It’s not selling your soul. It’s called being disillusioned with your impact on the world, a feeling that more and more people are feeling. Long gone are the days where you believed an individual could make a difference. At big corp, you are a small cog in the big machine. You are replaceable.
I’ve volunteered on political campaigns. I’ve volunteered for non profits as a developer. I’ve worked at startups that align closely with my moral views. Guess what? It’s all rotten. Nothing of meaning ever gets done, and the pay is pennies to boot. In the case of my volunteerism, pay equates to the pay of my full time colleagues that worked for those organizations.
So when faced with the choice of doing nothing on something you believe in for very little versus doing nothing on something you don’t for a lot, the choice is extremely easy. The choice is even easier if you factor in the level of privilege it takes to turn down generational money for someone else’s moral compass.
I’ve tried my best not to pass judgment onto you, but ask yourself — what kind of privilege affords you to think that the twenty year old second generation immigrants of today with no family wealth or financial lifeboat should give up their chance of securing generational (not even multigenerational) wealth in the richest country in the world just to achieve the same impact but feel better about themselves?
Are you under the impression the blog post author is?
Look if people need money I don’t think many of us are passing judgement on that. But if you’re privileged and your sole criteria for a new job is accruing capital, you bet I pass judgement on it. And honestly once you get over 200k a year I think the immigrant straw person everyone points out whether they are one or not can probably start getting picky too.
(If you wanna wait until after 300k/yr I’m cool with that too. But at some point you’re accruing enough capital that you can start thinking about what you spend your time on in your day job, and have a moral obligation to do so. When this kicks in is totally relative to a person’s situation.)
I agree there’s a point which that moral inflection point occurs, but I think the number is complex to come up to.
I’ll give an example. I make a pretty obscene salary that falls within your definition of “needing to care”.
But I live in a VHCOL city. I would love to move and work remote, but my partner has a career that’s in tech, but much less remote friendly.
I’m into personal finance, so here’s my projection. Assuming I want to own a home and have kids in this VHCOL region, I will need to work about 20-30 years to achieve this goal. And it’s 1 poorly timed recession from derailing. You know what I really wanted to do in life? Teach high school chemistry and own a cafe.
Am I better off than many many people? Yes. Do I have enough to take 30% pay cut to work at <arbitrary good place>? Are we saying I don’t deserve to live in the region I grew up in, and I should have to move to the Midwest, for the good of society? Force my partner to give up their dream career? Should I give up my dreams of an early retirement from tech into a field that “does good”?
My parents have nothing saved up. 2008 made sure of that. Should I sacrifice the planned war chest I want to build for my parents’ eventual long term care?
And finally, if I do all of this, how much does the world improve by me doing this? Will <evil corp> collapse because I’m not there? Will my wage be distributed to the service workers or Will they go to the next eager applicant? Will my CEO pay more taxes or lose money because I’m not there?
And I hope you consider doing it sooner rather than later, since you may find, as I have, that working on stuff you’re passionate about is one of the ways to do your best work, which often can result in comp increases faster than working on something you care less about. :)
Good luck out there!
That's fine, but you realize your judgement is no more valid than anyone else's right? And to think otherwise is quite arrogant?
Not even this, it's just seeing a job exactly and only for what it is. As opposed to having some pompous judgemental false self-image of "helping the world" when in reality you are way too lazy and selfish to actually do that, like most other people.
It's a common leftist agenda to push and impose this culture of covering up mediocracy with virtue signalling pretending that it's actually a conscious choice and really better to make less money, not just being mediocre. The fight against rationalism and meritocracy, lazy intellectual leftists grasping at straws now starting to sound religious about how your soul will go to hell if you work for google. Give me a break
Because it's not the only driver, it's the most important driver of the money making part of your life. Which is turn is just a means to another end, and that end is your family, hobbies, self actualisation, experiencing the world etc.
Let's ignore there is not much value coming out of education and that people mostly succeed despite having to go through the grind of an antiquated education methodology (which is the only way to certain professions). Let's ignore that better teachers can actually go to private education and get a higher salary.
Software developers can create software solutions that automatically do the work of tons of people (think about how much time is saved by an online checkout vs maintaining a physical store with employees). It's obvious that software is a great way for companies that want to multiply their revenue and that's the most efficient way to generate value for society at scale.
It's therefore obvious that people capable of delivering that solution have more value compared to a teacher.
You may not like Amazon, but people derive benefits from Amazon all the time. They can get stuff directly at home in a day. They can pay online without even seeing a store.
That's a lot of units of small value for the general public being created by the Amazon employees and Amazon itself.
You may not like where society is going, but people choose with their own wallets what they want or not. This is pure democracy.
As a teacher, this is absolutely not true in the way you’re describing it.
Better to go for the high salary which you know will be stable, and will always "work" in the sense of giving benefit to your life. And take any awesome colleagues as a random happy accident and a pure bonus.
If anyone wonders where the stereotype of the soulless immigrant IT drone comes from, it's from places like this board perpetuating it.
You do not need 'generational wealth' to live a decent life: nobody is forcing you to help Facebook earn ad revenue on genocide[0] - you are making that choice yourself.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
Who's writing network drivers these days? Who's pushing streaming technologies to the max? Who's designing a cool iot framework/automated driving?
Some people are...but most are write a microservice type tasks.
Yes.
A distinction needs to be drawn between understanding an action and consequences/blame. You can understand why someone does something but still blame them for making the choice. Knowledge doesn’t obviate responsibility.
This is true, but the fact here is that you do not have any responsibility of choosing your employer according to some moral standard of "making the world a better place". This is just your random opinion, in the same way as I can believe that it's everyone's moral responsibility to only buy local produce. It's objectively a "good thing" to do, and you are free to make that choice if you want. But you can't just decide that it's "everyone's" responsibility to suddenly follow your arbitrary moral code. That is the definition of being arrogant and judgemental.
