I mean working somewhere like Qualcomm or Microsoft when you care about FOSS, democracy, and the public commons, or a weapons manufacturer for a military that invades other countries and kills innocent people in their homes.
I like having a roof over my head and not starving to death. It really is that simple a transaction.
By doing the minimum required to not get fired.
This is the way
I do that anyway
Ability to afford food and rent is a pretty big incentive.
I have nothing. I need a paycheck. Finding a job in America is Hell.
ice applicants have entered the chat
God help me if it comes to that. Nobody is helping me and I’m getting desperate.
Take the $50k signing bonus and use it to fuck off to Belize or somewhere
probably does not come right away and I would not be surprised if ultimately they stiffed a bunch with that. Likely its something that gest “vested”
Wasn’t trying to project some bs but just highlighting the thought process ya know. Very unfortunate times and ignorant maneuvers.
They don’t take desperate people they take violent people.
If they’re desperate that’s more fuel for their racial hatred.
I envy the folks here who can lay their morals out on the table without having to sacrifice a roof or food on the table. Must be nice.
It’s never an easy decision to make and often you simply don’t have the resources to make it immediately; but if the work you do is immoral/unethical, your goal should be to remove yourself as soon as reasonably possible.
That said; sometimes even the need to provide for one’s self or family doesn’t outweigh the horrible things we’re asked to do. Where exactly that line is we’re unlikely to agree on; but in those situations sacrifices must be made.
You always have a choice, and it’s our choices that define us.
I get the vibe that it’s a lot easier if you’re not in the US. I guess there are a few worse countries as well…
That’s by design. It’s why regulations that give power to workers never pass, because it’s actually let emplyees apply pressure on their employees to be ethical, and employers don’t want that
I mean, if you find yourself in that situation, the ideal scenario would be that you exit that situation as quickly as possible.
So far, no free Americans are required to work for an evil corporation. And as far as I’m aware, most other countries do not force their laborers to work for evil corporations.
So looking for a new job is an option.
The next best scenario would be that you do everything you can to work ineffectively and waste their resources in just such a way as that they cannot fire you so that you, bit by bit, contribute to toppling their evil system.
Did you just “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” me?
Are you stupid?
Yeah, but not because of this thread. Plenty of other reasons.
But as we will see for so many others here, there are no moral companies, and even if there are no one is hiring.
So yeah, I could be completely moral. Lose the house to the bank. Not be able to eat. Not be able to provide for my family. We’d be destitute but I could confidently tell you that we were moral. What a win that would be.
There are certainly less immoral companies though. Avoid arms manufacturers, fossil fuel, big tech, the police and chemical manufacturers, obviously.
There’s vaguely ethical jobs in manufacturing, retail, government (e.g. parks, urban maintenance), academia, the NGO sector, and many other spaces
Of course, and I think everyone has to decide what their line is, their own personal Rubicon and if they have crossed it or not. Those lines can shift too, a company that was okay last year may not be this year. It could be that all of a sudden you find yourself doing things you wouldn’t have dreamed of 5 years ago. Maybe it is time to look for a new role. It’s completely a personal decision.
The blind “Just quit your jobs” is what annoys me, and doesn’t add anything valuable to the conversation.
In my defense, I never said “just quit your job”.
I said, start looking for another one. There are other jobs out there. There’s nothing that forces you to work for, meta, or google, or alphabet, or whatever the hell they’re calling themselves.
If you are working for a company that you find personally immoral and you are bound to them because of financial reasons, then I will stand by the statement that one of the best things that you can do is to find a way out, and one of the best ways to do that is to replace it with a different job so that you do not financially suffer through the transition.
I don’t really get how anyone would interpret that as a blind “quit your job”.
Ah yes, just avoid [lists all of the country’s biggest industries]…
Maybe stop huffing fatalism. its not good for you.
I gave clear and simple things that can be done by anyone with a minimum amount of effort to improve things. That’s all it takes to be moral, to be willing to improve things.
You’re right. Small steps matter, and I’ve made plenty myself to live and work more ethically. But that’s not what your original comment said. You said:
the ideal scenario would be that you exit that situation as quickly as possible
You suggested an oversimplified binary situation. That’s simply not realistic for most people. Suggesting be a half-ass employee isn’t meaningful advice either.
