[ChrisMarshallNY]

I worked for almost 27 years, for a company that aligned with my personal morals. The pay was substantially less than what I could have made at less-circumspect outfits, and there was a nonzero amount of really annoying overhead, but I don't regret it, at all. I slept well at night, made good friends, never wrote any software that I regretted, learned heaps of stuff, and helped to develop and launch the careers of a few others.

Mentioning that here, elicits scorn.

[robertlagrant]

> Mentioning that here, elicits scorn.

No it doesn't. "Woe is ethical me" comments like this might.

[phil21]

From a casual observer who (used to) mostly lurk, it absolutely does.

Maybe the tide has been turning the past few years but it was endemic from my point of view a decade ago when I first started reading HN.

Folks who didn’t chase career maximization were typically treated like naive children at best. Working for a third of the wages in some flyover state at a boring company vs some adtech company with an options package was panned on the regular.

It was always part of the zeitgeist you switch jobs early and often to maximize your career progression vs. chill with the same company for most of your life.

[ghaff]

I'm not sure it was so much of an ethical statement as you should be switching jobs every couple years to maximize your paycheck.

Of course, now, it's more about being happy to have a well-paying job as opposed to working a "full-time" job with two or three paychecks from different companies.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Seriously?

I've not really mentioned ethics, before.

The scorn is for working for one employer for that amount of time.

[kstrauser]

Not from me, it doesn't. That's enviable and I'm glad to hear you were able to have that.

[sourcepluck]

Geez, where do I sign up?

Sounds great. Don't listen to the pseudo-realists who chase dreams of grandeur rather than doing something (at least semi-) useful or good with their lives.

[dgfitz]

I imagine the scorn would occur if you planted a flag about how the company morals aligned with your own.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Actually, this is the first time I've done that.

I pretty much enjoy the world I live in. That upsets some folks.

[obscurette]

Almost same here, but I also understand that it's a luxury. At this point in my life I can afford it, but I've also seen times when I could do anything to get food on table for my family. Luckily for me those times didn't last.

[titanomachy]

Have a dose of anti-scorn from me. What qualifies any one of us to tell another that they're living their life wrong?

[globalnode]

My opinion after reading HN for quite a while is that your average HN poster is well educated and knows a lot of theory but struggles with ethics. Perhaps even seeing a debate against ethics as a game to be won.

[throwaway2037]

Why do you think well educated non-HNers are any different? Hint: They aren't. Why do people think HN people are special or different? <repeat same hint here>

[talldayo]

I don't think people are scornful of your work. It makes me happy to hear that people still find meaningful employment within their means of living. It's increasingly rare that someone is paid to do something impactful these days. You should feel happy.

The part that will attract scorn is pretending that everyone can do that. In the same way that religion spread by preying on the poor and lecherous portions of society, so too does the tech industry offer the downtrodden and mistreated a better life in exchange for moral leniency. It's not even the "revenge of the nerd" stuff past a certain point - if a $60,000/year software engineer in America turns up their nose to a contract, you can simply send it to a development firm in Pakistan for pennies on the dollar and get roughly equivalent results. There is no moral bartering with at-will employment. It's an illusion.

As individuals, you and I are both powerless to stop the proliferation and success of harmful businesses. America's number one lesson from the past 4 centuries of economic planning is that laissez-faire policy does not course-correct without government intervention. Collective bargaining only works when you're bargaining on a market you control - boycotting certain employers is entirely ineffective when you compare it to legislative reform.

So, with that being said, saving your dignity is not enough to save society. You have every right to take comfort in working a job that you respected - but nobody here owes you any more respect than their dairy farmers or the guy in Thailand that made their $55 Izod sweatshirt. If you come around expecting the hero treatment, then you're bound to feel shortchanged. Sorry.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

And you think I posted that, expecting "hero treatment"?

That's the problem, right there, I guess. We can't even mention things that should not elicit anything much more than "That's nice," without someone thinking that it's tubthumping. I wasn't inviting criticism of my decision. Sorry.

Sometimes (most times, actually), I post stuff, just to say "Me too," or "Here's my experience with that. Maybe it might help." I'd like to think that it helps others to maybe feel less alone, in their world.

People mention that they do stuff, all the time, here, with the direct expectation of being lauded and cheered. In many cases, I'm really happy to laud them, and cheer them on. There's some cool stuff that goes down, here.

I'm not really into that kind of thing, for myself. I'm retired, and follow my own muse. I've made some big impacts, but not really ones that most folks here would care about. What people here, think of me, doesn't really matter that much. I'm just not that important, and most folks here, aren't as important as they might think they are. We're all just Bozos on this bus. I have a fairly rich social life, and have a lot of people that like me (and, also, dislike me), because they actually know me.

People also post some stuff that reveals some fairly warped and mutated personal worldviews. Most times, I just ignore that. I don't think attacking someone in public does much to help the world; especially in a professional context like HN.

We live in a strange society.

[drewcoo]

> And you think I posted that, expecting "hero treatment"?

Seemed more masochistic to me. Different strokes for different folks.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

:)

> "Treat me like da pig dat I am."

- Andrew Dice Clay

[talldayo]

> And you think I posted that, expecting "hero treatment"?

I mean, yeah. This is absolutely something that should make you feel wonderful as an individual, being able to help people that are aligned with your moral understanding. But it's also something you can't exactly share - you'll never communicate the happiness other people felt from your assistance, and you're almost certainly not going to find people that universally respect your own moral compass. On the flip side, there are people with extremely perverse senses of justice that consider murder and automated attacks on civilian populations to be an unparalleled moral imperative - I've seen them right here on HN.