This idea of only working for companies that can be proven to not have any negative side effects of their business, is nothing but a virtue signalling trend, that is randomly and unfairly only applied to the tech industry, for some reason. You can choose to live your life according to maximising the virtue signalling points you can score on this trend, if you want, but this is not any responsibility, to act martyr for saving the world.
Big businesses have no ideology, even if some people would like to think otherwise. They will do everything they can to get more money. Anything resembling some kind of ideology or politics is done because it is helping the company to get more money.
Corporations aren't good or evil. They do good or evil (whatever someone might deem like so) as a side effect.
Corporations are just a group of people. Corporations do evil because some of the people in them are evil (and the rest are ambivalent).
The problem is we, as a society, tend to hand-wave away corporate malfeasance as some sort of unsolvable problem. It’s not - when a company does evil, we need to hold the leaders responsible. Yes, proving those individual actions/decisions is hard work, but it’s work that needs to be done.
This is one of the main points of Marx's Capital.
It’s basically working for the cigarette company of tech.
Facebook has been paying well since the start, to be able to poach from the "illegally reduced salary cartel members" (Apple, Google, Adobe, etc), 10-15 years ago.
And maybe some people say no, but they still get hundreds of people applying. There is an entire cottage industry built around preparing for their interviews.
This is the article I was vaguely referring to:
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-pays-brand-tax-hire...
Since we’re on something of a tangent, it’s interesting to think about what Meta’s idea of the Metaverse actually is. It isn’t the Internet 3.0 or some kind of grand revolutionary vision.
No, it’s actually just Facebook’s only chance to control a hardware platform.
They can’t control smartphones, they can’t control web browsers, they can’t control smart TVs. It’s not feasible for them to start their own phone OS or web browser.
Apple, for example, made privacy policy changes that have cost Facebook $10 billion in lost revenue, and there nothing Facebook can do about it.
Facebook’s only chance is to hope VR is the next big social tool after text (blogs, Facebook), images (instagram), and video (TikTok, YouTube, Reels).
In my opinion, this won’t really work, unless they truly have some revolutionary hardware up their sleeve. VR will probably forever be a niche: as it stands it’s a sweaty motion sickness-inducing experience.
They just don’t have another avenue to explore to try and have a platform where they have full control over data collection. They’re out of options.
I give the idea of the metaverse a very slim chance of convincing potential customers that it’s better than hanging out with friends On Discord to play some “pancake games.”
I got a lot of these opinions from this video, which really changed my perspective on Meta’s vision for their future:
This is not the first time I've heard this at all and each time it is equally relevant. Unless meta gets everyone goggled up fast I think that there will be so much negative stigma nobody will want to be part of it.
Unless the VR experience is flawless, and I mean better than reality, people can't get hooked.
If the hardware lags even a bit, the headaches and dizziness become unbearable. Depth-of-field is another disorienting factor, and field-of-view yet another.
I believe we do not yet have the technology to offer such an experience, let alone cheaply. As such, Facebook is prematurely investing in it.
VR is Meta’s only chance to control a hardware platform. It’s really as simple as that. As long as they don’t control iOS or Android they’re at the mercy of Google and Apple, who have no interest in making life easy for Meta.
For Meta, VR has to work to stave off their decline. But unless they’ve got some revolutionary hardware up their sleeve, they’re working with a sweat and nausea-inducing niche.
If I am being paid a lot at one place, and very little at another place, I might feel more of my surplus labor time is expropriated from the lower paying place. If I program, and one place pays more, it is an indicator (although just one, and not a solid one) that they exploit their workforce once.
A handful of companies might be even more distasteful than the other ones, but I look at all of them as exploitive - so I may bypass a few companies, but all corporations employing people are exploitative, and I am a wage slave.
The concept of anything changing due to individual choice does not add up to me. Things happen due to mass action, not some individual choice with some liberal moral reasoning. Amazon exploits their factory workers, but the factory workers who organized and voted to join a union in Staten Island have improved the lot of all Amazon workers, and other workers by their organizing and mass action. Some individual moral liberal reasoning to not join Amazon would not have been better. I'm sure most joined because it was the best and highest paying job they could find.
Also, I don't see the work I do at a corporation as being something that is not causing harm in the world. It is inherently exploitative. The notion of a woke corporation doing good in the world is a contradiction. If I am doing something good it is when I am not working - organizing, educating and agitating. Primarily so that workers have more control over their labor.
However when one the pick of the litter, there's a spectrum between getting $1M for a company responsible for polarization, breeding hate, and damaging democracy...to living well comfortably on $200k+ (or even $300k+) to at least try to do something meaningful. It's 8 hours a day of your time, you vote with how you want it to affect the world
Just kidding. It shouldn’t need to be said, but don’t actually off yourself.
On the other hand, if someone is just trying to make the most money, they may end up causing harm. There are many jobs like that - but the scale is more at bigger companies.
I don’t think it makes sense to judge someone based on the company they work for if you don’t actually know whether that individual’s actions are making the world a better place or a worse place.
If you are, let’s say the boat mechanic of someone making a business of dumping toxic chemicals in the sea, then you are clearly doing evil.
Similarly, if you are doing “harm reduction” at Facebook, you are still enabling them to exist, thereby enabling them to get away with doing more harm overall.
You tipped your hand with the 'damaging democracy' phrase, which boils down to "my political opponents are allowed to speak on the platform". In pursuit of your quest to destroy the freedom of expression for your political opponents, you severely damage your retirement (in my opinion, deservedly).
Oh please.