No - nobody needs to get the money. You can decide to only work for ethical companies and by doing so you do contribute to the pressure from the labour pool for companies to act ethically.
Yes - there are tons of developers, but a lot of senior devs won't nab offers from facebook due to their poor corporate profile and their hiring is, as a result, incredibly desperate at the senior level. Those folks who do consent to work for them command higher salaries because of this shortfall and most of us just get jobs that don't leave a bad taste in our mouth.
I don't know what an Ethical company means to you or if it should matter. Would groupon be more Ethical then facebook? Apple? Pornhub? Sport betting sites? EA? Walmart? Amazon? Microsoft? Google? Well Fargo? Standard Oil? Starbucks? Blockbusters? Ancestry? Twitter? Reddit? The NBA?
You could debate and compare all of these companies and they come out the same.
NGOs are full of unethical practices hopefully with cover. Small business does unethical at a smaller scale.
More often the successful businesses are the ones willing to be an unethical. The dating company with fake profiles or that tricky sales funnel designed to catch grandma and sell her knitting needles using misleading text.
You start with "I don't know what an Ethical company means to you _or if it should matter_;" I'm a sincere egoist, so I declare: no! It shouldn't matter to you, or to anyone, what my or anyone else's notion of ethical is! Ethics isn't a universal, it's not endemic to the individual experience, and neither is ethics-having in the first place.
I contend that ethics-having is vital to the human experience like vitamins are vital.
Having said that, what would an ethical company look like _to me_? I have one simple test: whether a B2C company enforces that their product or service be used only in specific ways. Any company which fails this test is de facto unethical, and downright uncivil.
That test doesn't sound simple or an ethical measure.
Apple taking away the right to repair is a company enforcing rules for a product be used in certain ways. On the other side facebook tries to get you to use the product in certain ways but rarely enforces it.
It's an ethical measure because I use it to measure whether something conforms to my ethical values. I take it to be axiomatic.
Likewise, it's a simple assessment for me to conduct. "Do I think this corporation enforces that their product or service be used in a certain specific way?" Unfortunately, I'm incapable of formalizing it any better than that. Yes, it's arbitrary, and not rational. I accept that. I don't advocate that anyone use this test, nor adopt my ethical positions; however, it is what I use, and I was primarily interested in sharing my perspective (which is both arbitrary and irrational).
I'd be interested in seeing which set of ethical values helps someone reconcile the two notions of "I'm not a bad person" and "I directly enable human rights abuses on a scale never-before-seen in human history;" or, otherwise, which perspective a person can take that doesn't commit them to the second notion (precluding fundamentally self-deceptive perspectives, such as willful ignorance).
Well for one a stance based upon human agency. "Enabling" is also a massive weasel word of propaganda to attribute all indirect actions and consequences to the target while ignoring the actual actors. The ones committing human rights violations.
Limiting everyone to only non-toxic crayons short, dull, plastic knives that cannot even cut bread would reduce ability to inflict harm. To call blaming the tool childish is an insult to children. Is Sony now responsible for production and distribution of child pornography for making camcorders, screens, and computer memory?
I don't even like Facebook but I can see the prevailing arguments are utterly deranged.
Facebook does not have any regard for human agency, neither the platform nor the corporation, anymore than fentanyl or its producers have.
I agree that the sense of which you speak is a nonsensical perspective; I'm not interested in laying blame on a tool for how the tool is utilized.
The Facebook employee isn't unethical because of their nebulous entanglement in nth-order externalities, whereby bad-person X did bad-thing Y therefore employee Z is guilty by association.
The Facebook employee is unethical because of their direct, active, engagement in developing the actual tools actually utilized by none other than their employer for the explicit purpose of making our world a more user-hostile place.
Does that make me unethical if I contribute to free or open source software, then Facebook uses that software, even though I don't work for them? Why would the answer to that question be different for employees?
Historically it’s a pretty straightforward to argue that pretty well any technology directly enabled human rights abuses on a scale never before seen in human history. Radio, telephones, railroads, you can basically go back as far as you want…wheels, bronze, iron, fire, etc.
This is true! It's a specific case of every tool being useful in its ability to affect the world, that anything which can affect the world will be at some weaponized, and any weapon will eventually be used to further marginalize the marginalized.
There is a very good discussion further down this thread. I do not mean "enables" in the sense that "a tool is used to violate human rights." I mean "enables" in the sense that "Facebook itself commits human rights violations, and employees of Facebook further the aims and means of these violations."
That is, Facebook employees are not unethical because they develop tools that are used to violate human rights. Facebook employees are unethical because they take direct part in the actual policies by which Facebook makes the world a more user-hostile place.
I mean... On one hand, I agree with your bemoaning,but then on second thought - compared to what?
I don't think plumbers,electricians,lawyers, construction workers,car salespeople, you name it necessarily have inherently better average ethics (even once and if we define and agree on what those are or should be :)
Sometimes you have to take the work you can get because the skills you have are in oversupply.
As a software dev, if you're good enough to pass the screening at Facebook, you're good enough to have your pick of employers. You can go to one which is making a positive impact on the world.
> I mean... On one hand, I agree with your bemoaning,but then on second thought - compared to what?
HN software people love to call themselves Engineers with a capital E, but it seems all too often it gets forgotten that the practice of professional engineering requires adherence to professional codes of ethics.
Every accredited engineering program in the US and Canada requires that graduates have completed a Professional Ethics course, but of course the vast majority of "Software Engineers" aren't actually degree-holding engineers. They're by and large Comp Sci grads and to the best of my knowledge there isn't the same requirement for Ethics courses in computer science programs.
Yes - there are tons of developers, but a lot of senior devs won't nab offers from facebook due to their poor corporate profile and their hiring is, as a result, incredibly desperate at the senior level. Those folks who do consent to work for them command higher salaries because of this shortfall and most of us just get jobs that don't leave a bad taste in our mouth.