I wouldn’t disagree, and hopefully at 25 I’m still considered young. Get a FAANG job that pays well and executes well, then work your way into an elite tooling / infrastructure team. IMHO tooling / infrastructure is very clean in terms of ethics, not to mention high transfer value and intellectually stimulating :D

I'm surprised to see this argument. Tooling and infrastructure are only as clean as the services they support. I don't think you get to wash your hands because all you did was build e.g. Palantir a giant database that's great for storing locations if you know customers will be assassinating political dissidents with it.

I don't (or no longer) think it's great form to say negative things about former employers on the Internet, so allow me to expound on the positive aspects of my point.

I think having great tooling / infrastructure at least gives stakeholders more options in terms of the business direction they're taking. You can pivot and execute faster, which to me means you can pivot away from something ethically bad and execute in a different direction faster.

Great tooling / infrastructure in my mind is also ethically salvageable and redeemable. A great tool can help an ethically positive division of the company as it can help an ethically negative division of the company. It may not always be black and white.

Lastly, great tooling / infrastructure generally requires top talent, which can move anywhere and is sensitive to things like ethics. Having great tooling / infrastructure, or the threat of losing great tooling / infrastructure by losing talent to ethical issues, can act as pressure for management to choose certain projects over others. I think Grasshopper is an example of one such decision.

The world is not a set of isolated systems. Your work directly contributes to some process, positive or negative. Just because you don't write code that tracks people doesn't mean your actions have a direct role in enabling people to do that on your behalf.

Ah, I remember being young once. It's interesting how much one's priorities and choices in life changes when you grow up. As a grown up most people will shift to:

1) Quality of life 2) How fun/interesting the job is 3) Ethical issues 4) Money 5) Moneyeh!

These changes only happen if ever because money has no longer become an issue. Which tends to be the case if you spent several years earning an ever increasing IT salary.

How is it ethical for Mozilla to lay off 70 people which was in news recently? Shouldn’t those people get moved to other roles? How is it ethical to lay-off so many people and then preach ethics to others who may have difficulty paying rent every month.

Perhaps it’s not true of yourself, but many people can choose to live a more ethical life in a cheaper place.