How do you work at a job where you fundamentally disagree with the company's ethics?
I mean working somewhere like Qualcomm or Microsoft when you care about FOSS, democracy, and the public commons, or a weapons manufacturer for a military that invades other countries and kills innocent people in their homes.
By doing the minimum required to not get fired.
This is the way
I do that anyway
Ability to afford food and rent is a pretty big incentive.
I have nothing. I need a paycheck. Finding a job in America is Hell.
I envy the folks here who can lay their morals out on the table without having to sacrifice a roof or food on the table. Must be nice.
It's never an easy decision to make and often you simply don't have the resources to make it immediately; but if the work you do is immoral/unethical, your goal should be to remove yourself as soon as reasonably possible.
That said; sometimes even the need to provide for one's self or family doesn't outweigh the horrible things we're asked to do. Where exactly that line is we're unlikely to agree on; but in those situations sacrifices must be made.
You always have a choice, and it's our choices that define us.
I get the vibe that it's a lot easier if you're not in the US. I guess there are a few worse countries as well..
That's by design. It's why regulations that give power to workers never pass, because it's actually let emplyees apply pressure on their employees to be ethical, and employers don't want that
I mean, if you find yourself in that situation, the ideal scenario would be that you exit that situation as quickly as possible.
So far, no free Americans are required to work for an evil corporation. And as far as I'm aware, most other countries do not force their laborers to work for evil corporations.
So looking for a new job is an option.
The next best scenario would be that you do everything you can to work ineffectively and waste their resources in just such a way as that they cannot fire you so that you, bit by bit, contribute to toppling their evil system.
But as we will see for so many others here, there are no moral companies, and even if there are no one is hiring.
So yeah, I could be completely moral. Lose the house to the bank. Not be able to eat. Not be able to provide for my family. We'd be destitute but I could confidently tell you that we were moral. What a win that would be.
Found a new job and took a 16% pay cut to escape an unethical situation. Last day in old job was today.
Congratulations! I hope your new job is rewarding and long lasting!
You don't
In a perfect world you wouldn’t have to but sometimes you haven’t got the choice.
You don't. Stand up for your ethics and morals and leave.
One of the best paying jobs I ever had, directly asked me to perform work that would have have damaged a customers home. When I layed out exactly how and why this was wrong and why I wouldn't do it, they insisted I do as I was told or be fired.
I walked off the site and never looked back.
I ran into that old boss a while later and he told me he later realized I was right, but insisted I still should have done as I was told because he was above me and had given me direct instructions...
Sometimes you just can't work with people and have to move on.
Thats absolutely rich well not everyone is as privileged, most of us are easily replaceable cogs in the machine.
As an adult the very first thing we try to feed ourselves are our morals and principles. And once we find out that they don't fill your stomach? Well. You'd be surprised what you'll do to not starve.
name checks out
After college I worked a project management job for a while before going to grad school. I didn't find it morally questionable, but I definitely found myself feeling like I was just working to make some rich guy richer. It didn't help that the rich guy(s) (the owner and his son in law who was out CEO) worked in the same building. So I went back to school. Got my master's. Ended up doing some contract work for the same company afterwards. Never felt more stuck in my life. Hated it. Did more grad school and when the contract work dried up I got asked to come work for another company but I still hated the bs corporate vibe, so instead I went from billing $80/hr to making $15/hr as a 911 dispatcher. Graduated and stayed in that field. I'm an emergency management professional now and while it's not a lucrative field (thankfully I don't want kids) I get a lot of satisfaction out of the work and I feel like my job matters.
Long story short, you choose what to prioritize in life. For some people making sure you/your family is well cared for will matter more than what you're doing or who you're doing it for. For others, you'll take a pay cut to feel like the work itself matters or that you're making a positive impact. Everyone has to balance what's important to them.
OP, If morally aligning with your job matters to you, you'll ultimately land somewhere you can stomach at least, because you won't stop trying until you get there. Don't blame yourself for having to do other work along the way to keep yourself fed and able to enjoy the ride there.
I've never known any other way. Companies by definition exist to make profits, not to improve the lives of thier customers. Any business that truely has the interest of thier customers first doesn't last long.
They do exist to make profits but there is such a thing as returning customers, and that can be very profitable it you dont turn your product into shit.
Thinkpads had such amazing reputation for a long time because they lasted so long and could be repaired. Then they stopped caring about quality and now its just a generic brand that breaks as much or more as the other brands.
That example can be traced back almost directly to IBM selling the Thinkpad brand to Lenovo.
And ask yourself why did they stop caring? They needed more profit, and caring costs a lot. So they tried to lower the level of care to see if they could squeeze profits. Enshitification. The race to the bottom. Couldn't compete with companies making a cheaper product long term. All are really caused by profit being the primary purpose of the company.
And as someone else pointed out, the brand got sold. If it was so successful, they wouldn't have sold it. Clearly it wasn't generating enough profit despite the quality.
Side note, I had one back in the day, those thing sure were solid at the time.
Love your name here.
Either you unionize, you leave, or your ethics aren't worth shit.
Sometimes you don't wanna be homeless and starving.
Yeah, let that happen to some other guy.
Or for your family to be.
Just a guess but I think it has something to do with people not wanting to be homeless
Someone at Microsoft isn't going homeless anytime soon. Most people live to their means and can't suddenly lose that income without lowering their means or having savings. A lot of Trumps votes were for economic uncertainty so people were worried about their savings. So they are worried about their economic lives but saying someone at Microsoft is working there to avoid homelessness is a joke and spending at the microsoft side of income is up (unlike lower incomes) so a bit of a harsh joke.
