7 ms·

Don’t work for evil companies.

by codemog 6mo ago

liveoneggs 6mo ago
your local food bank only has so many open positions
- troyvit 6mo ago
  The more people who believe this, the easier it is for me to find a job at a place I respect, so thank you.
newsoftheday 6mo ago
List successful companies you would not define as evil.
- fsflover 6mo ago
  Pine64. ("Successful" doesn't have to mean "a megacorp".)
- jjice 6mo ago
  Costco maybe?
- mirekrusin 6mo ago
  37signals, vanguard, costco, proton, fastmail, mullvad vpn, framework, automattic, valve, patagonia, lego, linear, hetzner, tarsnap, ...
  - antonymoose 6mo ago
    Valve has been making money hand over fist by getting kids addicted to gambling…
    - throwaway85825 6mo ago
      The snowball of government intervention has started rolling on them.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    There are those who attribute evil to Lego, and they may have a case (historically or now). Automattic has apparently gone insane, but that's not the same as evil. Valve might be the closest to a HN-agree on "good company" - and even that has a comment below mine attributing gambling to them.
  - ivell 6mo ago
    "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" It is only a matter of time...
    - mirekrusin 6mo ago
      People can’t wait to make heroes villains.
  - HDThoreaun 6mo ago
    Valve takes 30% of revenue from developers because they have cornered the distribution market. Their margins on the steam store are probably second only to the apple store's, another heinously immoral product.
    - mirekrusin 6mo ago
      If everybody does it wrong and you know the right way - sounds like you’re sitting on a million dollar idea.
      - HDThoreaun 6mo ago
        Consumers have no incentive to switch because they don’t care that devs are being taken advantage of, that’s what makes the scheme evil.
  - tombert 6mo ago
    Ok, and when you apply for and get rejected from all those companies, what do you do then? Suppose you give me a list of literally every company you think is ok, and I were declined by all of them, then what? This isn't a theoretical question for me. I've applied to and been declined from all the companies you listed (except tarsnap because I didn't see a careers page). What exactly do I do then? Do I then just decide that food is overrated and be content with not having paycheck?
    - mirekrusin 6mo ago
      Create your own company.
      - tombert 6mo ago
        Ok, great. Let's say I agree that that's a good response. I would still likely need investor money, which I don't even know how to get but even if I did then I have a similar problem of having to make sure that I only have ethical investors. I'm not saying that they don't exist but I'm not exactly fond of the big institutional VC firms. Let's not also forget that most companies go broke, and realistically most of us don't have any ideas that are likely to make a sustainable business. I'm not saying that you shouldn't try and find an ethical place to work for or start a business, I'm just saying that it's not as easy as "just apply to places that don't suck".
- mrguyorama 6mo ago
  Just starting with "Not totally abhorrent and aiding the destruction of democracy in the US" would be fine. Instead of working for Zuck or Google or Larry, you can work for Garmin, Shopify, Visa and Mastercard, most banks (they are soulless but some aren't always evil), grocery chains, pretty much any local business, car companies, non-weapon or surveillance based government work, IDEXX, hell even Apple imo and I dislike Apple, nearly every business that isn't "Tech" Basically just stop pretending that the industry is only Google, Facebook, AWS, Microsoft, and Oracle. There's something like millions of jobs that aren't in those companies.
Steve16384 6mo ago
Ideally it would be "don't buy from Oracle", but we don't get to affect those decisions.
- WarmWash 6mo ago
  Ironically this would just fuel more layoffs.
georgemcbay 6mo ago
> Don’t work for evil companies. I'm certainly not a fan of Oracle (or the wider scale damage the Ellisons have been doing), but I also can't bring myself to be so flippant when an action this large is going to cause untold amounts of personal tragedies. See, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/employeesOfOracle/comments/1s8m58p/after_20_years_and_2_years_before_retirement_my/ https://www.reddit.com/r/employeesOfOracle/comments/1s8m58p/... Today this unfortunate guy, tomorrow perhaps me.
raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
So exactly what for profit company is on the side of the angels?
- bix6 6mo ago
  Many of the startups I work with. We’re helping save the oceans and land. Purpose and profit are dream scenarios for me. It’s difficult in a capitalist economy but it exists.
  - raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
    Are those startups self funded or funded by VCs? If they are funded by VCs, it doesn’t matter what your company wants.
