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Moral injury can occur in many contexts and populations, including the workplace
- derbOac 5y agoIt would be interesting to quantify the experience of this and compare professions.
- cryptica 5y agoDecades ago, someone's reputation was in a large part based on their ethics. Nowadays, with globalization, money and rank act as substitutes for a reputation; ethics and morals are seen as hurdles to achieving a desirable reputation, not as its foundation. This is a radical shift. Humans were not meant to compete on the world stage. This level of competition is too intense. On the world stage, there will always be someone willing to compromise all principles and ethics to achieve their goals; such a person is much more likely to win. If you break it up by industry, you will get the same result across all industries. All industries will end up being headed by people who aren't impeded by moral hurdles. It's terrible for society.
- travbrack 5y agoAny solutions? Can't really ignore globalization, because you fall behind the rest of the world who's embracing it. The genie is out of the bottle.
- ushakov 5y ago> Any solutions? don't compete with morale-less losers! you can be a ethical company and let others follow your example
- cryptica 5y agoIMO, the solution is to either: - Stop money printing globally. Switch to a deflationary monetary system like Bitcoin or other. - Change the mechanism of money printing globally. Distribute all newly issued currency via UBI indiscriminately to citizens (instead of the current trickle-down approach of currency issuance which gives an advantage to corporations). We need to get rid of the centralized streams of new currency because it artificially concentrates all of a nation's competition to small areas. Those who are closer to the money printers have a huge competitive advantage over those who are far. We need to get rid of Cantillion effects. Maybe if globalization was done in a decentralized way, we would have smaller tribes wherein reputation would matter more and competition would be less intense. Currency printing is essentially a form of government subsidy via dilution. It takes wealth from PersonA, PersonB and PersonC who are on the periphery and uses it to subsidize PersonD who is in the middle. It's not difficult to figure out why PersonA, PersonB and PersonC are not able to compete against PersonD - Their own money is weaponized against them. The subsidy allows PersonD to offer lower prices.
- User23 5y agoYou forgot the single most important piece: outlaw usury. Lenders should earn from the value they create by underwriting, which is to say identifying parties that will increase general wealth and well-being if found creditworthy, not by collecting rents.
- cryptica 5y agoI don't know if it's the most important. I think monetary policy is the most important. But I agree that it could go a long way if governments would make the distinction between value-creation and value-extraction. The way things are now, people simply do not acknowledge that there is a difference at all. The reason why I think that monetary policy is the most important thing is that it naturally favors value-extraction (rent seeking). Why bother creating value for consumers when you can just tap into easy money from banks and government contracts?
- User23 5y agoI basically agree. Here’s why I think interest is so odious though: barring rounding errors like minted coins and federal reserve notes, our civilian money supply is bank created deposits. Anyone who borrows at interest from a bank will have to get more money than the bank initially created when it originated the loan. In aggregate it’s clear that it’s impossible for all borrowers to pay back usurious loans. It’s a fundamentally unjust system that guarantees that no matter how well they manage their finances, some borrowers must be forced to default.
- cryptica 5y agoAgreed. I guess it could be said that usury is an integral part of our current monetary system. It looks amazingly profitable from the bank's perspective. You just print money, loan it out to PersonA to buy a house, then collect interest payments on that for 20 years, then PersonB comes along, you print even more money, loan it out to PersonB to buy the same house from PersonA at a higher price, then collect interest payments on that for another 20 years... Repeat ad-infinitum.
- arcastroe 5y ago> Any solutions? I think people's frustrations with this is part of the reason we currently have a cancel culture. Part of the risk of unethical behavior IS getting cancelled. Of course as soon as people bring up their pitchforks, a company always backtracks with a "we remain committed to bringing the best experience for our customers"
- Glyptodon 5y agoWe should have made free trade require ethics and labor standards to participate.
- lazide 5y agoLulz. Even trade within a nation rarely met that bar in the past.
- throwawaygh 5y agoI think it's orthogonal to scale. Most of the horribly unethical things I've witnessed happened in hyper-local markets. Ugly corruption is rampant in small or medium businesses that dominate the economic output of isolated and localized geographic regions. As a distinct but sometimes overlapping phenomenon, "warm fuzzies corruption" is also incredibly common in hyper-localized markets. "Family owned and operated for three generations" is literally a re-framing of "nepotism in the C-suite and boardroom" as a good thing!!! Find me a multi-national that brags about bloodline continuity, please.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoOn the flip side, with the rise of persistent social networks and the long memory of the internet, people may be thinking about their overall ethical image "globally" in the same manner, and it being hard to wrap one's head around. Of course with government spying, China probably isn't the only one with a "good citizen index" calculated based on the monitoring. All it takes is for once three letter security agency to want to assign "danger" scores to citizens, as well as "importance". Your are also correct that if capitalism and its inherent sociopathic reward system promulgating to some form of reproductive reinforcement or selection, then in the long term bad things will happen.
