Re:Ask HN: Why did you leave the tech industry?
by apohn on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @02:26PM
(#22881214)
If you take what I said to the logical extreme then sure.
What I was trying to say was that it's very black and white thinking to say something like ads = exploiting users and healthcare = not exploiting users.
Since Facebook usually comes up when people talk about unethical companies, let me use them as an example. Let's say there is a team that improves ad targeting by 5%, helping to reduce the number of irrelevant ads people see. Let's say there's another team that reduces data center electricity's utilization by 5%, which helps the environment.
Is the ad team more or less ethical than the data center team if they are basically both supporting the same end goal?
I don't work for Facebook if that matters. And I have no answers to any of the questions I posed above outside of my personal preference to not work in online advertising unless I need to do it to survive.
What I was trying to say was that it's very black and white thinking to say something like ads = exploiting users and healthcare = not exploiting users.
Since Facebook usually comes up when people talk about unethical companies, let me use them as an example. Let's say there is a team that improves ad targeting by 5%, helping to reduce the number of irrelevant ads people see. Let's say there's another team that reduces data center electricity's utilization by 5%, which helps the environment.
Is the ad team more or less ethical than the data center team if they are basically both supporting the same end goal?
I don't work for Facebook if that matters. And I have no answers to any of the questions I posed above outside of my personal preference to not work in online advertising unless I need to do it to survive.