Don't be a UN intern | Hacker News Reader

Don't be a UN intern

desertqueensarah.wordpress.com

152 pointsdesertqueen67 comments

I was an intern at the UNHQ in New York city in 2010 and as a computer science grad student, i was definitely the odd man out. Right from my middle school days, i have always been intrigued by the UN and no one understood why a CS grad student would pick the UN for an unpaid internship instead of a typical tech company that paid $25-30+ an hour.

- My batch had 300 interns from 70+ countries and almost every intern was very talented and went to one of the top universities in the world. The internship selection process was similar to grad school admissions (essays, recommendations etc) and it was selective (around 5%). There were only a handful of tech people and it wasn't hard for me to get in! Unlike me (someone in tech), the internship was coveted for those in economics, international affairs and several other fields.

- Most people only see the irrelevant parts of UN where world leaders give prejudiced talks in the general assembly but there is a lot more to UN than that. UN plays a very important role in the world's peacekeeping, social development, human rights and several other things that aren't very visible to people living in developed nations.

- As a programmer, i built some internal publishing tools using PHP but i also got to wear suits and sit in group discussions at the world bank and with ambassadors of several countries. I loved that part. Out of my own interest, i also built an internal profile network for the interns and i learned a lot of new things doing that.

- The department that i worked at had many talented people who were well qualified and were passionate about what they were doing and i am still in touch with some. Of course, it is a large organization with a lot of red-tapism with many inefficient departments. My internship made me realize I didn't want to spend my 20s and 30s at the UN or any similar organization.

I probably spent around $8k-$10k out of my pocket to do the internship (travel, food, rent etc). I wish the UN paid me for the work but looking back, it was a very memorable experience and i would definitely do it again.

> They have long lost their professional ambition, and spend days in the office working on private projects, writing music, taking long lunches and in general killing their time until retirement. Most others are just average people, like you and me, that got trapped in the system and started drinking its Kool-Aid, over time becoming poisoned with it.

It sounds much like working in higher-ed or most government jobs. For that matter, it could be describing some large corporate environments.

I think the same can happen almost anywhere. I've heard startup culture described in the same way: people founding company after company trying to "disrupt" something without caring what it is, trying to fit themselves into a system defined by VC's.

I'm not sure there's any perfect way to avoid this kind of job. If what you care about is sculpture or bird watching or travel, you probably won't find a nice paying job that lets you flex your expertise. You might, it's been done, but there's not the same kind of demand for renowned bird watching authors as there is for doctors or lawyers or engineers.

So maybe the best we can say is this: If your goal in taking a job is for it to be a life's work, the thing you think about in your spare time, and the kind of thing people remember you for, then you need to worry about this. You need to watch out for systems that eat up your time and effort without mattering, because there are lots of them. But if not, then you don't.

Yeah, but the thing is even the most scelerotic, giant tech company (can think of a few) are producing something that someone wants (even if that customer base is dwindling or those wants may be silly - who are we to judge?). So you at least get a sense that you are moving something incrementally forward. It might be hard to say the same thing about parts of the UN.

After you finish your TPS report, stop by my office and I'll tell you about working 6 years of my life on a product nobody wanted.

I have, unfortunately, too much inside experience personally or via close friends of working inside NATO, UNICEF, and the ECB. All of the are dysfunctional, soul-destroying places where talented, highly educated people pass years without accomplishing much, all while drawing excellent salary and conditions. Many people hate their jobs inside these organisations every day but won't quit because the financial rewards are too great.

I got out.

I also got out.

There was a strange kind of resigned fatalism among the old-timers. When I started voicing my discontent, I would hear the same sentiment from older colleagues: "Oh yeah, I used to say the same thing when I was younger, and then in the blink of an eye, it's 20 years later and I'm somehow still here."

This article is spot on about working for the UN. It matches my own experience. The various organizations are sadly, for a number of reasons, becoming less relevant and more sclerotic.