- aught 5y agoYes but its a neutrality index
- nathanaldensr 5y ago[flagged]
- goldcd 5y agoMine makes me wear clothes on the video conferences, despite nobody being able to see below my chest. I mean if they asked me to go into the office, I've not told them I wouldn't consider trousers.
- dataflow 5y ago> failing to provide proof of vaccination, despite being a 100% remote worker That seems weird. Are you only incidentally remote, or is your position officially a remote one? As in, if the company reverted "back to normal", would you still be remote without any close interactions with people on behalf of the company? If so, this demanding proof of vaccination doesn't make sense, but if not, then presumably it's hindering their ability to have you come back to the office like they would've wanted outside of the pandemic.
- dboreham 5y agoNote: employer vaccine mandates aren't only about workplace safety. They're also about motivating people to get vaccinated.
- dataflow 5y agoSure, but unless the employer has a legitimate workplace/safety concern, why would that be any of the employer's business? Imagine if you had to submit proof to your employer that you have a healthy, well-balanced diet according to the FDA.
- lazide 5y agoSome companies have required it historically. One justification I’ve heard used in the past for similar types of things (requirements for smoking or not smoking or whatever) was health insurance premiums, which in the US are often paid partially or fully by the employer.
- gameswithgo 5y agoBack in ~2012 or so I worked for framesdirect, at the time owned by Luxottica, and was asked by one of their executives from France to work on a feature that would, when someone tried to leave the site, bring up a popup to offer them a deal or otherwise encourage them not to leave. Since I hated working there anyway, and had the financial freedom and job prospects to find other work I didn't hesitate to say "no, I will not do that", and he looked at me like I was a total asshole. But if I had been in a worse economy for programmers at the time, or hard up for money, I wouldn't have been able to make that choice so easily. It is something that makes me very sad, especially since 99% of websites now have dark patterns similar to this. Most notable the modal popups that come up moments after a page loads and you have started to read it. I back out immediately whenever I can but obviously I am in the minority, this bullshit must "work" on some level to have become so ubiquitous. Anyway if you should ever be asked to do a modal popup, and get fired for saying no, apply at Olo, we so far have never asked developers to do a dark pattern.
- RansomStark 5y ago> Most notable the modal popups that come up moments after a page loads and you have started to read it. I back out immediately whenever I can but obviously I am in the minority, this bullshit must "work" on some level to have become so ubiquitous. I fully agree with you here and if i could leave every site that did this I would be happier, but there are a couple that do this that I have little choice but to interact with: - a hardware components website, pretty much the only good one in the UK that will ship individual parts, if you even move your mouse point towards the top right corner (this is also where the basket and login buttons live) up comes the model "Please don't leave" in big bold letters. - a digital whiteboard used for work purposes, this one is a little more bad design than anything. if you login with an @example.com email address every so often instead of dropping you to the workspace you were hoping to get, it drops you to a page showing teams of other people from example.com, and a modal asking you if you are interested in getting more from the tool. This is most annoying when it's a customer meeting and one or two of your team get lost in this way (the links to get from the team page to the board is non-obvious, and if it's your turn to get the redirect, logging out and back in does not work) During one customer call it happened to the security SME got caught by the value redirect (it was a security discussion I was facilitating, the security SME was the star of the show), not realising my mic was on I loudly shouted CRAP!. That's when I realised this is CRAP, the modal begging me not to leave, the redirects to show extra value, its all CRAP - Customer Retention by Annoying Popup and I hate it.
- ushakov 5y ago"We are complicit in our employer's deeds" https://drewdevault.com/2020/05/05/We-are-complicit-in-our-employers-deeds.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/05/05/We-are-complicit-in-our-e...
- chii 5y agounless you're in a position to direct decision making without making self-sacrificing choices, you are not complicit to anything. The person above you that made the decision (and either profited, or somehow benefited from it) is.
