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by throwaway092834 4531 days ago
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.

1 comments

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}