A better way to approach this is to recognize that everyone has a moral line they need to define for themselves, and to regularly reflect on whether their work crosses it. If it does, they can decide whether leaving is feasible, or start moving toward something more aligned with their values.
“Just quit your job” is not an answer. As The Good Place illustrated perfectly, modern life makes it impossible to be entirely moral. They highlighted that by buying a simple tomato you are indirectly supporting big farming, greenhouse gas emissions, unfair labor practices, even slave labor. By participating in society at all you are an immoral person.
So yes, we should all try to do better, but we also need realistic paths, not platitudes.
I was wondering how far I’d have to scroll to find a The Good Place reference. Thank you for your contribution.
The idea of being a slow and ineffectual worker is a well-known concept in the CIA’s counterintelligence operations manual.
It is a known and tried and proven method of destabilizing government organizations and institutions.
Apparently, I’m coming off as a dick, and that’s definitely not my intention. I’m sharing the information that I have.
If it doesn’t get received well, oh well. That’s on me for not communicating it effectively.
Found a new job and took a 16% pay cut to escape an unethical situation. Last day in old job was today.
Congratulations! I hope your new job is rewarding and long lasting!
Thank you. Was in a love my work hate my job situation. I minimized my discretionary spending and saved for a year to be able to afford the pay cut. Keep minimizing until annual raise next year. Will be ok unless something truly calamitous happens.
Yes, I experience something similar working for one of the two major gambling companies in the US. It is possible to move and get a raise; several colleagues have done so moving to Black Rock or JP Morgan which both have high barriers to entry and are more demanding of your time.
I’m based in the UK so not sure if the job market is as toxic as the US with LLM CVs and HR/TA processing of said CVs. When I did recruiting a year or so ago I found a lot of CVs that people had generated from their LinkedIn profiles and they looked terrible: do not say you are a 10X developer rockstar on your CV!
At the moment I’ve been at the company for over 2 years so that affords me a lot of rights in the UK and in a climate where there are a lot of layoffs, I’d hesitate to move. Like a few years back I was being spammed with recruiters trying to get me to join Spotify months before they axed their entire data team - if I’d gone for it I would have been totally screwed and with a mortgage I don’t feel I can take risks.
You don’t
In a perfect world you wouldn’t have to but sometimes you haven’t got the choice.
You don’t. Stand up for your ethics and morals and leave.
One of the best paying jobs I ever had, directly asked me to perform work that would have have damaged a customers home. When I layed out exactly how and why this was wrong and why I wouldn’t do it, they insisted I do as I was told or be fired.
I walked off the site and never looked back.
I ran into that old boss a while later and he told me he later realized I was right, but insisted I still should have done as I was told because he was above me and had given me direct instructions…
Sometimes you just can’t work with people and have to move on.
Thats absolutely rich well not everyone is as privileged, most of us are easily replaceable cogs in the machine.
As an adult the very first thing we try to feed ourselves are our morals and principles. And once we find out that they don’t fill your stomach? Well. You’d be surprised what you’ll do to not starve.
name checks out
After college I worked a project management job for a while before going to grad school. I didn’t find it morally questionable, but I definitely found myself feeling like I was just working to make some rich guy richer. It didn’t help that the rich guy(s) (the owner and his son in law who was out CEO) worked in the same building. So I went back to school. Got my master’s. Ended up doing some contract work for the same company afterwards. Never felt more stuck in my life. Hated it. Did more grad school and when the contract work dried up I got asked to come work for another company but I still hated the bs corporate vibe, so instead I went from billing $80/hr to making $15/hr as a 911 dispatcher. Graduated and stayed in that field. I’m an emergency management professional now and while it’s not a lucrative field (thankfully I don’t want kids) I get a lot of satisfaction out of the work and I feel like my job matters.
Long story short, you choose what to prioritize in life. For some people making sure you/your family is well cared for will matter more than what you’re doing or who you’re doing it for. For others, you’ll take a pay cut to feel like the work itself matters or that you’re making a positive impact. Everyone has to balance what’s important to them.
OP, If morally aligning with your job matters to you, you’ll ultimately land somewhere you can stomach at least, because you won’t stop trying until you get there. Don’t blame yourself for having to do other work along the way to keep yourself fed and able to enjoy the ride there.