- aught 5y ago“Just following orders” isn’t a neutral decision
- djokkataja 5y agoBut if the cultural standard is that no one personally sacrifices anything in order to try to render better moral/ethical outcomes, how will people that become business owners and CEOs learn that they're supposed to be better? And from their perspectives, why should they have to sacrifice additional wealth in order to make some more ethical decision? If they don't make some morally questionable decision, they may worry that a competitor will. No business leader wants to crash their own company; they like the feeling of importance they get. And sometimes they feel like their position makes them feel more important in society at large, too, not just at their own company. Why should they have to make self-sacrificing choices and give all that up, when doing so would make them... like everyone else.
- kerneloftruth 5y agoBeing asked to motivate a team to meet a deadline is to sustain a "moral injury". Give me a break. I wouldn't have been surprised if this was from a lifestyle magazine like The Atlantic; but, this is from Harvard Business Review!? They're just not serious people anymore.
- not2b 5y agoThat's not what this article says. Here's the relevant text: “Just say whatever you need to say to get them to stay. We can’t lose any more techs or we’ll have to announce huge delays on the launch. I’m holding you accountable for making sure that doesn’t happen.” Brian,* an executive Ron coached, told him about this ultimatum he’d received from his boss. He explained that the project had been under-resourced, people were exhausted from working under impossible deadlines, and he felt ashamed of the corners he feared had been cut to meet them. Now, being asked to manipulate and lie to his people crossed the line for Brian. Despite feeling guilty for abandoning his team, he resigned.
- CheezeIt 5y agoHBR has been at this level for a while.
- pjbeam 5y agoMotivate a team is rather distinct from "say anything to your team to make X work". The former is my job and the latter = nope.
- throwawaymsft 5y agohttps://www.theonion.com/facebook-employees-explain-daily-struggle-of-trying-to-1825147978 https://www.theonion.com/facebook-employees-explain-daily-st...
- duxup 5y agoDoes this happen often to people? I can count on less than one hand the times when I was asked to do anything I felt was immoral. Maybe folks know better than to ask me ...
- musingsole 5y agoAcross 3 companies in 10 years, yeah, each one requested me to pursue ethically questionable ends. Sometimes it was an abuse of our customers. Sometimes it was an abuse of other employees. I could tell the people requesting these things often felt trapped themselves, that they had to. In one occasion, I was told the company could shutter in months if "we" didn't throw up smokescreens and obfuscate the product. An important lesson is these types of people don't actually value you if you deliver their unethical requests. They've already demonstrated their lack of backbone. It's rarely a quality that cohabitates with empathy and respect.
- ushakov 5y ago> Does this happen often to people? in e-commerce and shady web hosting companies, yes
- KennyBlanken 5y agoClearly you've never worked a service industry or support job in your life.
- notjustanymike 5y agoI worked in ad tech for 6 years. Once we got involved in APAC territories an exec bragged how there's no net neutrality so we could combine our tech with the Telco they owned to completely identify a person clicking on an ad.
- beebmam 5y agoWithout question, you should strongly refuse to do unethical work you disagree with. Never compromise your ethics for a paycheck. It's absurdly easy to find employment as a software engineer.
- chii 5y ago> Never compromise your ethics for a paycheck. It's absurdly easy to find employment as a software engineer. at some level, you're not really compromising your ethics for a paycheck if you could just find alternative employment. The real test is when you cannot find alternative employment, would you still not compromise your ethics?
- throwaway22032 5y agoI just don't do things that I don't want to do. Like, in general. If I can't understand why something is a good idea I don't do it. This isn't some selfish thing, if I think something will on balance help more people than it hurts, I'll probably want to do it and probably will do it. It's that simple to be honest. I find it weird that other people don't seem to work this way. Maybe I'm autistic, innit. It's worked for me so far.
- ushakov 5y agome too, if i don't feel good about working on a thing, i quit i don't care about what anybody else thinks about me afterwards i've got only one life to live and it better be fun
- CPLX 5y agoUnless your core emotional desires just happen to flawlessly, without a single exception, line up with a comprehensive and consistent ethical worldview, then at least every once and awhile you’ll not want to do something when you ethically should do it, and want to do something that will cause more than nominal harm to someone else. Also every now and again you’ll have to realize that your ability to predict the outcome of your actions is imperfect. If you happen to be like every other person that has ever existed on this planet, possibly excepting Siddhartha Gautama and Jesus H. Christ, you’ll have to sort out the places where your instincts and desires depart from what’s ethical and make value judgments.
