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We are complicit in our employer’s deeds
- cryptica 6y agoI've been trying desperately to avoid working for big corporations because they are against my personal beliefs. So far I have mostly succeeded. I only worked for corporations for 1 year out of 12 in total in my career. It's been really tough to avoid and getting tougher. I think if I'm faced with the prospect of not being able to retire, I will have to join one. I will have to knowingly participate in making the world a worse place but at least I will have tried.
- OneGuy123 6y agoEveryone will always prioritize the wellbeing of their own family VS some random people in the company you work in. Well-off devs like the guy who quit Amazon don't have $$$ issues, so he can afford to do that. Others don't, and that doesn't make them bad. That makes them care for their family first.
- mapleoin 6y agoI don't think that anyone with a developer salary and the ability to find another job with exactly the same salary or better within a month you can honestly say they have $$$ issues.
- clevergadget 6y agoThis is so obviously true and the higher the number of people questioning it here == the rate at which I devalue hacker news. Outside of specific extenuating circumstances to not have this perspective is either devil's advocacy, ignorance, fear in a way that suggests therapy. If you can't feel safe without hundreds of thousands of dollars in passive income that is a you problem not a world problem.
- ddevault 6y agoAuthor here. I addressed this upfront in TFA. Especially if you're working at for FAANG level salaries, there's no excuse for trying.
- tensor 6y agoPeople making FAANG level salaries on this site routinely complain that they are "grossly" underpaid.
- mcny 6y ago> People making FAANG level salaries on this site routinely complain that they are "grossly" underpaid. I wouldn't say they are grossly underpaid as much as I'd say executives (not necessarily all management) is grossly overpaid. The market has failed us. People tell me to not look at someone else's plate to see how much more they have than I do but it doesn't make sense when so much wealth/power is concentrated at the top. Btw, I don't make FAANG level salaries so I can't speak for them. I still believe there is a magic number like maybe 10, 50, or up to 100 which is a multiplier of the minimum wage above which the income tax must be 90%+ So for example, if the magic number is 50 and minimum wage is $15, then $15 * 50 * 2000 (a year), then income above 1.5M would be subject to the highest level bracket. I sincerely believe the magic number should be no greater than 100.
- nogabebop23 6y ago>> I still believe there is a magic number like maybe 10, 50, or up to 100 which is a multiplier of the minimum wage above which the income tax must be 90%+ The fact that you refer to it as a magic number implies that this at best wishful thinking.
- mcny 6y ago> The fact that you refer to it as a magic number implies that this at best wishful thinking. I agree. It is wishful thinking at the moment but it isn't entirely unreasonable. This is about individual income tax and not corporate income tax (which is a completely different thing altogether which I can't tax like individual income even in my make-believe world [0]). I think individual income tax changes I propose are very reasonable. I'd say if you are wealthy, my proposal is very much preferable to a wealth tax. [0] For example, according to https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/WMT/financials?ltr=1 https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/WMT/financials?ltr=1 the trailing twelve months, Walmart total revenue was ~523B, cost of revenue ~394B, and the most important bottom line, income before tax was only ~$20B. Ideally, we should be taxing revenue with no regard to expenses but there is no good way I can think of to do that other than drastically decreasing the tax rate to max out at about 2% so this is a different discussion altogether and likely not very fruitful.
- Loughla 6y agoThat was sort of the entire point of the writing. Because tech folks are in a privileged class, they have the ability to move jobs based on morals. And therefore they should. Not doing that, when you are making as much as you are as a programmer at BIGCORP means you are complicit in the bad behavior. That was the entire point. He addressed your concern in the first two paragraphs.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoIf you were to ask my circle of friends and family, even bigcorp programmer money isn’t sufficient to feel secure due to future economic volatility. Especially if your goal is to make sure your kids get to live in the richer neighborhoods and go to the richer schools, and so on and so forth. And it’s not just a perceived fear. The data shows that if you’re not in the portion of people increasing their rate of income/wealth growth, then you’re in the portion that is decreasing in income/wealth growth, and that compounds for your kids. I would want a few hundred thousand in passive income before I would say I had FU money, which also means a few million in diversified assets other than my house. Especially in the US, where quality healthcare is a minimum $20k per year for a family in insurance premiums alone plus a few ten thousands in out of pocket costs.