I don't fault the UN for not paying interns. There are lots of kids who think it is glamorous and are willing to take unpaid posts just like in the music industry, the U.S. Congress, and a number of other industries. If the UN had to pay interns they simply wouldn't take them on in the first place.

The UN is much more poisonous than screwed than working for the US Gov. I worked for the USG for 5 years (Dept of State) and had an excellent experience. Govt bureaucracies are actually much more efficient than the UN as they have voters to hold them accountable. Accountability for UN agencies is practically nil.

> Arguing that a 5% effectiveness rate is better than nothing is like treating frostbite on the patient’s toe by cutting off the entire leg – no patient would agree to that.

I'm sorry, but there is a litany of reasons that analogy makes zero sense.

My experience as a UN intern in NYC was incredibly similar. My department did nothing of note, and the person leading the department would routinely harass, disparage and humiliate her employees, sometimes in public. No one was even competent, and people spent most of their time doing nothing. It was one of the most demoralizing positions I have ever had, and was of course paid for none of my time while living in Manhattan, which was a great financial burden.

That being said, I'm convinced this line on my resume has worked wonders for me. I have switched industries twice (UN -> Non Profit -> Tech Software Engineering) and in most of my interviews, people still ask me about it after 5ish years. While it would be hard to say for certain that it has gotten me jobs, it does make my resume continue to stand out. This doesn't take away from how unethical it is to not pay your workers, or how insane it is that most of the UN does absolutely nothing but take most US tax dollars and pay their employees (at least in NYC) an incredibly insane amount of money to do nothing.

Edit: I want to make clear that there are hugely productive and beneficial parts to the UN like UNHCR which runs refugee camps throughout the world. I personally met the head of UNHCR, who was then a former Prime Minister of Portugal, and he was one of the most impressive people I've ever met. He ran over 150 refugee camps and knew each of them by name, location and how many people were there. Incredible person doing a very important job. But this is the exception, not the rule.

What kind of oversight do these organizations have? Who are their "investors" or "donors"?

It seems like organizations like this are not overseen for their effectiveness. Why is measuring organizations for their effectiveness and striving for effectiveness not a standard table-stakes expectation for an organization of this size?

By definition member states don't have oversight over the UN, though they can refuse or delay funding (as the US has done in the past). Technically, the UN Secretary General and the Office of Internal Oversight Services are responsible for ensuring effective, efficient and transparent operations. In reality, much of the UN evades oversight due to the highly-politicized bureaucracy.

There are plenty of good efforts coming out of the UN -- I've seen the results of UNHCR's work in the developing world, and UNICEF does much good work, even if some of their policies have been, to put it mildly, controversial in intent and implementation -- but much, perhaps most, of the UN's work is of dubious cash value to the international system.

Their "investors" are all the countries in the world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations#Funding

But seriously, how would you measure effectiveness? There is nothing to compare it to, and you can't never know for sure what wars it prevented (because they didn't happen).

The organization should set objectives and measures its effectiveness against the objectives. While it might not give you a sense of the organization's relative effectiveness (i.e., the objectives might be nigh impossible and making any progress at all is a miracle), at least you have a general overall sense of what they're trying to accomplish and how effective they are at solving those problems.

A data-driven and specific approach to projects will give people a chance to ask questions like: is this problem worth solving? Is the UN the right organization to solve this problem? Is this problem worth the cost we're putting into the UN? Is the UN taking the right strategy? Etc.

If my government is funding the UN, I'd want a statement of what the UN is attempting to do with that funding, and which parts of that my government supports and thinks is valuable. I'd also want my government to conduct its own assessment of whether the UN is effective (GAO style) and include that analysis in its recommendation to me of whether to continue to fund them with my tax money.

There is significant staff devoted to oversight-theater. Plenty of metrics with scant connection to reality are collected, and plenty of reports that no one reads are produced.

