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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/bu

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/ 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.

vacri 12y ago
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.
- quadrangle 12y ago
  Right, I wasn't disagreeing with the article, just giving it a different frame.
  - vacri 12y ago
    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.

vacri 12y ago

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.

quadrangle 12y ago
Right, I wasn't disagreeing with the article, just giving it a different frame.
- vacri 12y ago
  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.