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Comment by tacostakohashi | Hacker News Reader

Work as a programmer for whoever will pay you the most. Invest, and donate money to causes you care about.

People are going to shit on the parent comment - but honestly, anyone with more than a few years of experience in a tight tech job market is going to easily be in the top decile of earners. The highly-committed individuals that do the brutally hard work on the ground for non-profits or NGOs make a pittance in comparison. Committing a quarter of your salary would pay the entirety of theirs. Consider that for a moment.

I'm suspicious of the notion that throwing money at problems can solve them.

This is where due diligence comes in. You throw money at people and orgs who are good at solving those problems.

You throw money at people who have the domain knowledge and are actively solving the problems.

Agreed. Money can't buy everything, including experience and awareness gleaned from personally facing the problems such NGOs target. The knowledge accrued could demonstrate value later.

True, but you need to consider what you care about more - to have the problem solved, or to solve it yourself? Or to put it differently - do you care about increasing utility, or your own fuzzy feelings?

Either of those goals are good, but they're better done separately. See also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_sepa....

I'll admit that I didn't read the link that you shared. However, I'd like to assert that I feel fuzzies yield utilons to the individual in a similar manner as utilons yield fuzzies, each requiring refinement in their acquisition to be optimal. I think it's a more-grey area than your comment or the title of the article you linked implies (having not read said article).

Please read it, it's not long. In the article, utilons refer to the utility your help brings, and fuzzies to the feelings they generate in you (which indeed you can see as utility for you, but you could also count it separately).

The point of the article is that if you optimize for utilons, fuzzies and status points separately - e.g. by doing one thing for maximum utility, and then another for maximum fuzzies - you'll be more efficient in all of them than if you try to find one thing that maximizes all three at the same time.

To quote 'Eliezer, this is how adults solve problems. Professional specialization has huge leverage. If you can find a way to use your professional skills to help society, go ahead and do it. If you can't, it's more effective use of your time to leverage your professional skills into money, and then use that money to fund professionals helping society directly.

But it's pretty hard to solve a problem without money. There are a lot of people out there already trying to solve problems. But not enough giving them the money they need to do so.

I guess I have the advantage of starting out with close to a decade of low wages doing something that I enjoy ;)... I'm definitely attracted to billboard tech wages -- but I really could get by pretty comfortably with half were I building something I had faith in.

The premise that NGOs need tech more than they need money is shaky at best.

I wouldn't know but I'd venture that makes sense... Thanks for the perspective.

My $.02 - good for you for asking the questions. Don't stop there :)

That's great but you have to consider the social cost of the day job, which the parent comment assumes to be neutral even though in practice this may not be the case. I think the OP's real question is how to pick ethically efficient employment, not how to make money in order to be more charitable.

If you're on HN you're probably also conscious of your philanthropy being used for the maximal good, in which case you may be interested in projects like https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

Thanks for posting

I went through a similar period of soul-searching as the OP (or so I would imagine) back in November, and this is the conclusion I ultimately came to.

Even if you're willing to take e.g. a 50% paycut to write code at a nonprofit, you're likely doing more good taking the obscenely high-paying industry job and donating that half of your salary, as unsexy as that is.

Which isn't to say there aren't meaningful social problems that technology can solve, but rather that the cost/reward curve is often suboptimal if you're optimizing for impact.

50% is a conservative estimate. If you are a software engineer in the SF Bay Area you can expect a 75% pay cut or more.

Hmm, depends on the non-profit, but in tech-forward non-profits we are often only about 20% below market for most positions: https://www.ctosforgood.org/

Is CTOs for good US only?

Not by design, but by circumstance yes. I'm sure we'd be open to folks joining from other nations though as long as they could travel to our once-a-year in-person meetup.

And yet, there must be a supply of hackers to which you donate that money.

This is exactly the advice a sociology professor in college gave to the sociology majors.

A sociology professor advised sociology majors to work as programmers?

That's much better advice than I'd expect from a sociology professor, if I'm to be honest.

Yes. Any high paid job actually. Point being don't do this solely because you "want to make a difference".... making a lot of money at a different job and giving to causes you care about is a legitimate way to make a difference.

I always thought that was interesting.

One can do that. But I'd like to believe that I make a bigger impact in actually applying my skills directly to the problem.

...Unless it's advetising. Or Uber. Or government wanting you to implement yet another freedom-restricting bullshit.

> Or Uber.

There are plenty of companies 10x worse than Uber. Hivemind.

That there are worse companies than Uber doesn't make Uber good, or even worth working for.

Ummmmmm but Uber made the world a better place? (for me anyway)

Sorry, I said Uber a bit provocative. I meant companies doing unethical things and asking you to do unethical things.

Which Uber is definitely a good example of, but I agree it was a bit provocative :).

Did it make your world a better place, or just add a bit of convenience whose cost was distributed to people you don't know?

Well, the benefits are also distributed to people I don't know, so this type of accounting is tough.

Disrupting the taxi mafia has definitely made the world a better place.

Did the "taxi mafia" encourage a class of laborers who sleep in their cars for less than a minimum wage while depriving them of any kind of protections normally associated with employment?

...yes?

Are you really unfamiliar with how medallion owners used to treat their drivers?

Perhaps I have rose colored glasses, but the "sleeping in the car" problem seems new. But I could very well be wrong.

That said, how are we really in a better place? Same problem, different master.

There is an early NYT article (early in the context of Uber's lifespan) detailing a day when a cab driver in NYC ended up paying his employer a few hundred dollars for the privilege of working that day. This was after all his fares for the shift.

> But what if drivers don’t make enough to cover their rental charges? The company has clearly considered this possibility, as it’s included in a program FAQ. “No problem,” Uber says. “When you pick up your vehicle, Enterprise will take your valid credit or debit card to place on file. In the event of a difference, Enterprise will automatically charge the outstanding balance to the card on file.” See? No problem.

https://qz.com/563622/ubers-new-car-rental-program-for-drive...

Or do work for those places if you don't find them morally questionable.

I believe that over time your environment shapes you. I agree that you should devote your working hours to something more than shareholder value or increased clickthrough rates. Sure you can pull down the big bucks working on the next version of biological warfare weaponry and make large donations to Red Cross or whatever, but not without a personal toll.

A better rule is: just don't take a job in which your negative impact on the society will be greater than the positive impact of the money you donate.

I work in advertising and I don't think it's immoral or unethical.

Advertising is about creating artificial problems and needs, making the world a shittier place for profit. Maybe pulling your head out of your ass would help?

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