- troyvit 6mo ago
  Why stick with for-profit companies? But on measure I'd say System76, n8n, Nextcloud, GridX, Odoo, Tuxedo, GitLab, Uplight, Aurora Solar, Bandcamp (maybe), Bitwarden, Canonical (maybe), Scribd, Arcadia, Wikihow. Basically any time you find yourself enjoying a product you're using, see who made it and if they're hiring. Sure it's an uphill battle. This is late-stage capitalism after all and unless you're comfortable with a role that extracts from people who weren't planning in being extracted from you're not going to make a ton of money. That's what it takes to be on the side of the angels though.
  - BeetleB 6mo ago
    GitLab is for profit, isn't it?
    - troyvit 6mo ago
      I tried to focus on for-profit, but I'm just saying there's nothing wrong with non-profits either. In fact I don't think I consciously mentioned a non-profit but I might have.
  - raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
kaladin-jasnah 6mo ago
I tried to do this out of undergrad (graduated last year). Many companies do both good and bad things to me, some more good than bad. The "best of the best" companies to me require many years of experience and are still competitive. I didn't really want an entry level job at an "evil" company, so I'm going to go do a PhD (in something unrelated to my original interest in operating systems, as I don't want to be a 30k/yr automaton part of Meta's R&D machine). My point is: it's very, very, very hard to do this, especially with my set of interests (lots of OS work is in the datacenter, which leads to jobs with hyperscalers; I consider many of those companies evil). I'm trying. It will probably make my QoL worse for some time, and I'll probably give up eventually. Also, evil is undefined in some sense. Is it wrong to do something "good" at a company that has an "evil" aspect?
- calvinmorrison 6mo ago
  Yes. I work at boring companies that are not evil instead. Never went to my local magnate (Comcast), left a company when they off/onshored entire teams to HCL slaves, etc. No i won't make 350K as a dev. Yes i will have a paltry middle class existence while we still have a profession called IT.
  - kaladin-jasnah 6mo ago
    I used to work on software for non-profits. I found it fulfilling but it was hard to do the work since I found fullstack technically uninteresting (this is my own shortcoming). Finding a balance in that is difficult. I have seen that it might be easier to find a societally good job the less technically deep the job gets. Networking research seems to be both technically interesting and connected to societal impact (eg. because of the ties to censorship, security, net neutrality etc) It seems hard to continue doing this sort of research after your PhD though, as in both your school name matters immensely (i.e. you're screwed if you didn't go to Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, or MIT) and so does your publishing success to land a research job, which seems like an enormous task.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  The key to not working for evil companies is to have more choice in who you do work for, which involves living way below your means so that you can save inordinate amounts of income and "retire" early - which is just code for "do the work I want to do for those I want to work for".
01284a7e 6mo ago
The right thing to be said here. Oracle is trash. Would you expect rude idiots to be nice smart people all of a sudden?
sleepybrett 6mo ago
It's very very hard to do this because any public company will be evil in the name of 'shareholder value' EVERY.SINGLE.TIME.
tombert 6mo ago
Easier said than done. Most of us end up working for monsters if you go high enough up on the ladder. I'm certainly not saying that you shouldn't have boundaries; there are certain companies that I will absolutely not work for no matter what they pay me (e.g. Palantir). I'm just saying that if you draw the line at "don't work for bad company", it's going to be hard to pay your bills since due to the lovely world of capitalism the people on top are usually sociopaths. To be clear, I do agree broadly; if you can find a company that has decent people running it and doesn't appear to be evil to you, you should probably work for that company. The problem is that the job market is very competitive and you often have to take what you can get. I'm in a privileged position to where I can be a little choosy with my work (for now!), but I can't really judge someone who has a family to take care of for doing what they need to to pay the bills.
qwerpy 6mo ago
Counterpoint, work for companies that pay a lot regardless of good/evil. I worked for an evil company and got paid an insane amount. Got laid off. Am now happily retired in my early 40s.
- Draiken 6mo ago
  Yeah, who cares about morals, right? I'm sure Palantir is hiring. They'll kill people regardless, so might as well get paid for it!

