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by flying_dutchman 2444 days ago
This is not accurate. There are large number of jobs that have a directly impact, as part of solid teams working on things for the right reasons.
3 comments

I strongly disagree. Many many jobs, especially the higher paying ones, are bullshit jobs. Real work to actually improve the world doesn't tend to make a whole lot of money, it's much easier to lobby for bureaucratic inefficiencies you can inhabit, create artificial scarcity, gamble with other people's money, or outright scam people.

Look at the web. There's a ton of jobs (many would say a nigh-overfull bubble's worth) in the web right now, yet most webshit doesn't meaningfully improve anyone's life and is instead just a way to trick people into looking at ads or providing their personal data so it can be collected and sold.

I work for Google and Google has a lot of products that has improved my life immensely. Google maps, Google search, Google docs, gmail and Youtube are all very useful products, especially for poor people who can't afford paid options. I don't feel bad in the slightest for working to improve them.

People say that Google does questionable things but I haven't seen any of it. Of course as a bottom-up organization it is very likely that other parts of Google are less ethical but that doesn't really affect my work or conscience.

> People say that Google does questionable things but I haven't seen any of it.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/11/18260712/google-amit-sing... (Google confirms it agreed to pay $135 million to two execs accused of sexual harassment)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... (High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_regarding_Goo...

Correction: I haven't seen any of it in my work. My work is not related to any of those things. I have only seen unethical things done by Google in the news, never any emails encouraging anyone to do unethical things or anything like that.
One example doesn't make his comment invalid.
In cases like this it helps to give examples, as the person you are responding to evidently doesn't believe this is the case. Maybe you can change their mind!
I suppose it heavily depends on what is considered impact and the right reasons.