[Diederich]

A couple of honest questions coming in. I would very much like to engage in a good faith conversation with you.

> ... unwilling to represent the failings your company has done to society, then I need to hear a justification before moving further in the conversation.

I'm going to replace 'company' with 'organization'.

Do you harbor similar opinions about people who have previously or currently work for a federal government? State government?

You mention 'tech company': do you have such opinions about people who have worked for, for example, IBM?

I look forward to your response, and I promise I'm not trying to trap or bait you in any way. Thanks.

[errantspark]

Not OP, and I'm not sure I advocate for drawing such hard lines, but I hold a similar enough view that perhaps this will be of interest to you.

I do harbor similar opinions about people who have previously or currently worked for the government, or any organization that behaves in a way inconsistent with my ethical framework. I strive to see things as close to the shade of gray that they really are and act accordingly.

I more or less believe in free will and thus the responsibility for one's actions is one's own. The world is complicated and actions must be viewed in context. My opinion of someone who works for Google as a lead on their ad-tech will be worse than someone who works for Google X or someone who's on their first job out of college. My opinion will improve drastically if they leave Google on ethical grounds, or show remorse for their time there as an ex-Googler.

I think that on the surface level there are things big tech does are positive for society but the second and third order effects are frightening and negative in ways that are hard to bound. There's no way I can see to disentangle that from your personal responsibility for your actions that serve to advance their aims.

[montagg]

If you're hiring someone, it seems reasonable to ask about someone's ethical considerations to make sure they're in line with your company's. You're going to put a certain amount of trust in them. I, too, would be skeptical of hiring someone who didn't even recognize the tension of working for Uber or Facebook and both the good and bad things they have put into the world. I'm also not sure I'd draw such as hard line as OP, but I get where the line of questioning comes from.

I have worked for companies that do things I disagree with. I've thought about it and come to terms with it, even as I have expressed my disagreements when I believed it made sense to do so. I'd be happy to hire someone in a similar situation, because it shows they at least are aware that their work has ethical considerations.

[jentist_retol]

I work in the security org now, and so I deal with a lot of exmilitary and exfederal employees. Considering that the military is a institution in this country that helps a lot of working class kids get education and training...

It really comes down to choices and consent for me. If you're in the military, that may have been the option for an 18 year old and certainly I wasn't thinking about ethics when I was 18. But if you're able to work at an organization with a high bar such as Facebook, surely you have other options - unless you're a new grad - the stark reality is that when you get out of college, you take what you get.

I would definitely be a little tougher on someone who joined Facebook (or the NSA) in the last few years and already had job experience (senior/staff level) versus a Jr engineer or someone who'd been there since before a lot of these issues came to light (although that raises the question: why are yo u still there?)

And, my opinion on Facebook has changed drastically in the past few years.

So anyways, it's really contextual and empathetic. I'm not just trying to "GOTCHA" some guy who joined the military out of high school before fully appreciating the ramifications of their actions (I wouldn't have!).

But if you have 10 years of experience in software and you go work for the NSA... well, I have some questions.

I know there's a lot of gaps, and I'm ashamed to admit I don't really have a strong framework - this is a personal failing, and something I've really been thinking about more recently.

edit: i got downvoted. I'd like to know what I can improve on, please reply, thanks. I'm trying to be better!

[shmel]

While you have a point about 18yo, it is very difficult to overlook the main job of the military: kill people. NSA flies below the radar or at least used to, but it is very difficult to not notice that the US military mostly come to foreign countries and kill people there. Even if you are a teenager.

However, with FB it is less obvious due to their fancy talk about community and shit. I understand your outrage about facebook, but I don't understand you can give a pass to people who essentially say: "I gonna kill people, it is okay, they are probably bad people anyway".

[triceratops]

> it is very difficult to overlook the main job of the military: kill people.

Not really. Its stated job is to keep other people from killing you.

It's unfortunate and unjust that in many cases this devolves into pre-emptive killing. But for most sovereign nations, there's really no alternative to having a military.

[shmel]

Does it matter? Stated job of FB is to connect the community, allow you to share your life with your loved ones and so on. Stated job of NSA is to maintain IT security of the nation and perhaps hack foreign intelligence, not create a network of mass surveillance at home. But we judge them for other things, right?

[jentist_retol]

>While you have a point about 18yo, it is very difficult to overlook the main job of the military: kill people.

Yes. And I have never been faced with someone with a long military career. If they were interviewing straight out of a long career, it would definitely fit into the "senior person" context as mentioned.

It's a tough question, for sure, but I don't think I would be able to shy away from it. I guess we'll find out if I'm ever in that position... I should probably prepare for if that ever happens.

My stance on this has been getting firmer and firmer the more senior I get. I honestly wonder if I'd have the presence or guts required to ask that hard of a question.

[Diederich]

Thanks for your considerate response. If you don't mind, I'd love to have you expand on it a bit further.

Specifically, how do you feel about other government positions, besides the military and intelligence?

Reading your response, I'm getting the sense that this line of conversation is more about senior people with recent employment, which is sensible.