Don’t work for evil companies.

by codemog 6mo ago

Don’t work for evil companies.

liveoneggs 6mo ago

your local food bank only has so many open positions

troyvit 6mo ago
The more people who believe this, the easier it is for me to find a job at a place I respect, so thank you.

newsoftheday 6mo ago

List successful companies you would not define as evil.

fsflover 6mo ago
Pine64. ("Successful" doesn't have to mean "a megacorp".)
jjice 6mo ago
Costco maybe?
mirekrusin 6mo ago
37signals, vanguard, costco, proton, fastmail, mullvad vpn, framework, automattic, valve, patagonia, lego, linear, hetzner, tarsnap, ...
- antonymoose 6mo ago
  Valve has been making money hand over fist by getting kids addicted to gambling…
  - throwaway85825 6mo ago
    The snowball of government intervention has started rolling on them.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  There are those who attribute evil to Lego, and they may have a case (historically or now). Automattic has apparently gone insane, but that's not the same as evil. Valve might be the closest to a HN-agree on "good company" - and even that has a comment below mine attributing gambling to them.
- ivell 6mo ago
  "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" It is only a matter of time...
  - mirekrusin 6mo ago
    People can’t wait to make heroes villains.
- HDThoreaun 6mo ago
  Valve takes 30% of revenue from developers because they have cornered the distribution market. Their margins on the steam store are probably second only to the apple store's, another heinously immoral product.
  - mirekrusin 6mo ago
    If everybody does it wrong and you know the right way - sounds like you’re sitting on a million dollar idea.
    - HDThoreaun 6mo ago
      Consumers have no incentive to switch because they don’t care that devs are being taken advantage of, that’s what makes the scheme evil.
- tombert 6mo ago
  Ok, and when you apply for and get rejected from all those companies, what do you do then? Suppose you give me a list of literally every company you think is ok, and I were declined by all of them, then what? This isn't a theoretical question for me. I've applied to and been declined from all the companies you listed (except tarsnap because I didn't see a careers page). What exactly do I do then? Do I then just decide that food is overrated and be content with not having paycheck?
  - mirekrusin 6mo ago
    Create your own company.
    - tombert 6mo ago
      Ok, great. Let's say I agree that that's a good response. I would still likely need investor money, which I don't even know how to get but even if I did then I have a similar problem of having to make sure that I only have ethical investors. I'm not saying that they don't exist but I'm not exactly fond of the big institutional VC firms. Let's not also forget that most companies go broke, and realistically most of us don't have any ideas that are likely to make a sustainable business. I'm not saying that you shouldn't try and find an ethical place to work for or start a business, I'm just saying that it's not as easy as "just apply to places that don't suck".
mrguyorama 6mo ago
Just starting with "Not totally abhorrent and aiding the destruction of democracy in the US" would be fine. Instead of working for Zuck or Google or Larry, you can work for Garmin, Shopify, Visa and Mastercard, most banks (they are soulless but some aren't always evil), grocery chains, pretty much any local business, car companies, non-weapon or surveillance based government work, IDEXX, hell even Apple imo and I dislike Apple, nearly every business that isn't "Tech" Basically just stop pretending that the industry is only Google, Facebook, AWS, Microsoft, and Oracle. There's something like millions of jobs that aren't in those companies.

Steve16384 6mo ago

Ideally it would be "don't buy from Oracle", but we don't get to affect those decisions.

WarmWash 6mo ago
Ironically this would just fuel more layoffs.

georgemcbay 6mo ago

> Don’t work for evil companies. I'm certainly not a fan of Oracle (or the wider scale damage the Ellisons have been doing), but I also can't bring myself to be so flippant when an action this large is going to cause untold amounts of personal tragedies. See, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/employeesOfOracle/comments/1s8m58p/after_20_years_and_2_years_before_retirement_my/ https://www.reddit.com/r/employeesOfOracle/comments/1s8m58p/... Today this unfortunate guy, tomorrow perhaps me.

raw_anon_1111 6mo ago

So exactly what for profit company is on the side of the angels?

