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Interesting, from reading her post you'd think it's a real challenge to avoid working in a company that will eventually become evil. My first thought was that t

Interesting, from reading her post you'd think it's a real challenge to avoid working in a company that will eventually become evil. My first thought was that there is a failure in the system if it inevitably leads companies to become evil as they grow (maybe a failure of government?). But then I realized looking back at my career, I have not worked for any evil companies to my knowledge, at least not cartoonishly evil. It seems most of the companies she mentions have one thing in common, they are by the bay, part of a local system that's one of the economic engines of the U.S and favours growth over any other considerations, including ethics. So my conclusion from this post would be, if it matters to you, don't work in the bay? There are many industries beside software where good software engineers are needed and you can do good, challenging, and very innovative work "to make the world a better place".

fphhotchips 4y ago
There are also plenty of companies based in the bay area that aren't evil? I'm not suggesting they're necessarily good, but they're not evil.
deathanatos 4y ago
> There are many industries beside software where good software engineers are needed and you can do good, challenging, and very innovative work "to make the world a better place". Honestly, such as and how? I worked for one company I thought had a good mission, and a good product (it wasn't ads!), ahead of its competitors. Lackluster marketing, then we got acquired and inept management sunk it, and ended up with those of us who worked on it laid off and it's all gone, now. I'm in healthcare now, but it is really hard to move the needle. There's no way around integrating with providers, and they're driving a lot of absolutely bonkers technical decisions. I spent a lot of time building out brand new, but completely broken, things, because there's nobody designing the system. Meanwhile recruiters routinely hit my inbox with information-free cold pitches. I'd kill for a lure that had bait attached to it. The last email that had a salary attached wanted a Senior Software Engineer but was offering less than what I started at in the industry as an entry-level engineer. > don't work in the bay I left the Bay, and it's not really changed anything from a work/career perspective. But I don't think it's morally acceptable to tell people to "just leave"; what if they have a home there? family? connections? Perhaps giving it all up might be the most pragmatic thing, but it might crush a soul in the meantime. That said, the political climate of the Bay was "head, firmly in sand" when I left. I left partly because I do not see the Bay, collectively, being capable of solving the problems they face. (There are a few people trying — including a friend of mine I left behind. But they're hopelessly outnumbered.) > if it matters to you Maslow's hierarchy. Real rent is up, nominal compensation is down. People are getting laid off left and right. Being a millionaire is practically a pre-req to home ownership near any city. (And companies include "geographic adjustment" in compensation these days.)
- soco 4y ago
  I wouldn't take the message "just leave" necessarily as inconsiderate advice, or at least not always. It might be also meant to vote with your feet, because that's the only influence you can have in the process, and if enough people do it then it may tilt the needle a bit.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
  Pick any, I've worked in telecom, GIS, health, you need software everywhere. You have to weigh salary against the appeal of the mission and the work environment. You can't have everything, and you certainly can't have bay salaries. Personally I've never had trouble finding meaningful work with people I respect, but I have had to make sacrifices on the salary front. You seem to have read my comment as saying snarkily "if you really cared you'd just leave", that's not what I intended to convey. Of course I realize people have multi-faceted priorities, family, financial safety concerns, existing investments, and so on... I'm not telling people to leave as much as I'm saying if you care deeply about working for ethical companies, it seems like working in the bay area is not going to make it easy, and you'd probably have a easier time elsewhere. There are plenty of cities where you don't need to be a millionaire to own a home, I have a friend who just bought a nice house in San Antonio for 200k. That's another advantage of working out of the bay.
rob74 4y ago
Unfortunately most companies don't exist to make the world a better place, most companies exist to make money - the more, the better. And if you want to make more money, there's definitely a temptation to use unethical (while still legal) methods. And companies that make less money tend to be bought by companies that make more money, which tend to be higher on the "evil scale". Or sometimes, a not-so-evil company will buy a more-evil company which then eats them up from within, like Google with DoubleClick or Boeing with McDonnell Douglas.
- roenxi 4y ago
  Glance for a moment at the Wikipedia list of profitable companies [0]. Observe that #1 is Saudi Aramco, which supports one of the more horrible regimes. Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large. There is a great reason that companies are freed from the requirement to be morally good - because human instincts are not calibrated to run an 8-billion-strong postindustrial globe. It doesn't work. If we let people do things completely on instinct most people will die quite quickly, and the leadership will turn out to be corrupt anyway. We do things this way because a lot of experiments were run, and free market economics gets much better results than all the systems people swear do better. It harnesses greed to the cause of ... if you won't admit it is good you have to at least admit it is effective. Honestly, I think it is good too. Good and evil are not the right mental tools here, morals don't cope with the scale that humans need to operate on now. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_profits_and_losses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_prof...
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    >Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large. Well I don't see how people in Western Europe (i.e. excluding Ukraine) are in danger of starving and I would actually argue the people that we are seeing being killed at the moment are a direct consequence of buying cheap energy no matter the ethics. If Europe would have invested more strongly into becoming energy independent instead of chasing the cheapest oil and gas, we might have a slighly lower standard of living, but much of European politics would not be infiltrated by money from resource oligarchs and likely Russia would never have invaded so people would not be dying in a pointless war. In other words, not