- throwaway22032 5y agoWell sure, sometimes I'll do things that, without me realising, are net negative. I'm human, so sometimes I'll even do things that _I_ know are net negative just because that day I've kind of been like, fuck it, eat three bowls of cornflakes and fuck the indigestion.
- skinnymuch 5y agoNo one is that perfect. This sort of refrain is said semi frequently. It’s just not possible to actually be able to live this way.
- pyuser583 5y agoI once chased a job from a company whose business model I consider extremely unethical. The recruiter said straight up: “This is how the industry is, we don’t like it, and we don’t have expect you to like it. In fact, if you did like it, we wouldn’t consider you. Our company’s practices make things a little better, or at least not worst, and we have bright lines we don’t cross.” I thought it was really great they were up front about things, and I wish I got that job. I knew a founder who worked in the seedy end of an industry (non-profit industry, ironically) and walked out when it got bad. I consider myself an ethical person. But when people say “yes it’s wrong, you don’t have to like like” that goes a long way with me.
- ushakov 5y agoyou greatly underestimate how far these companies will go to find new suckers they were bluffing to get your sympathy so you don't pull your application, because they are aware candidates question their ethics > I wish I got that job see, worked
- pyuser583 5y agoI don’t see how it’s bluffing to say “yes, there’s bad stuff, you don’t have to like it.” “Bluffing” means faking something to get an advantage. So you think the company was filled with sadists who were trying to appear to be sympathetic to make hiring easier? It’s pretty easy to say “full disclosure, some stuff sucks. It’s ok to hate it, we all hate it. Just hold your nose and do it anyway.” Why fake that attitude? What advantage does the alternative present?
- ushakov 5y agoit is bluffing when you admit wrongdoing but then keep doing it the advantage you get is a larger candidate pool who are more sympathetic with your company now after you portrayed yourself as a victim of circumstances outside your control, aka. "It's not us, anybody is doing it!" in reality nobody forced that company to adopt the business model, which OP described as unethical ever heard of Stockholm Syndrom?
- KennyBlanken 5y agoWhat about all the people who can't command "a high salary, perks, and multiple promotions" who have been forced to be the human front to shitty practices implemented by the people HBR is sympathizing with? This dude is devastated by lying to a bunch of developers. Has he ever worked a minimum wage job in a call center, being the human punching bag for the company's infuriated customers? I would be more impressed if HBR talked to people like the redditor who I saw the other day talking about handling repo cases for Rent-A-Center and how much the job wrecked them. The final straw was having to repo a bed from a kid with cancer.
- throwanem 5y ago> Has he ever worked a minimum wage job in a call center, being the human punching bag for the company's infuriated customers? I have, at a credit card company. One day I spent 90 minutes arguing with the credit department for a limit increase on behalf of someone who was dying of cancer. I failed to convince them, and quit the job not long after. That wasn't the only reason, but it was one of them. Granted this was many years ago, but I'm nonetheless not sure quite what point you're trying to make here. Managers shouldn't be expected to behave with moral probity because they and their reports are well compensated? It sounds like that's what you're saying, but I'm not sure how that makes sense.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aaaaaaaaata 5y agoIndividual Corporate Humanism
- wantsanagent 5y agoWarning Rant The language in this article is the kind of thing that makes me hate sociology and business literature. They invent jargon to pretend they have 'discovered' something to get published. Because they are not controlled, interventional, reputable scientific disciplines they have to generate their 'discoveries' out of thin air and nonsense. It's called having a conscience. Why do we need your BS terminology for people acting ethically? Pride, self-respect, decency. The English language is resplendent with words to describe this phenomenon. Keep your moral injury and shove it in your lived experience. End Rant
- blablabla123 5y agoYeah, all these cool names like toxic workplaces, burnout didn't bring us much further. (Maybe I'm biased subjectively and through my choice of workplaces but from what I see it just gets more.) OTOH I think language and the chance of looking stupid/lazy are limiting factors of efficiently raising these topics. In fact I strongly believe in practice bringing up any of these topics directly just makes them worse but silently acting against that actually has an effect on the long-term
- civilized 5y agoYou're not wrong but I thought it was relatively good for an HBR. This publication is normally quite a bit more nauseating.
- pinewurst 5y agoHonestly, do you expect any more from Harvard Business Review? Book recommendation: “The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite” by Duff McDonald. (I liked his previous book on McKinsey better but there’s good stuff here too.)
- teawrecks 5y agoOf course the concept of a "conscience" is equally unscientific. Also Wikipedia defines "moral injury" in terms of a conscience.
