4 ms·

>One could argue this is partly why companies want to do this sort of thing, so their employees grow (among other good / less-than-good reasons). I really wond

by magduf 7y ago

>One could argue this is partly why companies want to do this sort of thing, so their employees grow (among other good / less-than-good reasons). I really wonder how much of it is this, and how much of it is virtue-signaling at the corporate level: "look at how great our company is! We have our employees spend work hours on charity work!" While it wouldn't do much for "team building", it seems like society would be better off if these companies simply contributed to a fund to pay minimum-wage workers to do this charity work. This would get more charity work done, and also provide jobs for some underprivileged people. As for your soapbox, I completely agree.

thu2111 7y ago
These sorts of corporate charity events happen because people want to know they are good people, that they're moral people who are making the world better. Our society, reasonably, emphasises the importance of these things very strongly to everyone from birth. It used to be that religion provided these answers. Believe in God, have faith, go through these rituals, help the poor and you're a good person who has successfully discharged moral responsibility. Religion has faded away, so we're left with "a good person helps the poor" which everyone agrees is a pretty moral thing to do. But the more indirect it gets the less moral value is assigned to it. People assign moral value to hours of time invested because time is what we all have equally. Time is not money when it comes to judging character. It must be this way because otherwise it'd be that very high earning people help the poor to a vastly greater extent than the average person does, just by turning up to work every day and paying their taxes. If that automatically made them morally superior to everyone else, it'd create a lot of resentment. No matter how hard you worked you would never be as "good" as the rich guy who just turns up and does some lucky stock trading or whatever. I think sometimes programmers don't feel this way to quite the same extent as other sorts of office workers because we sometimes get more meaning from our work than someone in e.g. sales. The Silicon Valley stereotype of "Join our startup because we're changing the world for good!" has a basis in real self-perceptions. If you believe you're making the world a better place by actually doing your work, of course doing extra charity stuff will seem silly and a poor allocation of time/money relative to other ways of achieving the same ends.
- magduf 7y ago
  >It must be this way because otherwise it'd be that very high earning people help the poor to a vastly greater extent than the average person does, just by turning up to work every day and paying their taxes. This would only make sense if paying taxes actually helped the poor. In America, it doesn't really follow. There's not much of a social safety net here. For proof, all you have to do is walk around various large cities' downtowns and see all the homeless people. There's thousands of them within a very short walking distance of the White House and Capitol buildings in DC.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    The USA spends about 25% of the entire federal budget on social security, or nearly a trillion dollars. Sure, America is very large. It may not be 'much' of a social safety net relative to other countries. But it's still the case that the rich subsidise the poor to a very large degree, in any western country.
    - magduf 7y ago
      This is disingenuous. Social security has multiple components, but the main one people think of is called "OASDI", and is a government-run retirement program, not a social safety net. It's paid for by individuals over their working careers through a separate tax (called FICA), and then when retired, they draw out of it, based on what they contributed. Someone who contributes nothing to SS gets nothing out of it, while someone with a high income gets a relatively large pension check. It's not helping the poor much at all. It's just a guaranteed but generally poor-return investment that's mandatory for all working adults. There are some other components administered by the same agency, including TANF, SCHIP, and Medicare, so yes there is some safety net there, but relative to other western countries it's rather poor. If it weren't, we wouldn't have so many homeless people. America is NOT like western European nations.
      - thu2111 7y ago
        The rich will bail out state pensions when they go bankrupt, and effectively already do via implicitly backing state debts. In the end, all social security is a wealth transfer from rich to poor. Even rich employees become much (money) poorer when they retire. That's not a criticism, just an observation.

by magduf 7y ago

thu2111 7y ago

These sorts of corporate charity events happen because people want to know they are good people, that they're moral people who are making the world better. Our society, reasonably, emphasises the importance of these things very strongly to everyone from birth. It used to be that religion provided these answers. Believe in God, have faith, go through these rituals, help the poor and you're a good person who has successfully discharged moral responsibility. Religion has faded away, so we're left with "a good person helps the poor" which everyone agrees is a pretty moral thing to do. But the more indirect it gets the less moral value is assigned to it. People assign moral value to hours of time invested because time is what we all have equally. Time is not money when it comes to judging character. It must be this way because otherwise it'd be that very high earning people help the poor to a vastly greater extent than the average person does, just by turning up to work every day and paying their taxes. If that automatically made them morally superior to everyone else, it'd create a lot of resentment. No matter how hard you worked you would never be as "good" as the rich guy who just turns up and does some lucky stock trading or whatever. I think sometimes programmers don't feel this way to quite the same extent as other sorts of office workers because we sometimes get more meaning from our work than someone in e.g. sales. The Silicon Valley stereotype of "Join our startup because we're changing the world for good!" has a basis in real self-perceptions. If you believe you're making the world a better place by actually doing your work, of course doing extra charity stuff will seem silly and a poor allocation of time/money relative to other ways of achieving the same ends.

magduf 7y ago
>It must be this way because otherwise it'd be that very high earning people help the poor to a vastly greater extent than the average person does, just by turning up to work every day and paying their taxes. This would only make sense if paying taxes actually helped the poor. In America, it doesn't really follow. There's not much of a social safety net here. For proof, all you have to do is walk around various large cities' downtowns and see all the homeless people. There's thousands of them within a very short walking distance of the White House and Capitol buildings in DC.
- thu2111 7y ago
  The USA spends about 25% of the entire federal budget on social security, or nearly a trillion dollars. Sure, America is very large. It may not be 'much' of a social safety net relative to other countries. But it's still the case that the rich subsidise the poor to a very large degree, in any western country.
  - magduf 7y ago
    This is disingenuous. Social security has multiple components, but the main one people think of is called "OASDI", and is a government-run retirement program, not a social safety net. It's paid for by individuals over their working careers through a separate tax (called FICA), and then when retired, they draw out of it, based on what they contributed. Someone who contributes nothing to SS gets nothing out of it, while someone with a high income gets a relatively large pension check. It's not helping the poor much at all. It's just a guaranteed but generally poor-return investment that's mandatory for all working adults. There are some other components administered by the same agency, including TANF, SCHIP, and Medicare, so yes there is some safety net there, but relative to other western countries it's rather poor. If it weren't, we wouldn't have so many homeless people. America is NOT like western European nations.
    - thu2111 7y ago
      The rich will bail out state pensions when they go bankrupt, and effectively already do via implicitly backing state debts. In the end, all social security is a wealth transfer from rich to poor. Even rich employees become much (money) poorer when they retire. That's not a criticism, just an observation.