- aaron_m04 6y ago> And it’s not just a perceived fear. The data shows that if you’re not in the portion of people increasing their rate of income/wealth growth, then you’re in the portion that is decreasing in income/wealth growth, and that compounds for your kids. Neither income nor wealth growth are zero sum games. This whole post reads like a bunch of excuses.
- clevergadget 6y agoCan you put a ballpark net worth at which you would feel secure?
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- normalnorm 6y agoRight. Is this the situation you imagined when you started?
- smitty1e 6y agoIf BIGCORP is acting outside of labor laws, then there should be legal action. If the law doesn't explicitly outlaw BIGCORP's actions (yet), and we all kinda know that it should, then opposing BIGCORP is the correct thing to do. If Amazon is acting legally, yet in an ugly way, to suppress workers organizing, it seems hard to complain. Now, if Amazon workers exercise the right of free association in their spare time to stick it to JeffB, well, it sounds like he's got a problem.
- ddevault 6y agoBIGCORP writes the labor laws. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary?cycle=2019&id=D000023883 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
- smitty1e 6y agoWell, if our political system is worth much, then it behooves us to elect some people who can, you know, write laws. Past the flippancy, this is a huge undertaking. Half the political battle is showing up; the other half is staying engaged.
- linuxftw 6y ago> If BIGCORP is acting outside of labor laws, then there should be legal action. Similar to how the FAA regulates the airline industry and let Boeing murder two plane loads of people?
- codesections 6y agoI agree with this, but also think that working for an employer that is "making a negative impact on the world" might _sometimes_ be the right choice. Specifically, it could be justified for two reasons: First: you might have more impact on the organization from the inside than from the outside (this is most relevant to people joining at a high/senior level). For example, Google seems to be making privacy far, far worse. Yet there are some people on the inside fighting to limit the privacy violations, which leads to decisions like banning GPS tracking in their contact tracing app[0]. Would the world be better or worse off if the only people working at Google were people who don't care at all about user privacy? I'm honestly not sure, but I can at least see an argument that it might be even worse off. Second: you might get something from the organization that lets you do good that outweighs any harm you contribute to (this is more relevant to junior employees). Many employers provide something (training, future job opportunities, or a high enough income to open your own small business/non-profit). A thoughtful employee can go into a "negative impact" employer with eyes wide open and a plan to get something, and get out. However, in either case, self awareness and a definite exit plan are _key_. As Drew writes, once you are working at a "negative impact" employer, > Doublethink quickly steps in to protect your ego from the cognitive dissonance, and you take another little step towards becoming the person you once swore never to be. The way to avoid that sort of conative dissonance is 1) know that you'll experience it and be on guard against it, and 2) know all along that you're there temporarily and should never get too comfortable. Even then, you should be realistic about how long you can maintain your personal values in face of a very different culture. For a junior employee, I'd say two, maybe three years should be the absolute limit before you get out. [0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-apps-idUSKBN22G28W https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-ap...
- polishdude20 6y agoAbout double think, what is the difference between cognitive dissonance and your mind actually changing about a certain company or role because you now are more informed about it and choose to see it in a better light? People swear to never do things all the time until they do them. Does that mean they're evil people? Or does that mean their views have changed? And if their views have changed, who are we to tell them what's wrong and right?
- rtodea 6y agoMorality isn't a binary thing. If we adopt consequentialism, how do we quantify all the good things amongst the bad ones? Please note that just because the bad ones are most vocal, doesn't mean they will outweigh the good ones.
- nogabebop23 6y ago>> Morality isn't a binary thing. It is when you're young and know everything
- door99 6y agoThe answer to employer abuse is not isolated people refusing to work at big tech companies. You have very little power alone and while refusing to work for a company you find objectionable may ease your conscience, it does little to affect change (unless you’re in a position with a lot of power like Tim). The solution is organization —- forming a union, or banding together behind a political organization or political campaign to affect change. Both of these run very counter to many tech workers’ individualist mindsets but ate much more effective than individual refusal.
- gbear605 6y agoWe need a combination of individual refusal and collective organization. With organization across the industry, we can achieve global purposes, while individual refusal can still make important marginal improvements.
- _curious_ 6y agoThanks for writing this out, there's no disputing the truth in your words. Individual courage can also be found from others, like in the case of Tim's sendoff, no doubt he inspired others to stand up for what they believe in.
- CurtHagenlocher 6y agoWe are also complicit in our governments' deeds.
- ddevault 6y agoYes, but much less so. We are coerced into participating in society on our governments terms, under threat of violence.