krageon 4y ago
Almost every corporation and startup is cartoonishly evil (in that it stupidly and persistently refuses to look at people, except as a vehicle to increase the high score - money). If I may ask, is there some sort of sector you've worked in that kept the corporations you worked for stricly neutral or better? I must admit I'm a little skeptical that they were not strictly amoral (which given the right incentives always tends to an almost ridiculous amount of evil), but I would really like to believe it.
- codingdave 4y ago
  > If I may ask, is there some sort of sector you've worked in that kept the corporations you worked for stricly neutral or better? Education. Non-profits. Hospitals. Not that the software vendors I worked for in those industries were perfect. Nor were the customers. Evil, greed, ambition, and power came into play and brought negativity to them all. But it tended to center around a handful of poor leaders, and did not prevent the overall impact of the work being "neutral or better".
  - hgsgm 4y ago
- bstpierre 4y ago
  I’ve worked for various network/telco equipment providers over the course of 20+ years, and there have only been a couple of cartoonishly evil moments that I can recall. Certainly not to the level of thinking that I needed to quit to save my soul. There were some soulless executives, but the business models weren’t morally bankrupt. I have been paid reasonably well (not Bay Area / FAANG well). Most of the companies don’t exist anymore, and I have been through my fair share of layoff cycles.
  - fshr 4y ago
    > Most of the companies don’t exist anymore Do you think there could be a causal link between their lack of evil and the fact that they don’t exist anymore?
luckylion 4y ago
> So my conclusion from this post would be, if it matters to you, don't work in the bay? I believe you can find "problematic" companies everywhere. If it matters to you, go look at the pay. If they're paying enormous sums, they believe they can make much more. "Good things" usually don't offer that kind of profit margin. That's not to say that shitty pay = good company, there's plenty of terrible people who are evil AND offer low salaries.
dsign 4y ago
This. The majority of companies I know of are evil in just one way: they want your money, and sometimes they will go to great lengths to get it. The big villains in USA are not that powerful in some other places, because people and their governments reign them in.
vineyardmike 4y ago
> So my conclusion from this post would be, if it matters to you, don't work in the bay? I had a job at a publicly traded company with an office (my office) in Ohio - and not headquartered from the bay but another part of the Midwest - and one day during pride month the CEO emailed everyone to say that they would NOT put up a pride flag. They went on to explain that they couldn’t because it would be upsetting, and if inclusivity flags were normal to display at the office, black people may want a flag too, and where would it end?. They were a very generic company, and not particularly evil in other aspects of their business. I have also worked at large FAANG companies in the bay. They treat employees way better (google’s shuttles! Free food! Equity Refreshers!). I would much rather be a Bay Area FAANG employee than an Ohio Generic Co employee. The way FAANG treats their employees isn’t evil. There’s evil everywhere, IMO I might as well be treated well for being complicit towards it.
- mebassett 4y ago
  I don't understand your point. Are you saying the Ohio company is evil for not putting up a pride flag? Are you saying the Bay-area company isn't evil because they treated their higher-ranked servants well ?
  - papandada 4y ago
    Not OP, but my read is yes; and no, but why not take evil with better benefits.
    - tanseydavid 4y ago
      Because utilitarianism? Just a thought.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    seriously, the other poster never stops to consider that the reason people like this CEO are drawing a line in the sand is BECAUSE of people like this poster are running around drawing such conclusions from something as lik a pride flag. What next, is this poster going to take a flamethrower to the anthill in their backyard? Lets see how well that works.
cowsandmilk 4y ago
My experience is any company can be viewed as evil. I’ve done a ton of computational work for pharma companies. We were trying to discover cures for diseases, pretty much a good thing, right? Don’t have to look hard to find people giving reasons why pharma companies are evil.
- DFHippie 4y ago
  > Don’t have to look hard to find people giving reasons why pharma companies are evil. Case in point: Imagine you find someone grasping a cliff edge by their fingertips. Pulling them back to safety is good! Pulling them back to safety only after they promise you all their worldly wealth forevermore is less good. Being in the business of offering people this deal is not better. Funding the effort to prevent people from restraining your exploitation of cliff danglers is still worse. This isn't an insoluble moral puzzle. I don't think pharma is an ideal example for your larger point. Most businesses don't thrive on the desperation of their customers. But I also don't think your point is correct. There are better and worse companies. I understand one needs to make one's peace with one's choices. I've worked for companies that were doing evil (not exclusively, but at all). I've worked for companies that were mediocre at best. I'm currently working for a company that I would say is positively good. I got paid more by the evil companies. I have been happier working for the good companies though it's harder to support my family. But I understand people who choose to keep working for their evil company, particularly when others depend on their income. In one of the more egregious outbursts of evil at one of the companies I worked for I had friends who quit. They didn't want to be complicit. I stayed. I had kids and didn't want to throw my family into turmoil. But I saw the choice I was making.
  - edanm 4y ago
    > This isn't an insoluble moral puzzle. I don't think pharma is an ideal example for your larger point. Most businesses don't thrive on the desperation of their customers. I mean, pharma as an industry also creates the ability to pull people back from the edge. Medicine isn't created out of thin air, the universe doesn't just owe us a steady supply of new innovations that have kept so many people alive and in better comfort. Money needs to be invested, that money has to be paid by someone. (I'm not talking about specifics of the US healthcare system or anything, where there are problems, just pharma in general.) Like seriously, what is your alternative?
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
> My first thought was that there is a failure in the system if it inevitably leads companies to become evil as they grow (maybe a failure of government? It is not a bug, it is feature. And it is not the government, it is capitalism which endorses greed.

