Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

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>In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go into public service for a fraction of the money. One of my best friends wants to save the environment. The summer after our second year of school, I went to go intern at a firm, which gave me a $1k/month lunch budget and a guaranteed job after graduation, while she went to intern for the EPA which rarely hires anyone after graduation. Now, I've got an office with views of Manhattan, and she's waitressing on the side to make ends meet while looking for that rare opportunity to get a job at an environmental non-profit.

Inputs are much less important than outputs. Sure, a greater proportion non-hackers make conspicuous lifestyle changes in the name of their chosen cause. But how much real difference has your friend made except to her waitressing patrons? By contrast someone who figured out how to save 1% of the electricity used at facebook has made a huge contribution to the environment, which is in no way diminished by the fact that they were well paid for doing so.

The article isn't about whether hackers are more or less effective, as a group, at causes in the public service. It's about aggrandizing their moral character. Who has a greater moral character? Someone who puts all their effort into the public service with the skills they have, or someone who has some positive benefit on the public merely incident to his lucrative job? Inextricable from this evaluation is the fact that the guy who saved 1% of the electricity used at Facebook could probably have a tremendously larger impact on the environment if he dedicated his skills entirely to the public service.

Also, by your reasoning, Goldman Sachs (which donates like $250 million a year to public service causes) is a far greater force for good than the EFF (which has a budget of $3.5 million). Now, the EFF might be more efficient at doing good than Goldman's charities, but is it 70x more efficient?

> Inextricable from this evaluation is the fact that the guy who saved 1% of the electricity used at Facebook could probably have a tremendously larger impact on the environment if he dedicated his skills entirely to the public service.

That's not at all clear. I would expect that work in public service is far more likely to go off the rails due to perverse incentives, so that such a worker would find themselves working very hard at something that doesn't create much value. One major benefit to working in a lucrative job is that you have a direct measurement of how much good you're doing, since someone is willing to voluntarily part with your high salary to have you do it. Maybe geeks are just better at personal cost-benefit analysis than liberal arts folk. ;)

>Who has a greater moral character? Someone who puts all their effort into the public service with the skills they have, or someone who has some positive benefit on the public merely incident to his lucrative job?

Surely it's whoever achieved the best outcome, irrespective of how they achieved it.

>Inextricable from this evaluation is the fact that the guy who saved 1% of the electricity used at Facebook could probably have a tremendously larger impact on the environment if he dedicated his skills entirely to the public service.

Citation needed. There was an economist article here a few months ago on how the UN's world development goals have been achieved ahead of schedule, not because of well-meaning NGOs but simply because of cheap manufacturing in China. The great thing about working in for-profit industry is that the invisible hand eliminates inefficiencies. In the public and charitable sector the incentives are entirely backwards - good, efficient charities that solve the problems they were created in response to put themselves out of business, while inefficient, ineffective charities just grow bigger and bigger.

>Also, by your reasoning, Goldman Sachs (which donates like $250 million a year to public service causes) is a far greater force for good than the EFF (which has a budget of $3.5 million). Now, the EFF might be more efficient at doing good than Goldman's charities, but is it 70x more efficient?

That's true as far as it goes, but we'd expect a bigger organization to have more impact. It's probably fairer to consider some kind of "goodness factor" - amount of good done as a proportion of market cap or some such measure. But yes, Goldman does do a lot of good that largely goes unrecognized.

> Surely it's whoever achieved the best outcome, irrespective of how they achieved it.

Isn't that an ends justify the means sort of argument?

> Isn't that an ends justify the means sort of argument?

Well, no, its an outcomes justify the means arguments. Ends are the goals worked toward, and aren't the sum total of the outcomes of an action; "ends justify the means" is a frequently problematic approach to evaluating the a proposed course of action because it ignores the potential outcomes of the action aside from the intended goal.

There are few, even in radical communities like slashdot, that think we as a global community would be better off if Bill Gates never existed. Sure, that is an extreme case, but it serves as an example that the ends certainly can justify the means in this situation.

>Isn't that an ends justify the means sort of argument?

Yes?

> Inextricable from this evaluation is the fact that the guy who saved 1% of the electricity used at Facebook could probably have a tremendously larger impact on the environment if he dedicated his skills entirely to the public service.

That's not "fact". At all. Some people certainly have great impact in public service, but most are pushing paper around and navigating bureaucracy and a brand of office politics unheard of in all but the worst private corporations. Years are wasted being an intern to the guy who gets coffee for the guy who gets coffee for the guy who answers the phone for the guy who sometimes has a meeting in the same building as the guy who makes an important decision every once in a while. Some build PRISM (obviously a public service project, undoubtedly build by people who are certain their project ultimately advances the human condition), other engage in countless other less nefarious but ultimately still worthless or even damaging projects.

I know this is great mythology, but if those people ever existed in the first place, they've been pushed out over the last 15 years of effective budget cuts (compared to costs of employment like healthcare) in most domestic public service roles.

It kills me to see people who get free sodas and 150k while commenting on Hacker News presume that a workplace they've never been is some wasteful USSR-esque bureaucracy. Yes, inefficiency scales with organization size but most local depts are pretty small, and local, state and domestic federal depts have been under budget pressure and salary freezes for years while still having the same job to do.

If you're looking for a corporate mess with no cost accountability, look at the big government contractors.

So obviously hyperbole for colour. Thought that was clear from including a coffee-fetcher for the coffee-fetcher. But it's fact that that getting to any real responsibility involves playing a long game of politics that inherently doesn't value merit very highly - and that the guy who saves 1% at Facebook did not have to jump through those hoops to get to there. Which loops back to my assertion that it's not a sound conclusion that the Facebook guy could have done more in public service.

> It kills me to see people who get free sodas and 150k while commenting on Hacker News presume that a workplace they've never been is some wasteful USSR-esque bureaucracy.

Interestingly, that does not seem to extend to the same demographic presuming that government magically became efficient throughout because they were pushed a little on budgets?

> If you're looking for a corporate mess with no cost accountability, look at the big government contractors.

If there were all straight lines and accountability in the government, then their contractors wouldn't be getting away with it.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/not-intended-to-be-a-fa...

I don't think the various departments that have been getting killed on budgets for the last 15 years "magically" became more efficient -- I think they did, objectively, do almost the same job with less resources in terms of headcount and pay freezes. No magic about it, that's based on actual numbers.

You're alleging that something being private or public is a bigger deal than the normal organizational dynamics of bureaucracies. This is the attitude that leads to us writing blank checks for the F-35 no matter how many times they double the cost, while furloughing civil servants across all layers of government because there's not enough money to go around.

Maybe you are prone to valueing the quantifiable and direct impact a hacker can make higher than the indirect and non-quantifiable impact of someone else. Just imagine the influence someone could have through a conversation with an influential politician at a dinner party. The aforementioned hacker might not have the rethorical abilities, broad academic background and social network to do this. Still, it could have finally had a much bigger impact on the environment. Of course such a conversation does not occur frequently, but I guess reducing Facebook's electricity usage by 1% doesn't either.

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