Most volunteering is a waste of time for anyone except the volunteer | Hacker News Reader

Most volunteering is a waste of time for anyone except the volunteer

jseliger.wordpress.com

21 pointsjseliger13 comments

The article mentions this, but it certainly bears repeating - the best kind of volunteers are the ones who have developed their 10,000 hours of expertise in their profession, and then volunteer their time.

Back in 1998, a small group of us volunteers took the Red Cross in Palo Alto and wired it up for Ethernet Networking in a single weekend. I'd had about 6 years of pretty intensive IT training, so was able to manage the Network Stacks on the Network/Desktops (They were using Novell networking in the Red Cross, and trust me when I say it was not a foregone conclusion that your workstation would be able to talk to your NIC, let alone your Network back in 1998. IRQs, himem.sys and such).

The guy leading the cable plant, and punchdowns had been doing so for close to 8 years, and had every type of cable plant certification you can think of. He also got his Cabling company to donate a truckload of brand-new Cat 5E cabling, tools, etc..

Ironically, the least skilled volunteer on our team, (for this kind of work), was a guy by the name of Ed McCreight (though he was still pretty damn handy, and certainly held his own when running cable) - who I only learned later was a fairly Sr. Scientist at Adobe working on their PDF engine, and, oh yeah, had co-invented the B-Tree.

Well, yes, volunteering in Africa does not make sense from a cost-benefit perspective, unless you actually posses a skill that is in short supply over there (i.e. doctors). However, volunteering at your local homeless shelter, orphanage, retirement home or women's shelter, where your work does not incur any extra costs for the institution you are helping, is a completely different thing.

It depends how short-sighted your goals are. If your goal is solely "build a house in rural Angola", then yes, hire local talent. If your goals include "making our youth more worldly, exposing them to other cultures" or "extend soft power by building bridges between citizens", then it's very worthwhile.

The author of the article strikes me as a 'worth of everything and value of nothing' type person, only seeing the literal end goal.

Those goals are not strictly related to volunteering though, they can be accomplished with exchange programs or tourism (if done through local tour guides). The main issue with voluntourism is that it does not promote sustainable growth in the communities it is trying to help, and therefore is not a good long term solution for the problems it is trying to solve. Not to mention taking jobs away from local workers who could really need the money.

Not to mention taking jobs away from local workers who could really need the money.

Jobs that aren't currently being done? Is it really a stolen job if it wasn't being done?

Another problem with foreign aid is that if you don't actively manage it yourself, corruption can very easily divert it (and regularly does). At least by sending in the kids, some of it actually gets spent on the intended target. Maybe the kids made a shitty house that has to be rebuilt, but hey, at least now the bricks are in the right place... and now there's a job for that local worker you wanted.

My point is that the article has an extremely simplified view of what's going on. There's a number of interests and angles at play here, not just the 'veiled selfishness' that the author is painting of the volunteers.

This isn't a problem with volunteering, it's a problem with most volunteering.

It's the same fact as "most jobs are bullshit" As in http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

There's tons of waste an inefficiency in our world today, and most people fool themselves into thinking what they are doing matters. But if we just question things, we can find ways to actually help whether in our careers or as volunteers.

My guess is also that the organisations the author mentioned actually mean "we don't want more volunteers" rather than "we don't want volunteers at all". It's an important semantic difference, since the value of a volunteer in the former statement is not nil.

Right, I wasn't disagreeing with the article, just giving it a different frame.

I am disagreeing with the article, because I think it's very highly slanted. "Someone with a skill that can be sold for a couple hundred dollars an hour is better off doing that, and then donating their wages to hire at least ten people for ten dollars an hour.", for example. Because people that actually earn a couple of hundred dollars per hour are just not that common - it's arguing from an extreme outlier. The median full-time wage in the US is something like $42k - half of full time employees earn less than this, which works out to ~$20/hour. And only 1/3 of Americans are full-time employees.

The arguments about charities not wanting to be swamped by the unskilled are fair points, but at the same time, charities still do need unskilled hands. They just don't need crazy amounts of them. The article should have been more about the imbalance in skill requirements, not that charities basically only want experts in the field. And even then, you don't need to be a ten-year expert to be skilled enough for a lot of the things a charity work requires. One week's pulling cable would be enough experience to really help out with ghshephard's example above. Sure, a professional netadmin would be better, but a few days cable-jerking would have made someone baseline useful. Likewise team management skills can be very handy in managing the unskilled hordes, and it doesn't take anything like 10 years to gain those kinds of skills.

Taking the article on its merits, no-one would be able to volunteer until their late 20s, which is clearly an absurd concept.

I've volunteered almost every week for the last 6 years running free STEM programs in local schools in Brooklyn. The robotics program I started runs entirely off of volunteers, most of whom I've never met before their first day and certainly aren't robotic specialists. About 40 4th graders from 3 schools get ~40 hours of free robotics classes every year. Not bad for a bunch of unpaid volunteers. To be clear, the robotics program wouldn't exist without us, and everyone--the kids, parents, school--are all very happy we do it.

New York Cares is a non-profit that organizes volunteers for all sorts of community organizations. Knitting at senior centers, arts and crafts at transitional housing centers, cooking programs at rec centers. Again, the programs wouldn't exist without the volunteers, and the intended recipients definitely enjoy them and benefit.

The robotics program was recently written about in a Brooklyn local paper: http://www.homereporternews.com/news/school_news/sunset-spar...

I wonder what the author thinks can be done to improve volunteerism?

Here in the Philippines I met a troop of British deaf-assistance volunteers, visiting for three months, who don't know sign language and happily admit their own uselessness. Clearly this is suboptimal. But the only solution he presents in the piece - make money and give it to NGOs to hire professionals - sounds, well, not exactly surprising coming from a grant writing consultant. The authors of books like Dead Aid [1] and White Man's Burden [2] would have a few research-backed criticisms of what his suggested approach does to NGOs' effectiveness.

I was hoping to find some in-trade NGO hacks for travel volunteerism, or Doctors Without Borders for Everything, but without any new approach presented, this piece is just complaining about a pretty obvious problem.

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[1] Dead Aid https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6184317-dead-aid [2] White Man's Burden https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33513.The_White_Man_s_Bu...

Be an example to others by becoming an expert, instead of by sacrificing time that should be optimally spent doing something useful for a large number of people.

10,000 hours in days to become an expert = 416 full 24-hour days. 1 week in days in developing nation helping out = 7 full 24-hour days.

Helping out somewhere doesn't make a dint in that 10k hours; it's not like it's an either/or.

I just felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of high school juniors suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

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