fphhotchips 4y ago

There are also plenty of companies based in the bay area that aren't evil? I'm not suggesting they're necessarily good, but they're not evil.

deathanatos 4y ago

> There are many industries beside software where good software engineers are needed and you can do good, challenging, and very innovative work "to make the world a better place". Honestly, such as and how? I worked for one company I thought had a good mission, and a good product (it wasn't ads!), ahead of its competitors. Lackluster marketing, then we got acquired and inept management sunk it, and ended up with those of us who worked on it laid off and it's all gone, now. I'm in healthcare now, but it is really hard to move the needle. There's no way around integrating with providers, and they're driving a lot of absolutely bonkers technical decisions. I spent a lot of time building out brand new, but completely broken, things, because there's nobody designing the system. Meanwhile recruiters routinely hit my inbox with information-free cold pitches. I'd kill for a lure that had bait attached to it. The last email that had a salary attached wanted a Senior Software Engineer but was offering less than what I started at in the industry as an entry-level engineer. > don't work in the bay I left the Bay, and it's not really changed anything from a work/career perspective. But I don't think it's morally acceptable to tell people to "just leave"; what if they have a home there? family? connections? Perhaps giving it all up might be the most pragmatic thing, but it might crush a soul in the meantime. That said, the political climate of the Bay was "head, firmly in sand" when I left. I left partly because I do not see the Bay, collectively, being capable of solving the problems they face. (There are a few people trying — including a friend of mine I left behind. But they're hopelessly outnumbered.) > if it matters to you Maslow's hierarchy. Real rent is up, nominal compensation is down. People are getting laid off left and right. Being a millionaire is practically a pre-req to home ownership near any city. (And companies include "geographic adjustment" in compensation these days.)

