuition matches the second case, but there's an existence proof that the first might actually be correct. It'd be a totally awesome story if it was, so I have a hard time being sad. And even if it isn't, it may give 18F folks a think, as in "hmm, perhaps some of these projects are appropriate for volunteerism; is there a context where we can develop tools for that use case? universities? job training?"

> Another comment referred to this article where a Florida business man donated a million t-shirts to Africa that resulted in the textile industry bankruptcy

I didn't result in any such thing, nor does the linked article suggest it does. A million t-shirts dumped in Africa would have less effect than the same number dumped in the USA.

1) Maybe? Did they have the resources to pay someone? And, as you pointed out, you got sucked into support for a role you didn't get paid. This increased their dependency on you and pulls you out of your normal economic/professional role. Probably not unethical, but certainly led to undesirable results (for you, great for them).

2) Your free consultancy extends his runway, which means he has a greater chance of success and puts him in a better position to contribute by hiring and spending in the future.

3) You also keep the retail chain in existence, and have spent your money more wisely rather than overpaying (by labor rates at least) for someone else to do what was actually a quick and easy job.

Honestly, though. You seem to be thinking that I'm opposed to giving. All I said is that it's complicated when you start giving to (and sometimes, in essence, taking from) others. Look at that Africa t-shirt versus textile manufacture example in another thread. Millions of people clothed, thousands of people out of (otherwise sustainable) work. The calculus is non-trivial. Clothing people is a good thing. Putting thousands of people out of work is probably a bad thing (depends on what the work is, and what they can do after it). Which one outweighs the other. In the long term, eliminating an industry from a region is probably going to turn out to be a worse thing as it eliminates the ability of those individuals participating in it to feed and clothe themselves and contribute financially to their local economy. Compared to other forms of giving (versus free t-shirts) that would have enabled people to build up more businesses and industries where they would then be able to afford and/or manufacture more clothing (or whatever other needed goods) locally/regionally. Or purchase them from abroad by producing some goods/services they could sell globally.

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