10 years of 10 percent

🗓️ Sun Jun 14 2026

In 2014, I decided to do a big scary thing. After getting my masters degree in social work, studying and passing my licensure test, and 2 years in the field, I decided to quit my job without a plan for what came next. I didn't know what the next step for my career path should be, but I figured if I tried a lot of different things, something was bound to stick. After several few months of experimentation, I ended up at a coding bootcamp (back when that was still a new concept), and I have been working as a software engineer ever since.

Quarter Life Crisis

In some ways, the choice to move from social work to tech made a lot of sense for me--I'm introverted! I've always been into computers and the internet!--But there was one big problem. I have always wanted to devote my life to "helping people" and had made the assumption that the way I would do that would be with my career. Moving from social work to tech felt like throwing that assumption out the window, which was pretty unsettling.

All of us "help people" to some degree. We take care of our family, friends, and community. We volunteer a few hours at the soup kitchen or take the junior team member at work under our wing for a few months. But I wanted to do more. I wanted to make a BIG impact. But what does that mean exactly? What counts as big? What does impact mean? While I went into social work to accomplish this perhaps vague goal, I found myself frustrated that no one was doing rigorous research to measure the efficacy of my work. Most of the nonprofits I encountered tended to conflate good intentions with impact and it was driving me bonkers. Sometimes of course you just "knew" that the work "mattered" but most days I had zero data to back that up besides gut feelings. I knew measuring impact was not easy, but it felt unethical and unsustainable to me to keep doing my work without that deep sense of knowing, so I left. (One might argue that my inability to sit with the ambiguity of this work is a sign I wasn't really meant for it in the first place)

Ironically, the tech world I entered in 2015 seemed to suffer a similar kind of vibes-delusion as the nonprofit world. There was (and maybe still is) a surprisingly popular belief that "disrupting" systems was going to "change the world" and that "changing the world" was the same thing as improving it. I do genuinely think a lot of tech does improve our lives but a lot of this tech-disruption-narrative seemed more focused on hiding undesirable externalities in exchange for vc profits rather than actually improving the world. I didn't buy into it, and struggled a bit to make sense of my desire to both become a software engineer and use my career to "help people".

Around this time I became familiar with a concept that gave me some solace called "earning to give". People who are "earning to give" will purposely seek out high paying gigs regardless of their moral impact (think corporate lawyer, hedge fund manager, etc) and then donate the majority of their earnings to high impact charities. This felt a bit extreme but interesting to me. I didn't think I'd have the patience to work in high finance nor the generosity of spirit to donate all of my earnings. But I wondered, could there be some kind of middle ground where I could:

That's when I found the Giving What We Can Pledge (which has since been rebranded as the 10% pledge). People who take the pledge, promise to donate 10% of their salary to highly impactful charities. This is hardly a revolutionary concept. Plenty of religions advocate tithing 10%. But for the secular amongst us, it can feel like a breath of fresh air to rediscover the idea.

So in 2015, my partner and I signed the 10% pledge. Here are some reflections after a decade of giving.

The numbers:

In August of 2015, I somehow miraculously got a first real programming job with a salary of around $100k. This was more than double my previous salary and beyond my hopes and expectations at the time. After a few months on the job, my spouse and I started giving 10% of our pre-tax income.

We have, for the most part, kept up with this pledge, adjusting our donations as our income fluctuated. Over 10 years we've collectively given over $230,000 to high impact charities.

Where did the money go? What was the impact of this money?

The majority of our donations have gone to the Against Malaria Foundation. While it's website is not my favorite, what it lacks in marketing it seems to make up for in impact.

Malaria is a horrible disease. It kills children every single day. While you are reading this blog post, multiple people--including multiple children under the age of 5--will have died from malaria, and many more will have to endure life-long debilitating malaria-related injuries, including brain injuries.

On the flip side it doesn't cost much to drastically reduce the chance that someone will catch malaria. For instance it only costs about $2 for a bed net (as of dec 2025) that could prevent a mosquito from biting you and giving you malaria in the first place. So that's basically all AMF does, they buy and distribute these bed nets.

It's not a perfect system. Not every bed net will save a life. You are only under a bed net so many hours of the day. And plenty of people find bed nets too annoying to be practical for daily use. Bed nets can rip and mosquitos can find their way in anyway. And even if buying someone a bed net prevents them from getting malaria, it doesn't necessarily prevent their death. Plenty of people catch malaria and recover just fine.

But even if it's an imperfect device, we know that if you give out enough bed nets to enough people, fewer people get malaria, and fewer people die each year. And it doesn't cost much (at least not a lot relative to the world of public health) to give out enough bed nets to move the needle. GiveWell estimates it takes between $3-8k to save a life if you are donating to the Against Malaria Foundation.

If we take that factoid at face value, that means that over the course of 10 years our donations have helped save between 28 and 76 people. Honestly, not bad for couple of code monkeys.

In recent years we've mostly focused our giving on GiveWell's Top Charities Fund, of which Against Malaria is still one of the major recipients, so not really a dramatic change. We've always been fans of GiveWell, and after Trump/Musk gutted foreign aid, and the advent of some new vaccines post-covid, it seemed reasonable to ensure that if the giving landscape radically changed or a new method of improving the world emerged, that we'd want our money to go wherever made the biggest impact as soon as possible.