soco 4y ago
I wouldn't take the message "just leave" necessarily as inconsiderate advice, or at least not always. It might be also meant to vote with your feet, because that's the only influence you can have in the process, and if enough people do it then it may tilt the needle a bit.
ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
Pick any, I've worked in telecom, GIS, health, you need software everywhere. You have to weigh salary against the appeal of the mission and the work environment. You can't have everything, and you certainly can't have bay salaries. Personally I've never had trouble finding meaningful work with people I respect, but I have had to make sacrifices on the salary front. You seem to have read my comment as saying snarkily "if you really cared you'd just leave", that's not what I intended to convey. Of course I realize people have multi-faceted priorities, family, financial safety concerns, existing investments, and so on... I'm not telling people to leave as much as I'm saying if you care deeply about working for ethical companies, it seems like working in the bay area is not going to make it easy, and you'd probably have a easier time elsewhere. There are plenty of cities where you don't need to be a millionaire to own a home, I have a friend who just bought a nice house in San Antonio for 200k. That's another advantage of working out of the bay.

rob74 4y ago

Unfortunately most companies don't exist to make the world a better place, most companies exist to make money - the more, the better. And if you want to make more money, there's definitely a temptation to use unethical (while still legal) methods. And companies that make less money tend to be bought by companies that make more money, which tend to be higher on the "evil scale". Or sometimes, a not-so-evil company will buy a more-evil company which then eats them up from within, like Google with DoubleClick or Boeing with McDonnell Douglas.

roenxi 4y ago
Glance for a moment at the Wikipedia list of profitable companies [0]. Observe that #1 is Saudi Aramco, which supports one of the more horrible regimes. Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large. There is a great reason that companies are freed from the requirement to be morally good - because human instincts are not calibrated to run an 8-billion-strong postindustrial globe. It doesn't work. If we let people do things completely on instinct most people will die quite quickly, and the leadership will turn out to be corrupt anyway. We do things this way because a lot of experiments were run, and free market economics gets much better results than all the systems people swear do better. It harnesses greed to the cause of ... if you won't admit it is good you have to at least admit it is effective. Honestly, I think it is good too. Good and evil are not the right mental tools here, morals don't cope with the scale that humans need to operate on now. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_profits_and_losses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_prof...
- cycomanic 4y ago
  >Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large. Well I don't see how people in Western Europe (i.e. excluding Ukraine) are in danger of starving and I would actually argue the people that we are seeing being killed at the moment are a direct consequence of buying cheap energy no matter the ethics. If Europe would have invested more strongly into becoming energy independent instead of chasing the cheapest oil and gas, we might have a slighly lower standard of living, but much of European politics would not be infiltrated by money from resource oligarchs and likely Russia would never have invaded so people would not be dying in a pointless war. In other words, not

krageon 4y ago

Almost every corporation and startup is cartoonishly evil (in that it stupidly and persistently refuses to look at people, except as a vehicle to increase the high score - money). If I may ask, is there some sort of sector you've worked in that kept the corporations you worked for stricly neutral or better? I must admit I'm a little skeptical that they were not strictly amoral (which given the right incentives always tends to an almost ridiculous amount of evil), but I would really like to believe it.

codingdave 4y ago
> If I may ask, is there some sort of sector you've worked in that kept the corporations you worked for stricly neutral or better? Education. Non-profits. Hospitals. Not that the software vendors I worked for in those industries were perfect. Nor were the customers. Evil, greed, ambition, and power came into play and brought negativity to them all. But it tended to center around a handful of poor leaders, and did not prevent the overall impact of the work being "neutral or better".
- hgsgm 4y ago
bstpierre 4y ago
I’ve worked for various network/telco equipment providers over the course of 20+ years, and there have only been a couple of cartoonishly evil moments that I can recall. Certainly not to the level of thinking that I needed to quit to save my soul. There were some soulless executives, but the business models weren’t morally bankrupt. I have been paid reasonably well (not Bay Area / FAANG well). Most of the companies don’t exist anymore, and I have been through my fair share of layoff cycles.
- fshr 4y ago
  > Most of the companies don’t exist anymore Do you think there could be a causal link between their lack of evil and the fact that they don’t exist anymore?