- itsdrewmiller 5y ago
- giantg2 5y agoHuh. This explains a lot. I guess my sense of justice is more strict than most at my office.
- csours 5y agoThinking about places like Boeing, Theranos, etc - failing to create a good corporate culture is not a crime, but it breeds crime.
- jasonhansel 5y agoThis applies to ordinary employees, but not to the executives that the article describes; those executives can, without much risk of harm to themselves, choose to resign and change jobs rather than agree to do something wrong. When executives agree to do immoral things, they aren't suffering a "moral injury," they're complicit in inflicting one.
- refurb 5y ago
- austincheney 5y agoThe primary reason this behavior is allowed to exist and expected to continue is that software is not a true profession in the formal sense: https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Leadership_In_Software.md#professionalism https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Leadership_...
- Bancakes 5y agoWe already have licenses, they're called university degrees. You can get certifications, e.g. Cisco, but those are overpriced. We should be avoiding centralized authority, the profession allows it. We are knowledge workers and it so happens the only qualified people to certify and judge us are other knowledge workers, not bureaucrats. To that end, your CV is the best license you can carry. It's unique per person unlike generalized licenses that lump people together like a hash collision.
- austincheney 5y agoPerhaps the most Dunning-Kruger response I can imagine. Education is never a license to practice in any industry, and rarely required for anything in software. Confusing this only devalues education for the developer too ignorant or entitled to understand the difference.
- Bancakes 5y agoHave you tried getting a serious job without a degree? Education is used as a de facto license. One exception is education cannot be revoked, but then again people who write buggy, leaky code don't get fired let alone forbidden from practicing. Requiring licenses will have two effects - making people pay money, and complicating job seeking. You can gauge a bridge for safety. You can test weld jobs. You cannot standardize code writing ability. My understanding is you want the profession to remain the same with the exception of bearing an extra piece of paper to my name. What does this improve? What I'm saying is, you're not original or clever in wanting something the industry and academia does not, and has invested in figuring out.
- faangiq 5y agoNot that sick. In fact many enjoy it, just look at the bureaucrat class.
- twothamendment 5y agoThis is one of the reasons the trucking industry is having problems. Drivers are tired of being asked to break the law. The consequences land on the driver and not the company. It isn't fair to the driver and especially not the people injured when an accident happens.
- Spooky23 5y agoThe way motor carriers work is weird. Enforcement folks at the state and federal level sample for inspections based on company size, violation history, and areas of operating authority. Basically the best drivers will only work for the best carriers, but you need to work up. If you work for a shitty company and get inspected, you are sanctioned for mechanical problems, including things like ripped seats. (Funny, as police car seats are always torn up) Once you have those violations, you’re stuck working for shitty carriers. Long story short, stay away from old trucks at night, especially near state borders. Chances are they’re problematic.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI was very fortunate to work for a corporation with a heavy-duty moral backbone. That was one of the reasons that I stayed, as long as I did. There were plenty of weasels* there, and it got worse —much worse— towards the end, but the corporation, itself, was one of the oldest Japanese tech companies, with a 100-year history of insane levels of Quality. It was truly a signal Honor to work there. It was not an environment a lot of folks here would like, but that moral infrastructure was crucial to me. For reasons that aren’t really ones that I’ll go into, I have lived a highly moral life, and I was grateful to have the support. I’m not competitive, for moral reasons, and I really enjoyed the way that the Japanese valued teamwork. Sadly, it seems to elicit scorn, from folks in tech. Either folks think I’m being “snobby,” or they think I’m stupid and weak-willed. *One of my favorite books is Scott Adams’ The Way of the Weasel.
- agumonkey 5y agoI have a thing for these structures too. And a lot of people frown upon my ways of operating, it's super weird. That said, there were a few instances of Japanese management techniques that would make amazon warehouse managers feel at home :) (someone recently told he was asked why he went to the toilet 3 times that day)
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoOh yeah. I was glad I wasn’t in Japan. I once watched a manager drive one of his employees to tears. I don’t know what he said, but it obviously had an emotional impact.
- joe_the_user 5y agoAs a programmer, you see a lot of "technical debt" and occasionally technical reaches the point it can no longer be paid and a company just abandons a product. It seems like what we're seeing now is something like a massive accumulation of moral and organizational "debt" to the point that organizations easily escape it. You've had accumulation of companies that only know how to manage by abuse, that lie to everyone, including themselves, about what's reasonable to expect for people. They've dug themselves a hole and the only way they know to get out is to dig deeper.