My main point is that big organizations....all of them....do a lot of different things and have a lot of different impacts. And many big organizations have extremely large impacts.

Some of those will be good, and some of them will be bad. But one way or another, both the 'good' and 'bad' impacts will both be very large.

Case in point: the US Government is an enormous and old organization. Nobody can rationally deny that it has done an enormous amount of both good and bad, and it's a matter of opinion and discussion as to which pile is larger.

Another example: IBM is a tech company that's old and has had a huge impact for a long time, both good and bad.

Before I get to Facebook, I'll note that it's widely held that all creatures, and humans especially, tend remember and weigh the bad quite a bit more than the good.

Facebook has created an enormous amount of impact over a pretty short period of time, nobody disagrees with that.

I strongly suspect this won't be a popular opinion, but I believe that Facebook has created, on the whole, more good impact than bad.

Before the reader reacts too negatively to that statement, please know that I personally consider technology/communication technology/especially social media technology to be among the top two or three most likely existential threats to human civilization.

I personally believe that Facebook was the first to take the inevitable next steps toward the now obviously dangerous territory we find ourselves in.

So, that's a tiny portion of my personal context.

I admit that your opinions made me somewhat uncomfortable, though I do understand where you're coming from.

I also admire your (somewhat risky!) transparency here.

[jentist_retol]

Posts that were doing well have been getting downvoted pretty heavily in the last hour. I'm curious to know why that is, but they don't seem to comment.

Ah well, that's the nature of an open forum such as this.

[elliekelly]

I definitely think there's a bit of "sliding scale of accountability" that makes sense. I won't begrudge someone who worked for Amazon in the warehouse because it paid slightly better than Walmart or Home Depot down the road. But the higher up you are in an organization the more control you (presumably) have and so, in my mind, the more "culpable" you are for that organization's actions. That can still be difficult to suss out though, especially in an interview. A lot of hiring managers won't like to hear you "bad mouth" your former employer so even when people do feel their prior employer wasn't quite ethical I doubt they'd come out and say it. It's much more likely they'd dance around it if they address it at all.

I also think even highly ethical people tend to be overly optimistic about how much change they can bring about within an organization. Changing the ethics of a massive organization isn't nearly as easy as overhauling operations or implementing a new tech stack - and neither of those things are easy either!

Tim Bray comes to mind. I have no doubt that quitting was the very last arrow in his quiver to bring meaningful change at the company. He's a very intelligent guy, highly respected in his field, and has an entire career to prove he's a capable and creative problem solver. Imagine all of the other things he tried to do before he quit? And he made a noisy exit but I'm sure there are others who haven't and felt the same way. Even at facebook, too.

[jentist_retol]

Yes, it's absolutely contextual.

At the very least, asking a softball question will help filter out someone I might not want to personally work with.

I actually think interviewing really sucks, because you spend an hour getting to know someone who you'll potentially spend 40 hours a week for years with? That's a whole separate topic, though.

[triceratops]

> i got downvoted. I'd like to know what I can improve on,

I didn't downvote you but I suspect it's because you compared working in the military favorably to working for FB.

[jentist_retol]

Well, frankly, there's a need on HN for "correctness" only. And I'm not sure what's correct. And I haven't faced some of the "hypothetical" scenarios posed here.

And if a resume came on my desk with something like what was posed, I would have to pause, and think. And think. And think.

Some of the posts in here actually worry me though. There's a real failing of ethical concerns and more importantly, ethical mentorship in our field. I'm a result of that. I'm not trying to "gotcha" FAANG employees or vets or anything.

[Diederich]

Yes, I appreciate your position, candor and transparency here. Also, that you're apparently rather uncertain as to what's "right" and "wrong". As a civilization, we're sailing in very new seas.

[throwaheyy]

The downvoting is standard HN holier-than-thou moralizing, but I agree that it’s not really a valid comparison.

A military is, for better or worse, a necessary requirement for maintaining a society that won’t get taken advantage of by others. While it’s easy to point to “job is to kill people”, that’s a simplistic reduction and many who are in the military will not do so. As much as one can be all Kum-ba-ya and imagine a Utopia in which armed forces are not necessary, life doesn’t really work that way.

Facebook is a form of publicly consumed entertainment, but unchecked they will happily fuck with people’s minds for more clicks/revenue, and they absolutely should be held to a higher standard than they are.

They two aren’t even in the same league when it comes to ethics.

[EarthIsHome]

I'd like to point out a few things.

First, the military is not a socialist organization, because the workers (soldiers) do not own the means of production. They don't have a say on where they fight and who they fight. The military is an arm of the bourgeoisie and is guided by the whims of those in power, not the people within the rank and file of the military or those who go and die.

Second, Yes, the military provides recruits with opportunities (e.g. postsecondary education, etc). But would they join the military without those incentives? i.e. If everyone had their basic needs met through redistribution of wealth, would they choose to go into the military? It's more like that they join the military, because it's one of the few ways of getting out of their economic situation. It's a form of coercion. It's the carrot that gets them to join the military institution.