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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

You should rethink this stance. Do you want competent people running the organization or the cheapest possible?

A charity that just passes money straight through by sending envelopes full of cash to a war torn country is much worse than one that spends a ton of money on analyzing first what the most effective way to help is.

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This argument is always raised but in the end, the most work is done by volunteers and the top of those big corporations (the charity status is just a tax dodge) reap wealth like in any other corporation.

The lower down payed employees get the "you don't get much but you work for a charity" speech and get abused as much as the volunteers.

Let the CEO do it out of charity and take a 1$ salary and see if it all goes to hell. I very much doubt it.

> and the top of those big corporations (the charity status is just a tax dodge) reap wealth like in any other corporation.

No it’s not, the charity status is a massive burden and it’s about the stupidest thing you can do if you’re forming a corporation with the intent to make money.

> the most work is done by volunteers

No, that’s not true. Much of the work is done by the suppliers charities buy supplies from and employees of the charity. Doctors get paid in Doctors Without Borders.

> Let the CEO do it out of charity and take a 1$ salary and see if it all goes to hell. I very much doubt it.

This is just the standard ignorant “I don’t think CEOs do anything” view dressed up in a comment about charities.

By that logic open source software should be mostly crap...

High pay bringing high competence and passion seems a rather poor assumption.

> By that logic open source software should be mostly crap...

And it is. Most free software projects never go anywhere. Those that do commonly have UI/UX that is far inferior to most consumer software produced for people willing to pay for it. The extreme right tail of open source software is great and most people who work on it are paid to do so. If you want reliability and quality paying for it works a lot better than hoping for people to do so uncompensated.

Being a CEO of a large charity is about connections and logistics. Not passion.

https://www.givedirectly.org/ is I think a fairly effective charity, admittedly I assume they mostly send money to people in non-war torn countries, but I think the point still holds, and just doing the moral equivalent of sending evelopes full of cash is a decent baseline for charities.

Loads of people take below market salaries. Plenty of CEOs are merely paid low six digits instead of 300k+!

Is it unreasonable for a charity CEO to merely be paid a bit closer to the median for their kind of work?

Is it unreasonable for charity CEOs to be charitable when negotiating salaries and living on the local medium salary (great incentive to raise the local economy)?

Your stance that the most competent people are paid the most is the kind of toxic capitalism that got us into this situation. Nobody is helped by this except the egos of the donators and the pockets of whoever is in charge.

That's not the stance though. The stance is that administrative costs isn't what matters. Impact is what matters. Sometimes impact requires more administration, sometimes it doesn't. But impact is something that we can measure, so why use a bad heuristic instead?

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