It saddens me that taking an ethical stance is now derisively considered "virtue signaling".

I would never work at Meta, not because refusing to do so would make me feel good, but because working there would make me feel like I'm making the world a worse place.

The idea of having a moral compass is antagonistic to the worldview of a lot of people in tech, so they are instinctively dismissive or condescending to anyone who does.

This seems like a pretty widely shared ethos in today's software engineering culture. "I'd happily build the Torment Nexus if you pay me enough!" No ethical baseline below which we refuse to pass. Simply a required $$$:EVIL ratio.

It's not always like that. Most of the team would be hired to move protobufs around for the Torment Nexus so it seems quite innocuous.

Yea, I think this is how a lot of engineers rationalize it. "Well, I'm not directly participating in my company's A/B experiment to see what types of content drive children to suicidal ideation! I'm just moving data from the project's logging side of the stack to the metrics side of the stack so that reports can be generated. Don't blame me!"