bix6 6mo ago
Many of the startups I work with. We’re helping save the oceans and land. Purpose and profit are dream scenarios for me. It’s difficult in a capitalist economy but it exists.
- raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
  Are those startups self funded or funded by VCs? If they are funded by VCs, it doesn’t matter what your company wants.
troyvit 6mo ago
Why stick with for-profit companies? But on measure I'd say System76, n8n, Nextcloud, GridX, Odoo, Tuxedo, GitLab, Uplight, Aurora Solar, Bandcamp (maybe), Bitwarden, Canonical (maybe), Scribd, Arcadia, Wikihow. Basically any time you find yourself enjoying a product you're using, see who made it and if they're hiring. Sure it's an uphill battle. This is late-stage capitalism after all and unless you're comfortable with a role that extracts from people who weren't planning in being extracted from you're not going to make a ton of money. That's what it takes to be on the side of the angels though.
- BeetleB 6mo ago
  GitLab is for profit, isn't it?
  - troyvit 6mo ago
    I tried to focus on for-profit, but I'm just saying there's nothing wrong with non-profits either. In fact I don't think I consciously mentioned a non-profit but I might have.
- raw_anon_1111 6mo ago

kaladin-jasnah 6mo ago

I tried to do this out of undergrad (graduated last year). Many companies do both good and bad things to me, some more good than bad. The "best of the best" companies to me require many years of experience and are still competitive. I didn't really want an entry level job at an "evil" company, so I'm going to go do a PhD (in something unrelated to my original interest in operating systems, as I don't want to be a 30k/yr automaton part of Meta's R&D machine). My point is: it's very, very, very hard to do this, especially with my set of interests (lots of OS work is in the datacenter, which leads to jobs with hyperscalers; I consider many of those companies evil). I'm trying. It will probably make my QoL worse for some time, and I'll probably give up eventually. Also, evil is undefined in some sense. Is it wrong to do something "good" at a company that has an "evil" aspect?

calvinmorrison 6mo ago
Yes. I work at boring companies that are not evil instead. Never went to my local magnate (Comcast), left a company when they off/onshored entire teams to HCL slaves, etc. No i won't make 350K as a dev. Yes i will have a paltry middle class existence while we still have a profession called IT.
- kaladin-jasnah 6mo ago
  I used to work on software for non-profits. I found it fulfilling but it was hard to do the work since I found fullstack technically uninteresting (this is my own shortcoming). Finding a balance in that is difficult. I have seen that it might be easier to find a societally good job the less technically deep the job gets. Networking research seems to be both technically interesting and connected to societal impact (eg. because of the ties to censorship, security, net neutrality etc) It seems hard to continue doing this sort of research after your PhD though, as in both your school name matters immensely (i.e. you're screwed if you didn't go to Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, or MIT) and so does your publishing success to land a research job, which seems like an enormous task.
bombcar 6mo ago
The key to not working for evil companies is to have more choice in who you do work for, which involves living way below your means so that you can save inordinate amounts of income and "retire" early - which is just code for "do the work I want to do for those I want to work for".

01284a7e 6mo ago

The right thing to be said here. Oracle is trash. Would you expect rude idiots to be nice smart people all of a sudden?

sleepybrett 6mo ago

It's very very hard to do this because any public company will be evil in the name of 'shareholder value' EVERY.SINGLE.TIME.

tombert 6mo ago

Easier said than done. Most of us end up working for monsters if you go high enough up on the ladder. I'm certainly not saying that you shouldn't have boundaries; there are certain companies that I will absolutely not work for no matter what they pay me (e.g. Palantir). I'm just saying that if you draw the line at "don't work for bad company", it's going to be hard to pay your bills since due to the lovely world of capitalism the people on top are usually sociopaths. To be clear, I do agree broadly; if you can find a company that has decent people running it and doesn't appear to be evil to you, you should probably work for that company. The problem is that the job market is very competitive and you often have to take what you can get. I'm in a privileged position to where I can be a little choosy with my work (for now!), but I can't really judge someone who has a family to take care of for doing what they need to to pay the bills.

qwerpy 6mo ago

Counterpoint, work for companies that pay a lot regardless of good/evil. I worked for an evil company and got paid an insane amount. Got laid off. Am now happily retired in my early 40s.

Draiken 6mo ago
Yeah, who cares about morals, right? I'm sure Palantir is hiring. They'll kill people regardless, so might as well get paid for it!