- LunaSea 6y agoBut you're voting for it as well.
- luckylion 6y agoYou might be voting, but you might not be voting for it.
- LunaSea 6y agoThat's a choice though.
- testbot123 6y agoIf someone sticks a gun in my face and gives me a choice of wallet or hospital, do I really have a choice?
- zokier 6y agoUS citizens have excellent mobility also internationally. Valley engineers certainly can find jobs in e.g. Europe or other parts of the world (if they accept the cut in paycheck). Immigration is not a thing only for poor third world people.
- ddevault 6y agoI almost agree with you... but it's not always that simple. I personally have little faith left in America, and would love to move somewhere else, but I have one fatal problem: I don't have a degree. Hardly any countries with better political prospects than America are interested in giving visas to anyone without one. But even for those who do, a change of nationality is much more traumatic than a change of career. You risk leaving basically all of your family and friends behind, spending years integrating into a culture where you may not speak the language, and abnormally large expenses for moving and establishing yourself there... while I don't entirely disagree with you, it's not really on the same level as the arguments I'm presenting about career choices.
- spaced-out 6y agoWe technologists like to pretend we're powerful, that we could bring these giant megacorps to their knees because those fancy suits need us, right? No. They need an engineer, not any one specific engineer. Companies like Amazon reject many candidates that could probably do the job they applied for, but were rejected because they can afford to be picky. If anything changes at Amazon it not be because of the loss of that guy's engineering skills. What would actually make the world a better place is if we recognized that we're really just well paid technicians, and that the true power in society is held by a relatively small number of people who hold a massive amount of capital. We need to give up the fantasy that we can change things with individual action, and start looking towards collective, society-level solutions to the problems today.
- ashtonkem 6y ago> “Graveyards are full of indispensable men”. — Charles de Gaulle.
- spaced-out 6y agoWow, that's an awesome quote. I Googled it out of interest, and it wasn't coined by Charles de Gaulle though: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/21/graveyards-full/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/21/graveyards-full/
- ashtonkem 6y agoAh, that’s a shame. But hardly surprising, most iconic quotes seem to be fake.
- pjc50 6y ago"I can make a new major in ten minutes, but a regiment of artillery is difficult to replace" -- misattributed to Napoleon, on staff promotions
- ForHackernews 6y agoThis is why unions exist: to enable collective action by workers. Maybe if we call it a "guild" (like the screen actors guild) it'll be more palatable to software developers who fancy themselves beyond the need for something as blue-collar as a union.
- GoToRO 6y agoWe need more developers start companies and not sell out.
- linuxftw 6y agoThat requires access to capital, which is vested in the banking class thanks to a centuries of organized crime people affectionately refer to as 'the government.'
- ddevault 6y agoI am a year and a half into owning a profitable business which has not taken any venture capital. It is entirely possible, and in my opinion, entirely necessary.
- sbuttgereit 6y agoSure, but are you investigating your customers and terminating those that might be sufficiently inconsistent with your morals? If so, do your customers understand that they're subject to such examination? Is that sort of thing a requirement for initiating the trade with you or, only if you coincidentally learn of transgressions after the fact, possibly after they start depending on your business? While I don't know your position on the questions above, and they might sound accusatory, I think it's probably fair for possible customers to understand how, after you've taken a stand that employer/employee relationships should come under a broader moral scrutiny, if you consider that the vendor/customer relationship falls under the same rubric. If so, how do you do your vetting or how might possible customers self-qualify under such conditions?
- ddevault 6y agoI have a terms of service, for one, which governs some of this. I am also not above "firing the customer" if appropriate, but of course I wouldn't presume to do this so urgently and without warning as to leave anyone who depended on the platform out in the cold. I don't think my target audience is especially likely to fall afoul of my convictions on what kinds of activities I feel morally at peace with supporting on my platform.
- chrismartin 6y agoNobody makes enough money to pay multiple-six-figures developer salaries without people being exploited somewhere, and any $bigcorp is generally incapable of acting in a way that doesn't maximize shareholder value (except as needed to comply with laws). If you want to quit $bigcorp in protest, $bigcorp2 across the street has its own ethical problems. There is a lot of important software work to be done for the world that doesn't enable mass surveillance, doesn't exploit addictive behavior, and doesn't degrade worker protections or evade taxes. It also doesn't pay multiple-six-figures. You'll just have to live like all of your non-tech friends.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y ago> This is why I hold my peers accountable for working at companies which are making a negative impact on the world around them. Oh these are the rules now? Judging other people is easy. You can look at almost anyone and find something you don’t like about them: sweatshop sneakers, ignorance of their history, consumer waste, eating meat from commercial farms... don’t you know people around the world are starving and you’re throwing out food? Finding faults in others is easy and helps change exactly nothing. Turning it inward in self examination is the hard part.
- ddevault 6y agoThere's a pretty damn big difference between throwing out $5 of food while someone across the Earth starves, and in directly making the software which opresses millions of people, raising millions of dollars for the people responsible, and pocketing huge salaries for yourself. >As a general rule, it costs a business your salary × 1.5 to employ you, given the overhead of benefits, HR, training, and so on. When you’re making a cool half-million annual salary from $bigcorp, it’s because they expect to make at least ¾ of a million that they wouldn’t be making without you. It does not make economic sense for them to hire you if this weren’t the case.
- linuxftw 6y agoPoliticians, and by extension, the people that voted for them, have been creating this environment for decades. Only mega corporations can survive. The reasons are many, and they include low tariffs, high domestic regulation (ever try to start a business and deal with tax law, incorporating, etc), exploitative visa programs, binding arbitration employment agreements, free unlimited capital to the banking class (Discount Window access, NIRP and ZIRP, outright monetizing private debt by the central banks), most importantly, patents and copyrights enforced by the state. I mean, the list is endless. Every facet of our society is built to protect the largest businesses, creating an environment that smaller, ethical companies simply can't compete in. Every election cycle it's the same thing. They divide people across their little pet issues, keep the two party system in place through ballot access, overturning ranked choice, while waging wars in foreign lands and extracting all the wealth they can. Stop voting for the same stuff. Get over yourself and your fickle positions. Vote for real change.
- austincheney 6y agoUggghhhh, the entitlement of well paid and under qualified developers is loathsome. To everybody else who doesn’t share that entitlement it looks like gross ethnocentricity. Look, if you want all your crying and personal opinions to actually mean something start someplace rational. Start by asking (demanding) for a uniform of code of ethics. Every other professional industry has this, but not software. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism
- techslave 6y agohttps://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html
- austincheney 6y agoSigh, did you declare an oath to those when you were hired? No, these were never mentioned during your hiring process or ever provided to you by your employer? Then that is just some animal's shit on a wall as irrelevant as wealthy software engineers quitting their jobs in protest. Honestly, what happens you violate those? What are the actual repercussions to you? Then they aren't a code of ethics that applies to you. As a medical doctor if you violate the Hippocratic Oath you will certainly lose your license to practice medicine and probably go to jail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath
- striking 6y agoI think whatever valid points you might have are getting lost in your attempts at rhetoric. You may want to reconsider the relevance of the article you linked yourself, given that it contains the phrase > The Hippocratic Oath has been eclipsed as a document of professional ethics by more extensive, regularly updated ethical codes issued by national medical associations and that, to my knowledge, it's not considered legally binding. In fact, you could consider it as similar to the ACM Code of Ethics, as both are not legally binding and yet they both do a pretty good job of mentioning a list of commonly made mistakes that people make that could get them in trouble (legally or morally or ethically) as well as processes for avoiding such mistakes.
- underdeserver 6y agoThings aren't so black and white. By some people's standards, Amazon has been exploiting warehouse workers for quite a while now (unpaid bathroom breaks and so on). By others', Amazon warehouses provide jobs to poor communities. Facebook may be bad for privacy, but communities of all sorts get together and old friends reconnect on their platforms. Instagram brings beauty to lots of people. Remember how things were before that? I do. It was much worse. Is it worth the price? That's for everyone to decide for themselves (and for lawmakers to enforce). But saying that all bigcorps are evil and nobody should work for them is a VERY simplistic view of the world.
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- zokier 6y agoI think there is one morally solid reason to stay at bad acting employer: if you are actively driving change of the behavior you consider bad. I pick this quote from Brays post: > I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. He only left after he felt he had exhausted his options of influence (This being my interpretation). Leaving just as a knee jerk reaction without making effort to change would be bad, to me personally almost worse than remaining. Of course quitting can be in many cases feel easier/more attractive than trying to navigate through the office politics. But if you manage to flip even small corner of Google or whatever to not do evil (as they used to say) that probably has more influence to the wider society than you quitting. Counterpoint being that you need to recognize if you are making that change or not, and if you are not able to do so then quitting might be the right choice
- empath75 6y agoThat's a reasonable point of view, but I think your obligation extends primarily to saving your own soul, as it were. It's not your responsibility to make others do the right thing. If you think the organization is engaged in an enterprise that is fundamentally wrong, helping them to further their aims in a slightly less bad way doesn't change the moral calculus.
