It seems more effective to go outside the system: e.g. for affecting change in the military, use civic action. Run for office and change the rules. This works for fighting against bad companies like weapons manufacturers and polluters too btw, since you can push legislation to shape what they do.
^ The cynical take is that everything is too locked-in-place for an individual to make a difference. But all important changes require a collective.
Going back to the original topic: if someone feels that Google as an organization of humans is broken from a values perspective (e.g. lacking systems to capture feedback from bottom up and allow that to shape decisions), the most effective way to change things is not to hopelessly try to become a C-level exec who makes those kinds of decisions. You either need to directly approach the folks in charge (e.g. a union actually helps with this, but also hopefully, if things aren't totally broken, there are internal forums that enable these kinds of interactions), or gather enough internal gravity to get their attention.
If you're in a workplace where neither seems feasible, all you can really do is leave.
The number of talented people in any industry are always limited. If enough people refuse to work at places that they don't ideologically agree with (and maybe dedicate their time working on solutions), at the very least, the operational cost of these companies would increase.
Companies act on the will of the people within them, and as the people change, so do they.
Empires change because they're overrun from outside, or - vanishingly rarely, on moral issues - because the emperor decrees it and/or is replaced.
Amazon may go in a different direction with Bezos gone. It almost certainly won't, but there's always a tiny sliver of potential when the big jobs change.
The political opinions of an Ln are irrelevant. Not even L10s get to set moral policy.
I think this makes sense in situations where there’s an oligopoly or exclusive options (eg, work in government or not).
But when there are thousands of options for engineers (including starting your own) then it doesn’t make sense to me and definitely seems like a societal net negative as well would be really stressful to me.
Knowing that every day, my code is making people angrier and more disconnected would be tough to outweigh with the hope of one day being able to fix things.
It’s not my duty to fix every broken thing so I should focus on fixing and building good things. Maybe one day when all the causes that I think are important are solved, I would consider moving down the chain.
This is the exact argument I used against my Mum when I was joining the Army at 17
And even if you did get somehow manage to get into an influential position, you're still going to get pushback from the board, from shareholders, from customers, and sometimes also from employees.
How many examples can you give of people successfully improving toxic industries from the inside?
All of the influential people that will ever exist, already exist. No new people will ever become influential.
One employee can not have even the slightest influence over the world's largest tech firm, even ignoring that it's publicly traded thus institutional investors are the only people steering the ship. Or ignoring that Brin and Page's research was heavily funded by the CIA and NSA as part of a program specifically designed to encourage silicon valley to develop technology and services to make it easier for them to track social connections between people.
This is a bit like going to work at an oil refinery because you think it'll help climate change. Or working for Marlboro's marketing department thinking you'll help them stop marketing to children.
Even top corporate leadership doesn't really get to steer the ship. It's investors - in publicly traded companies, typically institutional investors, mostly funds. Any sort of corporate "listen to the employees" initiatives are just window dressing; a tap at the bottom of the tank of "employee rabble-rousing."
Just to finish driving home how little impact any worker could have on companies of this size: do you know how Walmart reacts to a store that looks like it's about to successfully unionize despite their union-busting efforts? They turn off the lights and leave.
Now consider that Walmart's goal is to undercut all the small businesses in a community, driving them into the ground. Shutting down an established store leaves a huge vacuum. Walmart is capable of destroying communities at the multi-county level and they do not care.
I've been thinking about that recently, and was wondering if not accepting a job in """bad""" industries (bad is a gross oversimplification here covering things like oil, gas, tobacco, weapons, these kind of things) is in fact running away from your duty. If you don't take a job in these industries, other people will, and these people may be worse than you. Maybe the best moral option is to in fact try as hard as you can to get an influencial position in the industry to promote energy transition, reduce harm from smoking, etc.
I apologize again for the oversimplification of grouping together these different industries, my point here is to group what people think usually as "morally bad", not to pass judgment on people who work in those industries.