[mehrdadn]

I feel like it's difficult to bring it up. What are you going to do... tell your friends/students their next job is at an unethical company?

Also, people generally believe it's quite possible to work on good things in a company that also does bad things. (And many of them indeed will.) So it's not the most compelling argument that you shouldn't work with X/Y/Z because they did bad thing W.

[DyslexicAtheist]

> What are you going to do... tell your friends/students

mentors, professors and friends can have a lot of influence which (imo) could be a moral and ethical obligation one may like to exercise? If you were receiving advise or learning as a junior and looking for direction from a mentor (or any person you feel you can learn from and also trust), wouldn't you appreciate hearing their personal opinion on a subject, and how they arrived at their believes?

> Also, people generally believe it's quite possible to work on good things in a company that also does bad things. (And many of them indeed will.) So it's not the most compelling argument that you shouldn't work with X/Y/Z because they did bad thing W.

it's difficult if not impossible to convince somebody that a company they just passed their 1st interview with, to refuse because of ethics. Especially if they never had a job they might say I'll do it anyway and see for myself, I can still bail if it's that bad.

But employees already working there have more power by changing things from within. I think this is why point above is valid because everyone has mentors so speaking up (without judgement) is key. Only by changing the inside it's possible to have a dialogue about impact on environment/society and only by talking about it will we eventually be able to abolish the practice of labeling any such discussion as anti-profit or social-justice seeking. It does affect the long-term image and how the company/brand will be perceived in the long run.

[alxlaz]

YES!

This is particularly important for young professionals! It's super important for fresh graduates, who enrolled in CS/CompEng because of how enthusiastic they are about technology to hear this stuff!

Why? Because, while we're wondering whether or not ethics is even something that we should bring up in a discussion like this, Facebook has PR and recruiting departments full of smart people who are actively working on getting these folks on board.

And when you've spent the last four years of your life studying a highly-competitive field, in which there's barely any room for the study of philosophy, ethics and humanities, it's pretty hard to figure out this stuff on your own.

So damn right tell friends/students their next job is at an unethical company. I mentor interns every year, and whenever one of them asks me about companies like Facebook or Google, I absolutely tell them that I would never work there. I tell their recruiters the same thing. I tell my friends from outside the tech world the same thing.

> Also, people generally believe it's quite possible to work on good things in a company that also does bad things.

The problem isn't that you can't do good things, the problem is that these companies use them to whatabout the media away from the bad things they do. You think Facebook worked on those "Mark yourself as safe" thing out of the goodness of their heart? As if it brings them any kind of money? No -- they do it to capture a little bit more of their attention, and to point out to any reporter that questions their morale that they're totally on the Light Side of the Force, just look at how many users rely on us to let their friends know they're fine.

[incongruity]

The Socratic method might be a viable option - ask questions. Ask if they have concerns. Ask where their hard-stop lines are. Be friendly about it - attacks don’t help things but conversations can, even if it doesn’t look like it in the moment. Bringing the topic up and making it something people talk about will actually start to help.

[JohnFen]

> What are you going to do... tell your friends/students their next job is at an unethical company?

Yes.