- ardy42 6y ago> If you think the organization is engaged in an enterprise that is fundamentally wrong, helping them to further their aims in a slightly less bad way doesn't change the moral calculus. That reminds me of this article (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/opinion/auschwitz-bystander-theory.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/opinion/auschwitz-bystand...): > Some people unwittingly help atrocities occur by cooperating in an attempt to mitigate a monstrous situation. History demonstrates that this is nearly always a miscalculation. During the Holocaust, Jewish councils organized life in the ghetto and compiled lists of Jews for deportation, often thinking that they were helping Jews manage a nightmare. Ultimately, they helped the Nazis murder Jews by maintaining order and providing the Gestapo with the names of people to be deported and murdered. In his memoir, “Legislating the Holocaust,” Bernhard Lösener, a lawyer in the Third Reich’s Ministry of the Interior, relays how he hurriedly traveled through the night to get to Nuremberg in time to write the Nuremberg race laws so that the rule of law would be preserved, and how he fought to have the race laws written to count as Jewish those with three Jewish grandparents rather than those with one drop of Jewish blood. He too made the mistake of participating in the atrocity in an attempt to minimize the damages caused by its perpetrators. > Lösener remains the lawyer who wrote the Nuremberg race laws, lending a veneer of legality to a crime. Maybe someone else would have ignored the rule of law or written more draconian laws if he hadn’t, but maybe not. What we can decide is whether we will be a participant in terrible things done by terrible people. It never works to participate in the terrible thing in order to try to make it less bad. It’s tempting, and can seem like the right thing to do: Lösener’s race laws included fewer people than a one-drop rule would (though that had negligible effect). Adolf Eichmann reasoned similarly: “If this thing had to be done at all, it was better that it be done in good order.” History shows that when you participate in an atrocity together with the perpetrators, in an attempt to make it somehow a little less horrible, in the end you’re still participating in the atrocity — and it is no less horrible.
- hprotagonist 6y agoWe are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Distribute your attention and effort as a function of how effective your effort can be. How meaningful is my indirect effect? That's often a function of how many nodes are between you and the thing on the big whopping graph of interconnectedness, but not every time. Figuring out your allocations is a lifelong optimization process. Sometimes it is extremely obvious, usually it's not.
- screye 6y agoTech has a tendency to view the world in isolation. You can't work in fashion because it uses child labor. Rare metals used in electronics are mined in places with terrible work conditions. Don't even get me started on petroleum dependent industries. What does that leave us with ? Even companies that build apps or SAAS make their money from clients in these industries or consumers who are as a majority employed by them. Just because we establish a few degrees of separation from the problem, doesn't mean we stop being complicit in it. Public companies have a responsibility to their share holders to maximize profit. Every legal avenue there is to do, will be used by these companies. If Amazon stops doing so, someone else will and eventually they will have enough of the market that the responsible company will have to close shop. Take the example of a multiplayer game. It should not be the responsibility of the player to not exploit the rules of the games to their fullest. It should be the responsibility of the developers to fix exploits and ban/punish gamers who outright attempt to break the system (cheat). It seems that the political left (which usually drives these movements) would rather put the onus on the companies to change while taking millions in lobbying money, than hold them accountable for their actions. I recognize that the systemic favoring of republicans in the electoral system, might force the left to keep appearances, lest be viewed as hostile to businesses and lose the vital 5% of the swing electorate. But, that still means, that the problem is lack of electoral reform and not 'Amazon being a greedy company'.
- ardy42 6y ago> Public companies have a responsibility to their share holders to maximize profit. Every legal avenue there is to do, will be used by these companies. If Amazon stops doing so, someone else will and eventually they will have enough of the market that the responsible company will have to close shop. > Take the example of a multiplayer game. It should not be the responsibility of the player to not exploit the rules of the games to their fullest. It should be the responsibility of the developers to fix exploits and ban/punish gamers who outright attempt to break the system (cheat). Those aren't mutually exclusive, IMHO. Instead or in-addition to patching the "exploits," the law could be changed to make it clear that companies have obligations besides solely delivering "value" to their shareholders (IIRC that understanding of companies is actually pretty recent). Obviously it'd take more work to figure out how to do that than an internet comment warrants, but I'm not convinced it's impossible.