luckylion 4y ago

> So my conclusion from this post would be, if it matters to you, don't work in the bay? I believe you can find "problematic" companies everywhere. If it matters to you, go look at the pay. If they're paying enormous sums, they believe they can make much more. "Good things" usually don't offer that kind of profit margin. That's not to say that shitty pay = good company, there's plenty of terrible people who are evil AND offer low salaries.

dsign 4y ago

This. The majority of companies I know of are evil in just one way: they want your money, and sometimes they will go to great lengths to get it. The big villains in USA are not that powerful in some other places, because people and their governments reign them in.

vineyardmike 4y ago

> So my conclusion from this post would be, if it matters to you, don't work in the bay? I had a job at a publicly traded company with an office (my office) in Ohio - and not headquartered from the bay but another part of the Midwest - and one day during pride month the CEO emailed everyone to say that they would NOT put up a pride flag. They went on to explain that they couldn’t because it would be upsetting, and if inclusivity flags were normal to display at the office, black people may want a flag too, and where would it end?. They were a very generic company, and not particularly evil in other aspects of their business. I have also worked at large FAANG companies in the bay. They treat employees way better (google’s shuttles! Free food! Equity Refreshers!). I would much rather be a Bay Area FAANG employee than an Ohio Generic Co employee. The way FAANG treats their employees isn’t evil. There’s evil everywhere, IMO I might as well be treated well for being complicit towards it.

mebassett 4y ago
I don't understand your point. Are you saying the Ohio company is evil for not putting up a pride flag? Are you saying the Bay-area company isn't evil because they treated their higher-ranked servants well ?
- papandada 4y ago
  Not OP, but my read is yes; and no, but why not take evil with better benefits.
  - tanseydavid 4y ago
    Because utilitarianism? Just a thought.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  seriously, the other poster never stops to consider that the reason people like this CEO are drawing a line in the sand is BECAUSE of people like this poster are running around drawing such conclusions from something as lik a pride flag. What next, is this poster going to take a flamethrower to the anthill in their backyard? Lets see how well that works.

cowsandmilk 4y ago

My experience is any company can be viewed as evil. I’ve done a ton of computational work for pharma companies. We were trying to discover cures for diseases, pretty much a good thing, right? Don’t have to look hard to find people giving reasons why pharma companies are evil.

DFHippie 4y ago
> Don’t have to look hard to find people giving reasons why pharma companies are evil. Case in point: Imagine you find someone grasping a cliff edge by their fingertips. Pulling them back to safety is good! Pulling them back to safety only after they promise you all their worldly wealth forevermore is less good. Being in the business of offering people this deal is not better. Funding the effort to prevent people from restraining your exploitation of cliff danglers is still worse. This isn't an insoluble moral puzzle. I don't think pharma is an ideal example for your larger point. Most businesses don't thrive on the desperation of their customers. But I also don't think your point is correct. There are better and worse companies. I understand one needs to make one's peace with one's choices. I've worked for companies that were doing evil (not exclusively, but at all). I've worked for companies that were mediocre at best. I'm currently working for a company that I would say is positively good. I got paid more by the evil companies. I have been happier working for the good companies though it's harder to support my family. But I understand people who choose to keep working for their evil company, particularly when others depend on their income. In one of the more egregious outbursts of evil at one of the companies I worked for I had friends who quit. They didn't want to be complicit. I stayed. I had kids and didn't want to throw my family into turmoil. But I saw the choice I was making.
- edanm 4y ago
  > This isn't an insoluble moral puzzle. I don't think pharma is an ideal example for your larger point. Most businesses don't thrive on the desperation of their customers. I mean, pharma as an industry also creates the ability to pull people back from the edge. Medicine isn't created out of thin air, the universe doesn't just owe us a steady supply of new innovations that have kept so many people alive and in better comfort. Money needs to be invested, that money has to be paid by someone. (I'm not talking about specifics of the US healthcare system or anything, where there are problems, just pharma in general.) Like seriously, what is your alternative?

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

> My first thought was that there is a failure in the system if it inevitably leads companies to become evil as they grow (maybe a failure of government? It is not a bug, it is feature. And it is not the government, it is capitalism which endorses greed.