Every few years, there's a disaster big enough to attract attention, frequently connected to IT. Then, a sacrificial lamb in upper-middle-management resigns and goes to a new cushy post in a sibling organization or in a big consultancy. Then, some departments are split up or merged and new acronyms are created, with few noticeable real-world consequences.

> "The first thing to understand: rules apply only to the powerless."

This has nothing to do with internships, the UN, or any particular office or division. It's a universal truth. Yes, everyone who is considering an internship should learn this if they haven't already, but not because it will help them decide where to be an intern.

Learning that rule is one of the main benefits an internship provides for the young.

2 benefits of the UN in New York:

1 - They pay no tax. (And salaries get trued up to cover it)

2 - The kids get access to a great private school.

I don't know anyone who has done great work (besides avoiding wars) at the UN, but I know a few who used the international non-profit experience as launchpads to bigger and better things.

I also have a friend who works in the stats department in NYC. Back in 2011, he was getting paid almost 90K salary (not including benefits like you mentioned) and he told me that he loves his job because there's little or no responsibility and is certainly not challenging. He's still at UN and I haven't talked to him in the past couple of years. That and my personal experience interning at NGOs have convinced me that these jobs actually are quite chill and well-paid with little or no actual work (the hard work like field trips are usually delegated to locals, who are paid significantly less than the management, who are usually foreigners).

The hard work is basically optional. It's very difficult to get fired if you do the bare minimum, and the organization is geared for about half it's staff to not be productive. If you want to move up, you do work and take up the slack. If you're comfortable where you are, you do the minimum, which is very... minimal, and typically no one will stand in the way of either path.

What does "trued up" mean?

All the overseas employees working in NYC are not taxed. To create equity amongst employees, US employees get their salaries bumped up to make their offers appear tax-free. So if your salary is $90K, and you are American, they give you enough money to make it $90K after-tax. Since there are a lot of factors involved in this (examples: spousal income and if you have a mortgage deduction) it's not as simple as reversing the marginal tax rates.

Isn't avoiding wars kind of a big deal?

Yeah, but you know, besides that what have they done?

I have never worked within the UN, but I have worked for companies small and large, like many others here I am certain, and have seen the loss of quality of purpose and people happen many times.

With a company, it is possible for a good leader to come in and start cleaning up shop with either a buzz axe of a scalpel. Even at small companies, I have seen places where a small subset of an organization get cancerous or hardened by a bad director, and then when a new CEO comes in (often because an investment firm takes over) that director is given the boot quite quickly. Often this director is allowed to remain because the previous CEO is somehow related or friends with that person, and once that pressure or corruption is gone, then that director is no longer protected.

In the case of the UN, if I were to surmise, it is impossible to do so because so many of the corruptions are external. It is possible that nobody is capable of actually cleaning things up because one country or a group of countries want to keep making sure that one of their friends live high on the hog at taxpayer expense without doing anything valuable, hence the terrible personal actions listed in the article. Dealing with these external corruptions are basically impossible in a modern political climate in many nations, and of course globally.

I don't have the connections, influence, intellectual capability, or any kind of power to disrupt such massive forces. I wonder, does anyone? Is it possible to disrupt such a thing without revolutionary action in a large number of countries? With the internet, many things seem possible, but it seems that the only way to make change happen is to go into meatspace. The internet seems to delay that from happening in most instances (although it does seem to have the effect of keeping the fire burning when they start).

This post is more of me speaking to my frustration than anything else.

> a very polluted interpersonal atmosphere

Or in other words: Politics.

Or as Frank Zappa quipped, "The entertainment branch of the military industrial complex"

Apparently he said similar things but not exactly this quote. Still true though.

I am a donor of UN~ A bit hopeless after reading this~

Who can I donate to~ under such system and hierarchy, I guess lots of large NGOs are messy internally.

GiveWell is a charity that evaluates other charities to try to find which do the most good per dollar: http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

+1 for GiveWell. They rock.