- yters 6y agoWhat if everyone with a sense of morality dropped out of big corps and government, leaving only the apathetic and evil? Is that more likely to turn the big corps and gov into forces of good, or evil?
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- rob74 6y agoThis really got me thinking... of course, what Amazon is doing is bad, I don't want to deny that - OTOH, for a tech company, they are an easy target - for example, Google doesn't have as many low-paid workers, so we don't know if they would treat them more fairly. How about the contractors hired by Facebook to weed out the worst posts by extremists, terrorists and other lunatics so our sensitive eyeballs aren't confronted with them? Is that better because they aren't directly employed by Facebook? Maybe Amazon should divest its warehouses so they're not so much in the public eye anymore? If you start to think about these things, where do you stop? Tax evasion? I guess every tech company is guilty of that, because shareholders expect them to find and exploit every possible loophole. In the end, probably the only companies you can morally work for are non-profits like Mozilla et al. - which is probably easier to do after raking in half a million per year for some years at a less morally sound company...
- MattGaiser 6y agoA company which automated away all the menial jobs and work would probably get better publicity than one that paid people to do it.
- indymike 6y agoScreening for cultural fit is a common strategy by many of these companies - FAANG companies especially. Culture includes morals and the actions you are willing to take or not take to do what is right or wrong. If you've been screened out for cultural fit, it may not be your age or race or other demographic. It may be because you will not be compatible with the value system at the company. Who you hire today dictates what your culture will be in 1-2 years.
- rickyplouis 6y agoThe industrial revolution was a period of unprecedented growth for our country and the world as a whole. It ushered in a new era, built immense fortunes, and led to the creation of critical infrastructure that we still use hundreds of years later. But with the great achievements came the unparalleled exploitation of the poor, minorities and even children, resulting in some of the most progressive labor laws ever developed. History rightly criticizes the robber barons and clearly illuminates the miseries they inflicted upon mankind for their wealth. Software engineers are going to be faced with the same moral reckoning that the industrialists of the past faced, it’s inevitable. So it’s worth wondering if this time we will take some moral leadership and actually build a world that benefits humanity, or merely profit from it.
- guyzero 6y agoIf you eat vegetables in the US, they were probably picked by farmworkers paid below minimum wage who are probably do not have legal work authorization. If you eat meat, in addition to having killed an animal (which isn't an ethical issue for everyone) meat processing plants continue to be the source of endless health and safety violations and which also exploit immigrants, both legal and illegal. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. And by extension, there is no ethical employment under capitalism. The notion that you can get a single job that somehow places you outside society and the economy and puts you above other workers morally or ethically is fiction. By all means, seek to minimize your impact or make your own ethical choices, but there is no choice without some sort of ethical compromise.
- kungtotte 6y agoYou can choose fair trade products over the alternatives, you can forgo meat entirely or mostly and be selective about where you source it, you can choose not to put money in Nestlé's pocket and you can choose not to work for Google. You don't have to be perfect in order to make better, more ethical, choices. Yes, you're entirely correct that living a perfectly ethical life is nearly impossible. That's still no excuse for not putting in the effort.
- foolinaround 6y agowhen every single company seems to have some flaw (like the FAANG examples the article gives), now, the techies might have less choices to work for.
- C4stor 6y agoAs usual, someone suggests that _other people_ change their way of life because it's bad, without any impact on himself of course. It's really easy to preach without having any skin in the game isn't it ?
- starpilot 6y agoJohn Carmack and Yann LeCun really need to explain themselves for working for a data collection firm that aids the GOP.
- p1esk 6y agoWhy? More specifically, why should they care about your opinion?
- jlbnjmn 6y agoWell written, I agree. I've been thinking a lot lately about two different aspects of this same problem. We are complicit in our vendor's deeds. If businesses stopped buying ads and server time from these companies, the situation would change rapidly. We are complicit in our entertainer's deeds. If individuals stopped viewing or engaging with content on these platforms, especially paid content, the situation would change rapidly. What's someone with a 7-digit annual ad spend to do? (Avoiding social ads is easy, search ads are harder to replace.)
