[munk-a]

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.

[ipaddr]

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.

How ethical is the company you are working for?

[cybernautique]

This is whatabouttery to a fine degree.

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.

[ipaddr]

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.

[cybernautique]

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).