If you're interested in learning more about GiveWell, Ezra Klein recently did an episode on it that I found interesting.

Was it hard emotionally/financially to do this?

Most of the time no! Setting up my first monthly donation was a bit emotionally difficult for me. I have very vivid memories from my early twenties in which my monthly rent and food bills combined were less than $450, so to see close to twice that amount just disappear from my bank account overnight did come with a bit of sticker shock. But on the other hand I was used to making so much less, that I still felt I was living the good life even minus 10% of it.

Over the years, we still managed to pay off my student loans, to live in nice apartments, to keep up with retirement contributions, to go on a nice vacation sometimes, to occasionally upgrade a flight to business class. In 2021 we bought our first home with a healthy downpayment. I can very easily think of other ways we could have spent the money, but I think overall we live a life of abundance, and giving this money away didn't really noticeably slow us down in anyway that was important. I feel no sense of regret when it comes to our charitable contributions.

Did you always stick to 10%? Did you ever miss a payment?

We definitely have missed a donation or two! Our donations are on auto-pay, but I often drag my feet to update donations after one of us gets a raise or a bonus at work. When we purchased our home, it became apparent we needed a new roof, a new water heater, new gutters, a new kitchen and more... all at once. So during this time, we did pause our donations for a while. When the repairs eased up a bit, I went back and tried to make up for the missed payments.

I don't pretend that my accounting here is perfect, to me that is not the point. I am pretty proud of what we've done. For me it's not about absolutes, it's about ensuring that giving is part of the budget, part of the life plan. Whenever we finally get around to writing a will, I imagine a good chunk of it will also go to these charities.

But isn't it better to give locally?

This is a sentiment I've heard a lot before and one I also believed for a long time. However after working and volunteered with many nonprofits I remain skeptical this is true. And I'm not talking about corruption (though that definitely happens sometimes), I'm talking about a good local charity, one with nice people trying to help real people in their community. Good intentions do not unfortunately equate impact. Something can sound and feel good and not really make a big difference or even seem to be negatively correlated with the outcomes you want. In my experience, a lot of the "statistics" that local nonprofits use to "prove" their effectiveness is highly suspect and often based on self-selection issues (checkout my spouse's piece on a college access program that suffers from this). Nonprofits often must "prove" their work is effective or everyone in that organization will lose their job, and the population currently being cared for will be ignored. Given these stakes, it's not surprising they often are not setup to find the truth, they are set up to "prove" that the solution they are already implementing is the best one. This unfortunately means a lot of pseudo-science in the already murky terrain that is social science. It leads to outcomes that are at best subpar, and at worst harmful.

But even if you are truly convinced that your local nonprofit is doing good work (and that does happen, I've worked at many!), are you 100% confident it is doing as much or MORE work per dollar as it would somewhere else? If you've ever been on a vacation somewhere very cheap or very expensive, you've likely experienced the shock and amazement at how much variance there is to how far a US Dollar can go. $50 to a local food pantry in the USA is probably is not enough to buy groceries for a family for a week (which often is less about food-scarcity as it is about offsetting exorbitant housing costs). But that same donation to a highly efficient international aid organization might be enough to help a family on the brink of starvation for over a month. And in my values system a family in need is worth the same whether they are in my zipcode or across the world.

That said, yes I do still give locally. But I don't consider those donations as part of my 10% pledge commitment. I give small amounts to lots of groups not because I'm convinced it is a highly effective way to help the world, but because it genuinely feels good. It is a gift I give to my community that feels nice for me personally, but I don't expect much for the ROI of that gift (that said even a small ROI that I can directly see/feel has value to improving my day to day life which is part of why I do it).

This is very preachy! I disagree with you on XYZ points! You should give a lot more than you do!

My bad! My intention here is to inspire not to judge or to declare perfection. I actually don't think EVERYONE should give 10%. I also don't think everyone who wants to make a difference should only look at charitable giving.

However, I do believe that everyone who has the capacity to help people should be helping people, but I think that can and probably should look very different from person to person. Maybe you want to be a doctor and that means years of being a poorly paid resident and then years of paying down absurd student debt. Maybe you want to be a nurse and need to spend any free dime on vacations and massages to keep you sane and being fully present for your patients. Maybe you want to focus your time/energy on inventing a new vaccine and don't want to waste any brainspace thinking about donations. Maybe you want to run for president. Maybe you want to run a nonprofit and you are very confident in its efficacy but its too small for GiveWell to ever pay attention to it. Maybe you're preventing the ai-apocalypse and need to save all of your funds to buy up chips from bad actors. Honestly I'm here for all of it. If in the future I too come across a different way I'd like to make a difference, I might change my mind! I think of charitable donations as a kind of an insurance policy for positive career impact. For now this feels right for me and I'm sharing it in case it inspires you to try something new too.

If you've been craving a way to do something--anything!--positive on this planet while the oceans boil around us, maybe try giving 10% and see how it feels. And if you're feeling overwhelmed about finding "the best charity" why not outsource that decision to the smart people at GiveWell who are already researching that problem extensively. If you've already been giving but more sporadically, why not pick a target number and make it methodical. Giving and impact doesn't have to just be vibes-based, it can to some degree be measurable and quantifiable, which means it can also be improvable.