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Comment by qmmmur | Hacker News Reader

This is such a breath of fresh air in the tech world. I dream of working for a people over profits org, where value is placed on your compassion and custodianship as a means of getting things done (and enjoying the journey there).

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Then go work for a non-profit. There's a lot of e.g. human rights NGOs needing IT people and having a hard time finding them.

I was at a NGO for a while where we interviewed North Korean refugees about execution and burial sites and collected the information in a PostGIS db with QGIS as a frontend and working towards a custom UI plugin for the interview process, and it was very rewarding. Their operations also had a lot of unique security challenges to deal with.

I'm not sure if working for an NGO is necessarily better in terms of culture. It seems to me you can have good or bad culture and management either way, regardless whether the purpose of the organization is making profits or not.

Definitely. However, by and large in NGOs you will work with people who are intrinsically motivated, and not by their paycheck.

From my interaction with people from NGOs, mostly from foreign aid organizations, there seemed to be as many people genuinely trying to make a difference as the ones that are only interested in their own agenda. I would like to think the smaller an organization the easer it is to maintain certain standards and not the other way around.

Getting talked into working late because your boss is persuasive and his bonus is on the line happens all the time here.

Working late because people are dying is a much better justification, but you will burn out just as fast. People who are too earnest about a cause have difficulty pacing themselves. Every org has people who burn the candle at both ends.

I think the values and work/life balance are really great, but it still has to come with a decent paycheck to be great, which NGO’s often seem to lack.

I have friends who have had awful experiences working for NGOs, and eventually ended up burning out.

It can be all the stress of working for a tech company, with 1/3 of the pay. The dynamic that often shows up is that higher-ups try to use employees' intrinsic motivation to guilt them into working longer hours and accepting low pay, "for the greater good".

There are good and bad NGO workplaces, just as there are good and bad private workplaces. But NGOs as a whole are no safe haven.

There's no magic bullet solution to finding a great life by just applying for a job in the right sector. Non profits are not necessarily healthier places to work.

The world as a whole is still trying to work out how to be productive enough to provide for everyone, fairly or reasonably divide up the pie and achieve the vaunted work-life balance.

That's a relatively new concept. In the past, a lot of people were literally slaves or metaphorically "wage slaves." A standard expectation was that the man of the house was the primary breadwinner and he had a wife handling all the quality of life work -- cooking, cleaning, shopping -- so he could put most of his time and energy into the job. In exchange, he got enough income and benefits to support a family.

We are gradually transitioning to a two income couple model in part because people are living longer and having fewer kids. It no longer makes sense to sequester female labor and limit it to women's work. It doesn't make sense for her life, for her marriage or for society.

The transition is proving bumpy.

I work for a non-profit. Yes, they're chill about some things, but it's not lower-stress by any means, and work/life balance is a joke.

I've seen plenty of toxic non-profits that will happily burn you out while paying far below market rate. Bonus: total disillusionment with the mission that excited you in the first place.

Not saying there aren't great NGO roles, but the company being an NGO isn't a good signal that it is a great role.

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