Please read my comment above. I lost hope on these UN and NGOs since I interned at a few INGOs (three) before going to college. I'd certainly recommend you to donate to charities that gives directly to the people (not the middle management and people who work) and the ones that have good transparency record.

The article, dismayingly, matches up with my own experience.

I was at the IAEA for 3 years, the first year as an intern and then two more as regular staff, coding tools for weapons inspectors. The organization is hardly irrelevant, so one would expect it to be better than some of the smaller and more obscure organizations like in the article.

In some ways, it was better, but not in many. The IAEA interns were paid, though not by the IAEA itself but by sponsoring countries. I was friends with interns from other organizations who, much as the article reports, were frequently unpaid, idle, disinterested, there for too short a time to do serious work anyway, and mostly interested in networking and partying.

Some further responses:

"The first one is to pay the salaries and the perks of its employees." Oh yes. I'm surprised the article doesn't mention that the salaries are tax free (international civil servants are tax exempt). They're explicitly tuned to be "average for the position in the given field", but then they're not taxed, so you're automatically making 30-40% above average for your field. Furthermore, regular benefits like health insurance and retirement are extremely generous, and are topped up by all sorts of perks such as rent-assistance, grants for cars, daycare, and higher education, generous allowances for all sorts of things such as paid home leave and subsidized moving. Many of the employees were explicitly there until retirement because they knew of no other place to get such generous treatment with so little demanded in return. Because if you had a permanent contract, then oh yes there was quite little demanded in return, firings were unheard of and a good number of staff spent half the days chatting on the phone or drinking coffee in one of the many cafes.

"Fixed term contracts are the holy grail" Yes oh yes. Most of the younger people were on short-term contracts, which lasted a year. It was understood that if you pay your dues to the powers that be, your contract would be extended over and over, with a significant pay-bump each time, until you got a permanent one. The machinery of contract extension was inscrutable. You would hear nothing back and typically your contract would be renewed on the day your last one expired. Sometimes they'd blow it by a few days and people would end up sitting around at home waiting to hear if they were really jobless or not. Rock the boat a bit, and that renewal would be much less certain. The ambitious and engaged minority tended to get fed up with this after a few years, leaving only those who desperately desperately wanted the cushy perks-for-life hanging on for those fixed term contracts.

Finally "rules apply only to the powerless" Yes oh yes. The whole organization was hidebound and rules-driven, except when miraculously, it wasn't. Over and over, the stonewalling would stop, the doors would open, and the structure would rearrange itself in order to accommodate someone. You never knew why it happened, and it was never discussed.

Overrall, I have to say that the experience was disillusioning, I believed (and still do) in the mission and importance of the IAEA and the non-proliferation treaty. It was hard to accept the degree to which the organization had become the plaything of the entitled and the powerful.

I get pretty sick of seeing organizations like this...and a lot of slacktivism...and nothing being done about it.

What can we actually do about problems like this?!

This kind of supports my view of the UN being a place where countries can go to denounce each other and appease the masses without actually having to go to war.

The work they do is often irrelevant, but someone like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can go in front of some TV cameras at the UN general assembly in New York and denounce Israel. This lets him appear tough and influential in front of his power base, yet without much risk of starting an actual international conflict.

Without an outlet where countries can express such dissatisfaction, they would take to launching missiles at each other with greater frequency. The UN's existence is largely symbolic (organizations like NATO provide the real firepower), but symbolism and politics go hand in hand. So rather than lamenting the fact that the UN has no power and is a bureaucracy for its own sake, I would say that was the entire purpose. If you make people do a bunch of paperwork before they start fighting, chances are they will be satisfied with registering a complaint against each other.

"To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war." - Winston Churchill

There's always been jaw-jaw. Whether or not the UN providing a forum has actually lead to any less war-war doesn't seem obvious.

It's always good when governments have ways to escalate international conflicts other than by shedding blood, even though, or especially if, these ways are consequenceless. Just to appease the hardliners.

