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It seems hard to find an ethical, large tech company. Amazon? Mistreats warehouse workers. Microsoft? Antitrust, baked-in telemetry. Facebook? Privacy, cambridg

It seems hard to find an ethical, large tech company. Amazon? Mistreats warehouse workers. Microsoft? Antitrust, baked-in telemetry. Facebook? Privacy, cambridge analytica. Capital One / credit card companies? Profiting off financial illiteracy / people in need. Apple? Anti-competitive app store practices. Google? Ban people with no visible justification or reasoning, no customer support, benefits off lack of privacy for ads. Oracle? Sleazy vendor lock-in. Comcast? Too many to list.

pram 6y ago
To be fair though, if you're working at Oracle or Comcast in particular you're probably not under any delusions about their ethics or morality. ;P
munk-a 6y ago
If by large tech company you mean one of the largest ten out there then yea - but widen that field a bit and you'll find some good ones. And, I feel like this is sort of what we get as a society and marketplace that doesn't value ethical or enforce business practices. There is no penalty for acting unethically and there is a profit penalty for acting ethically - so the top performing companies are likely to be those that decided to ignore ethics and pursue the dollar. Google, for a while, was an exception to this rule by pure luck - they so fully dominated search when it was just becoming a thing you could actually monetize that they had bails of money they could use to operate ethically and at a large scale... but they've since course corrected to be an unethical as anyone else.
snakeboy 6y ago
Can't we at least mostly agree that mistreatment of workers is clearly a more tangible bad offense than most of those?
- the_jeremy 6y ago
  https://www.newsweek.com/apple-samsung-and-microsoft-linked-child-labor-abuse-claims-417313 https://www.newsweek.com/apple-samsung-and-microsoft-linked-... https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderator-interviews-video-trauma-ptsd-cognizant-tampa https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderat... If we're going on "what is the most offensive thing I can point to about a company", it seems like Facebook and most hardware suppliers have that beat.

pram 6y ago

To be fair though, if you're working at Oracle or Comcast in particular you're probably not under any delusions about their ethics or morality. ;P

munk-a 6y ago

If by large tech company you mean one of the largest ten out there then yea - but widen that field a bit and you'll find some good ones. And, I feel like this is sort of what we get as a society and marketplace that doesn't value ethical or enforce business practices. There is no penalty for acting unethically and there is a profit penalty for acting ethically - so the top performing companies are likely to be those that decided to ignore ethics and pursue the dollar. Google, for a while, was an exception to this rule by pure luck - they so fully dominated search when it was just becoming a thing you could actually monetize that they had bails of money they could use to operate ethically and at a large scale... but they've since course corrected to be an unethical as anyone else.

snakeboy 6y ago

Can't we at least mostly agree that mistreatment of workers is clearly a more tangible bad offense than most of those?

the_jeremy 6y ago
https://www.newsweek.com/apple-samsung-and-microsoft-linked-child-labor-abuse-claims-417313 https://www.newsweek.com/apple-samsung-and-microsoft-linked-... https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderator-interviews-video-trauma-ptsd-cognizant-tampa https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderat... If we're going on "what is the most offensive thing I can point to about a company", it seems like Facebook and most hardware suppliers have that beat.