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What does it mean for a company to be "fundamentally" evil or not? The "fix things on the inside" argument for going to working at a place that you think is har

by gfodor 8y ago

What does it mean for a company to be "fundamentally" evil or not? The "fix things on the inside" argument for going to working at a place that you think is harming people has always struck me as based upon a mostly unfalsifiable assumption: that the organization has the capacity to change and that you can actually bring about that change. This is especially unknowable until you've actually worked at an organization for a long enough period of time to understand all of its internal pathologies and the motivations and character of the people involved in them. There's no reason to believe that as a job seeker you can have some insight for a given company into how impactful your actions may or may not have on the things they are doing that you consider harmful. An honest assessment I'd argue should assume your impact will be minimal if not zero given a large enough organization, unless you are coming in as a high level manager. As such it's hard to not take it as a self-rationalization given the incentives to create cognitive dissonance on the part of job seekers in order to take a high paying job working on interesting technical problems despite the potential negative effects it has on others. This doesn't mean there aren't good reasons to go work at such a place, it just means that if you're telling yourself that you're able to look past any ethical concerns you might have since you think you can be an influencer towards correcting them, I think it's worth reflecting on if you're not actually going to be put into a real position of power to do so. The challenge with Facebook specifically on this front is that power is extremely centralized onto one person, so even if you were joining Facebook as, say, a VP, it's hard to know in advance just how much influence you're going to have over the direction of the company before you've learned where the boundaries of that influence are.

jammygit 8y ago
I've never seen 'fundamental evil' in real life. Just people who don't care, who care too much, or who are not clear headed. That's enough to go pretty deep into the pit without adding 'evil' to the mix.
debatem1 8y ago
I think these are all good questions. They're certainly things I mulled over when considering whether to take the job. Regarding being fundamentally evil or not, I've worked around groups which were constitutionally amoral or immoral-- the mandate of the group was simply incompatible with common-sense notions of good and little effort was made to reconcile the two. Facebook does not seem to belong in that camp, but does belong in the grey wasteland of groups that are well paid to develop a peculiarly self-serving sense of ethics. The reason that's important is because amoral groups will simply not accept ethical arguments as valid arguments to make, while groups with peculiar ethics are responsive to them but sometimes their logical toolkit is filled with double-ended hammers and crescent screwdrivers. I've found that to be an important distinction in previous roles. As you point out, there is an ethical hazard here. If I worked there for five years would I find their ethical blind spots so obvious? Is the environment corrosive in a spiritual sense? No idea, but early indications both during my interviews and speaking to current employees were mixed. It was definitely something that gave me pause. In terms of whether you can actually have the requisite influence, I probably would have taken the job if I could have come to confidence on this. In the end I don't think I could have and I didn't take the role. Of course, it's difficult to disentangle the compensation from the levelling, so I may just be lying to myself and saying that if they'd paid me more I would have pretended. To attempt to guard against that I asked friends and former colleagues who I thought knew both me and something about the dilemma and listened to their thoughts. It's not a perfect system but I think it yielded a set of thought experiments that were useful to me in making sure I didn't fall into that trap.

by gfodor 8y ago

jammygit 8y ago

I've never seen 'fundamental evil' in real life. Just people who don't care, who care too much, or who are not clear headed. That's enough to go pretty deep into the pit without adding 'evil' to the mix.

debatem1 8y ago

I think these are all good questions. They're certainly things I mulled over when considering whether to take the job. Regarding being fundamentally evil or not, I've worked around groups which were constitutionally amoral or immoral-- the mandate of the group was simply incompatible with common-sense notions of good and little effort was made to reconcile the two. Facebook does not seem to belong in that camp, but does belong in the grey wasteland of groups that are well paid to develop a peculiarly self-serving sense of ethics. The reason that's important is because amoral groups will simply not accept ethical arguments as valid arguments to make, while groups with peculiar ethics are responsive to them but sometimes their logical toolkit is filled with double-ended hammers and crescent screwdrivers. I've found that to be an important distinction in previous roles. As you point out, there is an ethical hazard here. If I worked there for five years would I find their ethical blind spots so obvious? Is the environment corrosive in a spiritual sense? No idea, but early indications both during my interviews and speaking to current employees were mixed. It was definitely something that gave me pause. In terms of whether you can actually have the requisite influence, I probably would have taken the job if I could have come to confidence on this. In the end I don't think I could have and I didn't take the role. Of course, it's difficult to disentangle the compensation from the levelling, so I may just be lying to myself and saying that if they'd paid me more I would have pretended. To attempt to guard against that I asked friends and former colleagues who I thought knew both me and something about the dilemma and listened to their thoughts. It's not a perfect system but I think it yielded a set of thought experiments that were useful to me in making sure I didn't fall into that trap.