So it's kind of like the opposite of Sayre's Law?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

One of the interesting things about reading histories of the outbreaks of the World Wars was how much international coordination was hampered by the lack of a regular, active forum where all the big international leaders went (the League of Nations was hampered from the beginning by the absence of the US).

When everyone is doing everything by ad-hoc, one-on-one phone calls and negotiation sessions, things don't get done fast enough to react to crisis.

How much of that was just communication difficulties?

Some, but not all; a lot of the missteps in the lead-up to WWI, for example, were where two people had a conversation, agreed on something reasonable, then failed to communicate it to third parties who needed to be on board. When all of the great powers are in a room (as in the Security Council, which is I think the most necessary part of the UN) everyone gets all at once a feel for the positions of everyone else.

True, but... do you claim that in the UN, things do get done fast enough to react to a crisis?

Better? I think when the international community doesn't respond to crises, it's because there really is no consensus on what to do and different countries have different interests at stake, which can't really be fixed by better communication.

Yeah, hah! You know what that tells me? The system works.

People complaining instead of lobbing missiles? I wish everything could be solved with so little bloodshed!

"Children, children! Do you want to be like the real UN or do you want to argue and waste time?" -- The Simpsons

well, one could imagine doing this at a much smaller cost, for example, the league of nations (which admittedly didn't work to prevent WWII), but did stop a lot of smaller wars.

> People complaining instead of lobbing missiles?

Well, technically speaking, US, UK have shown that some of the member states get to "[lob] missiles" while others "complain".

You are right. The "system" works .. for the Anglo-Saxon Imperial Axis.

There are different facets to the UN. I agree that the General Assembly is mostly a talking shop, and to a lesser extent the Security Council is too (though occasionally it is a coordinating mechanism for the major world powers).

Those are the two parts of the UN that most people think of when they hear UN, but there's a lot more to it. Things like the World Food Programme or the World Health Organization certainly have their issues, including those in the linked article, but they do some good work.

I think the URL needs to be updated to reflect the actual blog post, rather than the blog's homepage; otherwise, it will be invalid after the next post is made.

Current URL:

    https://desertqueensarah.wordpress.com

Correct URL:

    https://desertqueensarah.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/dont-be-a-un-intern/

Thanks, we'll fix it.

I'm going to be that really annoying person that leaves some feedback entirely unrelated to the actual content, I'm sorry. I'll just do this the once and hopefully we won't end up having a 20 comment long thread about it.

The two column layout on your blog makes it very difficult to read. You'd be much better off having one column - like it does in smaller window sizes.

if you narrow your browser window, it automatically switches to one column.

That doesn't help much for folks who read with their browser window maximized. It's good to know, and thank you for pointing it out, but the original feedback is pertinent - it's inconvenient to resize the browser for one page that's flowed poorly.

A single column of similar size would be fine. Two columns is not great.

> That doesn't help much for folks who read with their browser window maximized.

They should install proper window manager, then. (I use GridMove.) I for example use only half of the screen for the browser and sometimes it's annoying, because the content is exactly couple letters too wide. Why should web designers force their width of screen on everybody?

Yes, but the point of responsive design is to make the content work and work well on all browser sizes. A two column layout doesn't make sense for a blog post.

I came in to say the same thing. Two column is great on a single page, but when part of the reading process is "scroll all the way back to the top of the page and start over", something's wrong.

On particularly wide screens it's three columns! With the scrolling and such I think your point should be well taken.

Yeah, it's fine for print (or for a screen that doesn't scroll), but it's a real pain in the ass to read on a laptop.

Don't feel bad - you're absolutely correct. Really rough/unintuitive design here.

I enjoyed it. I was excited to see when I would switch from one column to the next. I would probably get annoyed if I had to read this more than once a week, though.

Just a silly rant against the UN. There's many of those.

I've been working as a consultant for the UN for a while now, and most of what she writes is spot on (unfortunately).

I think you forgot the part where you explain why you disagree.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com