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Comment by ballard | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen what happens when holiday food drive barrels are brought front-and-center to techie venues? Basically empty. Go to any Midwestern state whether an office or a supermarket, and these same barrels are most often overflowing. The generosity and consideration of the less fortunate should shame and humble more people than it does.

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I can't speak for other techies but I will never buy canned food for food drives. It's one of the least efficient ways to donate.

Instead I write a check which helps far, far more. Here's an article on the subject: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/12/food...

An overflowing food barrel represents very little in value, compared to the large cash donations made by wealthy techies. Cash donations are buying entire warehouses of food that you just aren't seeing.

Understood and agreed with, but you know as well as I do that advertising matters. You said it yourself, people "just aren't seeing" the entire warehouses of food. Empty donation bin means a snap judgement to "heartless."

According to the weekly Kroger ad for their store in north Fort Worth (Texas), a can of Simply Organic beans (very tasty beans, I should add) is $1 with a Kroger card; the same goes for a can of Hormel chili (no beans in chili, please). My back-of-the-mousepad calculations say that approximately 37 regular cans will fit in a 55-gallon drum, the kind usually used for these food drives. That means that, in a regular 8-story office building with two deposit locations per floor, filling all of them to the brim will cost $592. If you go the other way and just put three cans in the areas visible to the public, that's $111 to make a small but visible impact.

Yep, it's advertising and showmanship, but that food also does go to people who will actually use it, so it has the benefit of doing a little bit of good, unlike most advertising.

I understand your argument but frankly I don't buy it. I don't think filling up inefficient bins of food on closed tech campus is visible to anyone outside the company; I don't see the potential for impact.

I'll be completely honest: I think much of this anti-tech sentiment (such as: tech people don't give) is wishful thinking and willfully divorced from reality. Most large tech companies have public giving foundations and publicize their donation programs. Here are a few examples:

http://csr.cisco.com/pages/employee-volunteers

https://www.google.com/giving/

http://ef.siliconvalleycf.org/blog/yahoo-employee-foundation

http://www.microsoft.com/about/technicalrecognition/charity-...

These kinds of programs are strongly promoted at most tech companies. A large amount of giving happens outside these programs as well, but they do help establish a baseline well in excess of any food drive.

While trying to dig up the data for some of the bigger tech companies in the area I also stumbled across this report, which claims that area workers not only donate above the average but spend significantly more of their time actually going out into the community http://ef.siliconvalleycf.org/blog/bay-area-companies-giving... The article throws around the term "average" a lot which tends to raise my eyebrows, but it does mesh with my anecdotal experience that tech workers on the whole care a lot more about their community in the bay area than workers in general in other regions of the USA.

Companies do a fair amount of giving, but on an individual level, the Bay Area isn't particularly generous. San Mateo county is in the bottom 1/3 for '% of income given', Santa Clara in the bottom 1/4, SF is a bit better and is in the 42nd percentile for counties.

Long Link to Data:

http://philanthropy.com/article/Interactive-How-America-Give...},"obj_data":null,"conveyor":0,"noSplash":1}

Why not do both?

If any penny spent on cans is better spent on a check, it's dumb to buy a can regardless of whether you also wrote a check or not.

No, it's not dumb. It's merely suboptimal along the one metric you've chosen to measure. I'm including "show of good will" as a secondary metric, hence why it's perfectly sensible to donate in both forms.

Sure, but I think it was clear from the post that throwaway092834 prefers to actually help people over being seen helping people.

Well, it's clear he says one route is more optimal than another.

It's not clear techies actually donate checks, however.

Pardon, but it's very clear. Take a look at the charitable donation foundations at various tech companies, many of whom publish their donation levels. Or get out and talk to some charities in the area and ask them where their money comes from.

Those making more than $100,000 give less (proportionally) of their discretionary income than the middle class. [1][2]

"as wealth increases, people become more insulated, less likely to engage with others, and less sensitive to the suffering of others."

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/48725147 [2] http://philanthropy.com/article/Rich-Enclaves-Are-Not-as/133...

Being seen helping people establishes helping others as a societal norm, and thus promotes the practice generally.

It also creates expectations of help, which can also be very harmful in the long term. Helping others should be voluntary, not done because of expectations.

My girlfriend volunteers full-time for the local food pantry. It was formerly an independent nonprofit, but a few years ago it was taken over by United Way.

Since then, any and all cash donations, given on site at the pantry itself, are funnelled to United Way. The pantry never sees a single cent of the money and United Way does not provide any food (UW employs two people and sends a truck periodically that delivers food from an unaffiliated food bank). No one who works there has any idea where the money goes or what happens to it. The employees there are not allowed to explain this to donors. The donors, of course, have no idea either.

The pantry is only allowed to keep tangible foodstuffs that are donated directly to them, which they can then give to people who need it. The pantry often runs out of certain types of food. When they do, there's nothing they can do but hope someone will donate more of that specific item, meanwhile watching as the cash donations that could be used to buy it get sent away.

I realize this sounds implausible and I can't cite any sources for it[1]. Just be careful about the assumptions you make regarding where the money goes. Food is food and people can eat it. Money can get funnelled or turned into other things, and unless you're there to watch it happen, you don't know what's going on.

[1]: Howevever, if you haven't already, read the Wikipedia page on United Way sometime and see if you can figure out what it is that they actually do, other than collect money, build bureaucracy and get involved in major scandals.

You could check http://www.charitynavigator.org/ to see what ratio of the money goes to programs vs. admin costs and funding costs. The navigator has many entries for United Way as it seems each region has its own organisation.

I think the youth has a lot to do with it, more so than the industry. I live in DC, and there is a stark contrast between buildings with 20 somethings and buildings with older residents (the 20 something are split between a 5% that give tons and a 95% that do fuck all, while the older residents on general give far more on the aggregate.)

Just living in a building with 20 somethings shows that they are much more self-involved, no matter what industry you are in. The typical giving 30 something was probably the same way in their 20's.

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