Hacker News Reader

Comment by hallmark | Hacker News Reader

Give me a break. When a successful tech executive says, "It has always been a priority for me to give back to people who are less fortunate," the Gates Foundation or the US Digital Service come to mind. Getting another highly paid job is not at all in the same class.

View on HN

> Give me a break. When a successful tech executive says, "It has always been a priority for me to give back to people who are less fortunate," the Gates Foundation or the US Digital Service come to mind. Getting another highly paid job is not at all in the same class.

Says you.

If you have the opportunity to make a bunch of money moving on to a new gig, hire your old co-workers, and work on new technologies like self driving cars[1], I'd say that's going to have a much larger impact than picking up a hammer and building houses Jimmy Carter style.

Also, using the Bill Gates, who's probably 2+ orders of magnitude wealthier than Singhal, as a comparison point isn't fair either.

[1]: Guessing on this one as I have no clue what projects he personally oversaw at Uber.

> Also, using the Bill Gates, who's probably 2+ orders of magnitude wealthier than Singhal, as a comparison point isn't fair either.

You don't have to be Gates-wealthy to be a philanthropist. Hell, I did some philanthropy when I was earning only $35k a year - I saved up $2k and sent out an invite to a dozen friends for them to do any short course of their choosing up to $150 and I'd pay for it. And that's small potatoes - there are thousands upon thousands of people out there working long-term as volunteers for good causes despite also being on or near minimum wage.

The idea that philanthropy is only the domain of the ridiculously wealthy is just bizarre.

I'm not saying you have to be Gates-wealthy to do philanthropy, I'm saying dropping your career to do nothing but philanthropy doesn't scale or sustain if you're significantly less wealthy.

Taking a high-paying job, hiring your already well-paid ex-colleagues, and working on toys for the upper-middle class wouldn't strike most people as 'giving back to the less fortunate'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com