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Giving money to charity is good. But if you worked less, you'd have more time to volunteer. I'd say that's more valuable.
by normloman 13y ago
Giving money to charity is good. But if you worked less, you'd have more time to volunteer. I'd say that's more valuable.
- tedks 13y agoBeing a developer is a very valuable skill. Presumably, working for eight hours as a developer can pay for a number of volunteering efforts, so it's strictly more valuable. If a charitable organization needed some software written, volunteering to write it would certainly be helpful, but this still requires you to be a domain expert in two things, rather than one. Unless you mean "valuable" in the sense of "makes you feel more fuzzy," in which case you are killing people and I advise you to stop.
- gjm11 13y agoI think current best estimates are that the most efficient charitable donations you can make save about one life per $2000 donated. If you're a decently but not extravagantly paid US software developer (I'm not, but the money is in the right ballpark) then maybe your salary is $100k/year; let's say you donate 5% of that before tax, or $5k/year; that's 2.5 lives saved per year. Most things you could do by volunteering full time probably do less good than that. (Of course "lives saved" is an unsatisfactory metric; something like QALYs would be better. But the lives-saved figure is the one I happen to remember.)