I think generally the way this works is that management finds the most positive spin on this (based on their public ads, this appears to be "small businesses ev

I think generally the way this works is that management finds the most positive spin on this (based on their public ads, this appears to be "small businesses everywhere would be going under without this valuable data!") and people repeat it to convince themselves and everyone around them. Or, they believe being there as part of the system helps to keep it from being even worse somehow. The alternative is telling yourself that what you and your team have been working on is pretty questionable and maybe you should go take a massive paycut and work somewhere else for a while. I think most people have a pretty strong internal resistance to coming to that kind of conclusion.