- matchbok 6y agoSo much virtue signaling and holier-than-thou in this article. Really embarrassing to read. We make ethical judgements everyday, from eating an apple to driving a car. Does the author use a smartphone built by low-income folks across the ocean? How about other tech, using rare earth minerals mined in horrific conditions? The hypocrisy is astounding.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago> Apple builds walled gardens and makes targeted attacks on open standards, This is where the article lost me. There is a saying called "keeping your powder dry". If you express outrage at everything, soon your outrage has no meaning. Whatever your position on open source, I think you would admit that this behavior is in a whole other category than having poor worker safety, retaliating against whistleblowers, or conducting mass surveillance. I do think that one of the reasons we are so ineffective in our protest is that they devolve into a diffuse rage against the machine where we protest a dozen different behaviors. One of the reasons the NRA is so effective is that they focus on one thing: gun rights. If you really want to influence politics, you need to be laser focused on an issue. See also prohibition.
- CalRobert 6y agoDebt and healthcare are used to ensure that you don't have the freedom to walk away from immorality. If you're in debt for your (or your kids' and/or partner's) house or education, or depend upon your employer for healthcare, you are not free to walk away. You might be able to switch jobs for something less objectionable, but so long as "not doing the immoral thing" means "my kid might not get treated for their cancer" just walking away is an option for a vanishingly small number of people.
- ddevault 6y agoAuthor here. I did not say "just walk away". This is what I said: >A good software engineer with only a couple of years of experience under their belt can expect to have an offer within 1 or 2 months of starting their search.
- CalRobert 6y agoA fair point, leaving with a job offer is much different. For what it's worth I still found it easiest to speak out when young, debt free, and single.
- roosterdawn 6y agoThe Tim Bray blog post, while well written and respectable, was still in my mind contentious and arguable. I unfortunately can't make that same call here. It's taken me a while to realize this, but I have begun to filter out reading thoughts that aren't fully formed, and I think this is one of them. The author brings up the Nuremberg defense[1] as an example of complicity which is indefensible, but this is rhetorically quite hollow. If you go a little bit further into political theory and consider Arendt's conception of the banality of evil[2], and furthermore the idea of a panopticon[3], you very quickly come to the philosophical impasse between individual culpability and agency and systematic mechanisms and the political. What is this impasse? Plainly, I think it is that the individual has nearly zero agency alone, and only has power when effectively organizing into groups. That makes arguments like these functionally useless (or even "usefully idiotic"[5]), because they fundamentally misattribute the locus of value production, capture of capital and political clout onto the individual, in what Marx would call the petite bourgeoisie[4]. This misattribution misses the asymmetric distribution of power towards the top of organizational hierarchies, especially within the size of large mega-corporations. If this author were correct and engineers were truly accountable for the work of their employers, what is the unique labor that managers and executives contribute to the corporation that ICs do not provide? And who has the power to make and override decisions at a corporate policy level? It's transparently obvious that corporations are intentionally set up divide labor such that decision making agency is allocated towards executive leadership and management, and that line level ICs serve to execute on those decisions but do not have the agency to veto decisions they disagree with. This is obvious to anyone who has ever worked at a mega-corporation, enough so that I wonder if the author has. If they have not, then the post amounts merely to speculation about something the author doesn't have enough firsthand experience with to credibly analyze. That doesn't mean it should have never been written, but I certainly got no value from it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_banality_of_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_bana... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#Criticism_and_use_as_metaphor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#Criticism_and_use_a... [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie [5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- adverbly 6y ago> Doublethink quickly steps in to protect your ego from the cognitive dissonance, and you take another little step towards becoming the person you once swore never to be. Engineers in Canada are awarded an iron ring on graduation. It is worn on the writing hand's pinkey and meant to remind the engineer of their ethical obligations any time they sign a document. I rarely wear mine because of exactly these kinds of mental gymnastics you describe. One never thinks they are being unethical because one changes their definition of ethical over time. Instead of the ring, I kept the small slip of paper they give you at graduation. The symbol of the ring changes, but the words on that page never do. Here are a couple example sections: "my care I will not deny towards the honour, use, stability, and perfection of any works to which I may be called to set my hand." And "in the hour of my temptations, weakness, and weariness, the memory of this, my obligation".
- dennis_jeeves 6y agoMore accurately your parents are complicit in your employer's deeds :) . If you were born rich you don't have to stick to any employer.