I’ve never known any other way. Companies by definition exist to make profits, not to improve the lives of thier customers. Any business that truely has the interest of thier customers first doesn’t last long.
They do exist to make profits but there is such a thing as returning customers, and that can be very profitable it you dont turn your product into shit.
Thinkpads had such amazing reputation for a long time because they lasted so long and could be repaired. Then they stopped caring about quality and now its just a generic brand that breaks as much or more as the other brands.
That example can be traced back almost directly to IBM selling the Thinkpad brand to Lenovo.
And ask yourself why did they stop caring? They needed more profit, and caring costs a lot. So they tried to lower the level of care to see if they could squeeze profits. Enshitification. The race to the bottom. Couldn’t compete with companies making a cheaper product long term. All are really caused by profit being the primary purpose of the company.
And as someone else pointed out, the brand got sold. If it was so successful, they wouldn’t have sold it. Clearly it wasn’t generating enough profit despite the quality.
Side note, I had one back in the day, those thing sure were solid at the time.
Yeah I agree. Consumers picked other laptops with slimmer bezels, better screens, mostly the super popular Dell xps series that looked much better.
They failed to understand the importance of feel and look. Apple built their entire empire by making those things top priority. Dell made good looking laptops and stole a lot of Lenovos market share.
Now they have nicer laptops but its very late.
Love your name here.
Either you unionize, you leave, or your ethics aren’t worth shit.
Sometimes you don’t wanna be homeless and starving.
Yeah, let that happen to some other guy.
Or for your family to be.
Just a guess but I think it has something to do with people not wanting to be homeless
Someone at Microsoft isn’t going homeless anytime soon. Most people live to their means and can’t suddenly lose that income without lowering their means or having savings. A lot of Trumps votes were for economic uncertainty so people were worried about their savings. So they are worried about their economic lives but saying someone at Microsoft is working there to avoid homelessness is a joke and spending at the microsoft side of income is up (unlike lower incomes) so a bit of a harsh joke.
To the OP, as someone that recently left a company like this, you have options. Work out your values and come up with a plan. Until then, take the little wins that align with your values and make the world a little better.
Oh wow, it looks like I upset a surprising number of people. Median income at Microsoft is 200k or 94th percentile for the US. Who is reading this and downvoting because someone at Microsoft really might become homeless if they try to work somewhere that more aligns with their ethics?
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism type shit.
There are no companies where I agree with their ethics, but I gotta work. From there it’s just a matter of shades of gray, rather than a dichotomy; there is no clear line. You just gotta do the best you can. Make the best choices available to you.It really surprises me how preachy people can be. When you got a family of 4 to feed, that white collar job working in accounting at Chiquita seems really distant from their literal government toppling conquests of the south.
When responsibility is so plainly distributed in larges companies, individual accountability becomes almost invisible.
I have a lot of random thoughts on this, but they aren’t all coherent. The system is so messed up, you could form an entire major studying just how fucked up capitalism is.
Why do you got a family of 4 if you knew how the world was? Why do you think that making bad decisions absolves you from making unethical decisions? At least acknowledge the lack of ethics.
Case and point with preaching. This answer is undeniably devoid of empathy.
And going through the world without care for it or your fellow humans with unethical decisions is also devoid of empathy
Yeah, a lot of people in this thread are delusional. Any big company is up to shady shit, you only need to dig deep enough to find it.
In my last job, I was stonewalled hard when I cautiously inquired why a huge 1st world company, selling seemingly innocuous products, had so much “value creation” done in 3rd world countries. If you live anywhere in the world, including Antarctica, you probably have some stuff of said company in your home right now.
As it turned out, they were taking advantage of the lack of regulation and/or enforcement in these countries, big time. The worst thing to me were all these smokescreens, the schmoozing with politicians and the goody two-shoes image they created to hide all of this.
The job allows me to spend a lot of time volunteering and doing good deeds on the side. I don’t think I could use the cheat code for just any company. My main problem is that I’m very anti-capitalist (don’t have a solution, just think we have proven thoroughly that this isn’t it). Getting a different job won’t fix my problem.
This is so real. I generally find my job morally commendable (I work in emergency management) but even working around disasters there’s improvements to be made (ugh, the recovery process! Definitely entrenched in a very biased, racist, system!) There is no morally perfect job you can land that avoids those deeper systemic issues.