It's your life, I can't tell you how to live it. My point is to tell you why people everywhere will bristle at that type of rhetoric, the holier-than-thou "this is how we transcend suffering" memoir written by hands that spent more time touching a smartphone than doing manual labor to feed a family. If you are in a position where you are emotionally, financially and politically secure enough to sponsor a life that you are satisfied with living, then your satisfaction begins and ends with you. It's like announcing your valiant donation to charity on a public soapbox - to whom does it serve? Will you be donating the soapbox to charity too?

Look out on the world as it is today, and you'll see a society of people that reject causal opportunity and change. We don't boycott companies when they send death squads to kill dissident plantation workers because their products taste too good. We can't boycott our tech companies when they drive margins low enough to install suicide nets and sell user data for profit, because the immediate access to porn and Facebook is too enthralling.

You're a little guy, a cog in that great big machine. If you know that playing your part had great impact on the world, then it should bring you a profound sense of personal justice. The part that makes people scornful is when you zoom out and look at the machine, then conclude "we should all be cogs, imagine how much more efficient the whole thing would run!" Many of us aren't made of steel, and have too few spokes to fill the same role that you do.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> holier-than-thou

All I said, was that I worked for a company for a long time, was basically happy, the work environment was not perfect, I found their ethics attractive, and don't have any regrets.

We live in a really sick world, if that can be interpreted as "holier-than-thou." I know dozens of people, personally, that can say exactly the same thing. They don't consider themselves "special," and I don't really care that much. Almost none are in the tech industry, though, so maybe that's the difference.

I also know a lot of folks that work at jobs they hate; often, for big money. I don't waste time judging them, and am just happy to have them in my life.

I tend to avoid folks that are actively trying to be unethical, but I'm not on a mission to convert them. If they ever want to do things differently, I might have something they could use.

It's sad to think that someone, saying what I did, is somehow "wrong." It's really not a big deal.

[ncr100]

This is likely a misinterpretation.

It's not "pretending" or seeking "moral leniency" for individuals to use their agency to identify the potential for meaningful work, even within constraints. Recognizing the impact of work, and making conscious choices about how one contributes is more the point.

There exist systemic exploitations of labor certainly.

On being the change ...

It is not heroic idol-seeking to share one's experience, nor to ask others to consider the values dimensions of their work.

Even on a small scale, change can be made. It's worthy to highlight it, and moreover celebrating good can motivate values based thinking in others.

[wizzwizz4]

> if a $60,000/year software engineer in America turns up their nose to a contract, you can simply send it to a development firm in Pakistan for pennies on the dollar and get roughly equivalent results.

People who live in Pakistan are also capable of making moral decisions, you know. Your argument only holds if there are infinitely-many people in some kind of idealised labour market, but in the real world there are less than a million people capable of that kind of work.

If you plan to take an immoral job and then work-to-rule while sabotaging the evil schemes, charismatically deflecting all blame to those who were trying to make it succeed (or, better still, keeping the organisation as a whole from understanding that their plan has been sabotaged), then that's a different question, and I'd wish you the best of luck. (Not that such a person would be bragging about it here, anyway.)

[BurningFrog]

Given how easy it is to recruit contract killers all over the world, I think any unethical software with money behind it will be built. Maybe with paying some premium for the worst stuff.

[wizzwizz4]

It's easy to recruit a hitman, but hard to recruit a competent hitman. (See: the subcontracting hitmen in 2019.) And killing people is, in general, much easier than writing software.

[Nasrudith]

By definition the best hitmen aren't for public sale, they are held by the local holder of the monopoly on violence. Because if they weren't then they wouldn't have said monopoly in the first place.

[problemsolver12]

Can confirm.

[staunton]

You're saying that you've killed people for money? Or that you hired killers before?

[camgunz]

I have friends who work(ed) at various FAANG companies, and maybe even more shamefully at "silly" places like d2c mattress companies and whatever (I worked on the civil side of a defense contractor, I'm not... ugh, innocent either). They're all pretty self-aware about all this, and I'm the first to say I'll never criticize you for how you make your money. Life in the US is oddly unstable; everything gets exponentially better the more money and status you have; that's the game. There's no sense cosplaying some kind of ethics here.

But, that's a different argument than the collective action problem argument you're making here. This isn't a collective action problem. Tech workers can spurn unethical work, just like doctors, lawyers, chemical engineers, etc. Very few of us would work on ransomware, right? Now we're just talking about degrees.

I just think we're starting to realize the "money firehoses" that are either ad tech companies or VCs laundering government ZIRP stimulus are at best unhelpful and at worst eating away at our mental health, our democracy, and our society. The problem is that these are truly behemoth companies, if you don't work for one the company you do work for probably wouldn't be viable without them (do you... have anything in the cloud?) As noted in TFA, there is a real Upton Sinclair problem here. Tech is unimaginable without Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple.

In the absence of legislation, I think tech workers should unionize and demand the following:

- ethical, highly regulated supply chains with penalties that make violations economically non-viable

- fundamental privacy protections: companies cannot share or sell data about you without your consent (basically a data HIPPA), and they're liable for security breaches (looking at you Microsoft)

- slowly phase out advertising. This is a hot take I know, but it's super bad for humans, its critics were right the whole time, and it enables business models (e.g. social media companies) that are somehow even worse.

- ethical treatment of workers: no more union-busting Amazon workers

Maybe it'll take 100 years, yeah, but hopefully humans are still around by then.