Look for those who are trying to serve established respectable professions, ideally have already done so for many years or decades. Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism (in the ideal sense).
Then look at their own mission. Then look at their own work. Do they show their work? Are they open? Do they willingly allow their customers to audit their work product? Does how they talk about their work match the work product itself? Does the thing do what it says on the tin? Are they hypocrites with respect to those they serve or those they manage?
These are my strategies and I’ve found they lead to working almost exclusively with people who have high Integrity.
>Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism
In America, in 2026, this is a particularly dark joke.
I studied accounting in part because my father was an engineer at a public company that was rocked by an accounting scandal. It impacted my family in many ways for years and left deep impressions on me during my formative years.
There are many CPAs who believe strongly that part of their job is protecting the public interest. I have seen more than a handful go to the mat for things that were highly principled. Sometimes they did so knowing that they were risking their job / career / reputation. It's not a patient dying on the table sure, but I know many who take enormous pride in their responsibilities as accountants. I have seen lots of CPAs standing up for what is right, and I have watched executive teams yield to them almost as often.
It's easy to get cynical, but there's lots of good ones out there.
My point is just that there are lots of people that wake up every day and make serious, sustained efforts to exercise due care in their professional duties.
The giveaway is the "in 2026", which implies that it would not be a dark joke in other years.
Thus the poster is evidently indicating that:
The legal system has been undermined and been shown to have no integrity because it allows illegal actions by the rich and the political class.
Journalism has been undermined because major media outlets have been purchased by rich people who only allow the media to publish pro-conservative, pro-rich, talking points.
Healthcare is a larger stretch for their dark joke, but the governmental agency that sets the rules for healthcare research and what are the socially approved recommendations is run by RFK Jr. who is a well-known anti-vaxx guy, also the U.S has left WHO and may not get access to WHO data anymore, and last year the CEO of an insurance company got shot basically for denying insurance claims for healthcare, indicating some level of corruption. There may also be more dark joke levels in regards to healthcare if one is a female.
Accounting is also something of a stretch, but there are governmental shenanigans where common accounting practices are involved that indicate corruption and that might make you feel like "accounting, what a joke" /strawman quotes there
That, at any rate, is what I suppose can only be meant by the somewhat obtuse phrase dark joke in 2026.
On edit: no wait, CEO of United Healthcare got shot at the end of 2024.
Speaking as a USian:
If one hasn't been paying attention, one might have missed the deterioration of the courts and law enforcement apparatus, the normalization of many types of fraud (accounting included), the consolidation of news companies and subsequent decimation of effective investigative journalism, as well as the gradual deterioration of healthcare over the past several decades (with bonus acceleration of the healthcare deterioration around 2019 when folks decided to get the fuck out of a profession run by people who evidently gave few shits about the safety and wellbeing of its practitioners and the efficacy and timeliness of the care given to those served by it).
I'll not claim that this Administration isn't the most visibly worse one we've had in quite a while, because that's plainly untrue. This Administration does do absolutely awful things that -in a just world- folks would be tried and imprisoned for, and do those things very loudly and visibly. But, well, there's a lot of precedent for Administrations doing (and/or turning a blind eye to) just godawful things.
To be very clear, one of the things from the original Trump platform was to "drain the swamp", right? Now, clearly that's not what he meant... or maybe he did from different terms maybe from you and I. But for supporters? They saw a government that they felt was corrupt, wasteful, and out of touch. Propaganda or not, it doesn't matter.
That whole idea of the government being wasteful and untrusted reared its head again in the 2024 election with DOGE.
Now things politically have flipped, and more non-partisan or less radical individuals have been pushed out to make way for partisan yes-men. Now the people on the other side of that political equation no longer trust things like the Federal Judiciary, Department of Education (or that it will even be funded), things like the Center for Disease Control, etc.
Oh and journalism! Everything has been bought out, and been allowed to in massive mergers by the Trump administration. Then they stuck government-approved heads at each of them.
Not acknowledging these realities is the first step toward repeating them.
Somehow, trust in institutions in this country will have to be rebuilt.
Yes, and his WHOLE THING that got him elected was that he was going to "fix it".
He got a lot of independents too.
The problem, or perceived problem, predates Trump and will not end when he is gone.
Suffice it to say, it was not a response to "the very ideas" of those fields, but to their state "In America, in 2026". GP suggests that people working in them automatically assume a sort of virtue just because they overpaid for an advanced degree, and I reject that, in light of how they've operated for most of my life.
>you're making things worse and creating cover for unethical people
This is, ironically, my own point about what GP said.
Also, you can do your own job with personal integrity regardless of what others are doing.
Like everyone else at the moment, you're living in interesting times.
AFAIK, there are not enough respectable companies for even the senior engineers.
(And you may have already noticed that a lot of companies are run by people who make a half-hearted effort to drape the company with positive PR language. But they'll soon hint at their true intentions with their actions. Even in a brand new startup, you can simply look at equity allocation, to see what the founder actually thinks about warm-fuzzy ideas like social equality and valuing others: compare their allocation of wannabe-billionaire founder shares, to the token amount of peanuts in stock options that they think the first hires deserve if the company is successful.)
The good news is that a lot of people are looking for high total compensation, or career stability, as higher priorities than respectability, so... less competition for the respectable jobs.
One idea: make a ranking list of companies based on how respectable you think they are (recognizing that most have downsides), and then see how close to the top of the ranking you should focus your energies. Do a first shot at this ranking early on (and revise over time based on actions, not overtures), and you might check yourself when a company with low respectability ranking approaches you.
When you find a good company, let people know.
Not in a "new-grad or corporate PR appropriating meaningless platitudes" kind of way. But in a "I have seen multiple times how one untrustworthy person can easily wreck all the work of a team or organization, and make their lives miserable, so averting that is a high priority" kind of way.
Lately, in business context, I tend to characterize what I seek from people as "alignment". I think that many (not all) business people are still willing to buy in on that.
And it will just have to be a given that the company and team goals with which people are aligned are respectable.
What seems to be getting more difficult in the last few years is finding companies with respectable goals. Of course you knew to avoid any company in crypto. But now, with with a new VC gold rush of AI (often involving the same people who were happy to run crypto scams), there aren't a lot of startups that look respectable.
Not all AI companies, nor all companies doing AI, are bad. But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush?