Tech Worker Ethics

I guess we all make choices about the kind of work we do. If enough devs feel it's not something they can support, the co wouldn't be able to do whatever the thing is.I am an accountant, so can and have been put in ethically dubious situations. I couldn't have known beforehand, but once I did, I chose to move on. But where the facts are apparent before, I can just choose not to do that work.Amazon were recently hiring for finance roles near me. I chose not to apply on ethica

That’s a very high horse you’re riding. Everybody is looking the other way to some extent, there aren’t a lot of companies who live entirely on a moral high ground. Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have all done shady things here in the US and internationally, and they still have a lot of employees. Being in tech at all is being a willing participating in your economy in a way that is disenfranchising the poor, nearly everyone globally is conveniently ignoring that. Reflect on your own cho

The author seems like a nice guy, but perhaps a bit naive regarding the efforts big tech companies go to to crush employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...). They appear to be a staff level engineer at a big tech company - I don't know how much money they make, but I suspect it's an ungodly amount.The organisation

I work at FB. I wouldn’t want to be working alongside people who think I’m a mercenary abdicating my moral precepts. And I wouldn’t expect that of my colleagues. So my guess is that you could get away with it easily, but you‘d be doing a disservice to yourself and your team.

"I was just doing my job" is not an excuse. It is absolutely not only our right to decide how our work is used in the world, but our duty to make sure we're not enabling human rights violations. I applaud and support tech workers making ethical calls around their work. Unfortunately we may need to put our money where our mouths are and leave employers that refuse to stand by any ethical code, and that's already happening all across the tech industry.

Why? If they have alternate employment options, they are actively choosing to support their company's work. The "someone else will do it" excuse doesn't mean you throw your hands up in the air and give up on ever caring about ethics, it means you acknowledge that it won't change the world on its own and still try.I don't think you go attacking individuals publicly but yes, people should absolutely be forced to have conversations about the morality of their job, e

I agree it's a luxury, and I'm happy people at github can do it. I don't think it _should_ be a luxury. They are quitting because they have a direct relationship they feel is immoral. If people aren't supposed to take stands what they can work for, you're advocating for the vast majority of the population (ie. ~non CEOS) having no moral agency in the place where they spend a huge fraction of their lives.

"put your bodies upon the gears"I absolutely agree with you that this is a moral decision for the employees. At a former company I pushed to improve our user privacy and decrease our storage of unused personally identifying information.I left that company when they neutered my project to only affect the UI...We aren't soldiers following orders, we are humans that can reflect on our actions.That said, I had the savings to be unemployed for a while, not everyone does.

I'm going to assume that the people I'm talking to are the ones who are against that and trying to fix it.At this point in my life, I've seen enough people desperate for work that I'm not going to fault someone for working for an "evil" company. Maybe they really needed that money. Maybe they really needed that insurance for a loved one. I really don't know their situation and I'm not going to judge them just for that.If, after talking to them, th

Ok, let's agree that some of us have a moral position against x and are benefiting financially from x but are too busy or too ignorant to do anything about it.And, lets also agree that being employed a company is bad, the argument still seems to breakdown soon enough. Generally, the engineers are to blame because they make enough money and could choose other options, but not others capacities of employment e.g. a driver, cleaning staff, cook at one of their food courts etc. at the same c