To the OP, as someone that recently left a company like this, you have options. Work out your values and come up with a plan. Until then, take the little wins that align with your values and make the world a little better.
Oh wow, it looks like I upset a surprising number of people. Median income at Microsoft is 200k or 94th percentile for the US. Who is reading this and downvoting because someone at Microsoft really might become homeless if they try to work somewhere that more aligns with their ethics?
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism type shit.
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There are no companies where I agree with their ethics, but I gotta work. From there it's just a matter of shades of gray, rather than a dichotomy; there is no clear line. You just gotta do the best you can. Make the best choices available to you.
It really surprises me how preachy people can be. When you got a family of 4 to feed, that white collar job working in accounting at Chiquita seems really distant from their literal government toppling conquests of the south.
When responsibility is so plainly distributed in larges companies, individual accountability becomes almost invisible.
I have a lot of random thoughts on this, but they aren't all coherent. The system is so messed up, you could form an entire major studying just how fucked up capitalism is.
Yeah, a lot of people in this thread are delusional. Any big company is up to shady shit, you only need to dig deep enough to find it.
In my last job, I was stonewalled hard when I cautiously inquired why a huge 1st world company, selling seemingly innocuous products, had so much "value creation" done in 3rd world countries. If you live anywhere in the world, including Antarctica, you probably have some stuff of said company in your home right now.
As it turned out, they were taking advantage of the lack of regulation and/or enforcement in these countries, big time. The worst thing to me were all these smokescreens, the schmoozing with politicians and the goody two-shoes image they created to hide all of this.
The job allows me to spend a lot of time volunteering and doing good deeds on the side. I don’t think I could use the cheat code for just any company. My main problem is that I’m very anti-capitalist (don’t have a solution, just think we have proven thoroughly that this isn’t it). Getting a different job won’t fix my problem.
This is so real. I generally find my job morally commendable (I work in emergency management) but even working around disasters there's improvements to be made (ugh, the recovery process! Definitely entrenched in a very biased, racist, system!) There is no morally perfect job you can land that avoids those deeper systemic issues.
I like food and my basic needs covered.
But generally speaking, let's see what we've got: Military is obviously out. Working for governments? Mostly out except for education related posts and some other niche stuff here and there. Banking out. Energy companies: mostly out except niche ones into renewables. Big tech like Amazon Microsoft Apple Google etc is out of the question. Car companies out. Anything owned by billionaires, out. Any sector that contributes to global pollution like meat industry, fishing industry, logging, Monsanto, 3M, DuPont etc etc out! Any company that employs people under minimum wage, out. Surely I'm forgetting a lot of stuff, but even with this small list, what the fuck is left?
As a government worker, I will say there's a lot more than just teaching that's morally filling work. A ton of government jobs are directly tied to keeping the public safe. Food inspectors, doctors, researchers, firefighters, even grant writers. It's not all cops and politicians.
Fair point all these are helping the community, positive overall.
You can still work for advertising, something where I would never work.
I have worked for defense companies and would do so again.
Not to criticize or anything, you do you. But defense companies would be a definite no from a moral perspective, and advertising is the driving force of consumerism which is destroying the planet so yeah kinda no to that too.
My point being, it's already hard enough to land any job, adding morality to the mix makes it nigh impossible to survive for most people. If someone has a choice, good for them. But I'm not gonna blame the average salary man trying to get by. Only the rich have choices.
I worked with someone that switched careers because his work did not align with his ethics.
He was an electrical engineer that worked with high-frequency circuits. Niche field back around 2000. He worked for a "defense" company working on missile systems.
He could not accept it morally and changed professions. I met him doing IT desk-side support at a large company.
I know he took a pay cut.
I hated a lot of Verizon's policies, but I wasn't about to leave a job without another one (that paid as good) lined up.
I had mouths to feed, but I tried to do good by my customers.
It's actually pretty easy to compartmentalize your job if you're not directly confronted with what the company actually does.
If you're an elevator maintenance technician working for a defense contractor, your job is the elevators, and you and your peers probably only deal with elevators, and the job probably pays pretty well. There's a layer of abstraction between you and the "bad" things that your company may do.
Also, getting to make an employment decision based on "is this company evil" isn't a luxury most people have until they've built some experience. Most entry level professionals are just happy to get a job.
Having a bash prompt with the $ replaced with a hammer and sickle sure feels weird in a Bank, but... I'm pretty much trapped. Either I somehow find anything else to survive, with an employer that's as understanding for my problems as my current one is, and then pay back study fees, or I have to keep up with it. At least it's only a few months of being there. And avoiding the usual suspects (bankers) helps with not getting triggered in the office. Or just doing homeoffice.
The larger plan: Somehow be stable with just hosting + maintaining stuff, and get to a medium to good standard with extra freelancing.
I studied physics in university. I didn't put any real thought into what I was going to do with it afterwards, I was just choosing something that seemed interesting and helped me make sense of the world. What I discovered afterwards is that the main use of physics in the economy is to find new and exciting ways of blowing people up. I had been drawn to science by the idea that I was going to work towards the benefit of all humanity. I'm ashamed to admit it, but there was a moment around when I graduated when a friend of mine joined the Navy, and I really considered it. Fortunately, I came to my senses and said no.
Instead, I wound up working the meat counter at a grocery store. This was before I went vegan but I still had negative feelings about it. From there, I wound up picking in an Amazon warehouse for a couple years, and I've kinda bounced around other warehouses, occasionally getting involved in some technical roles in them.
Amazon's a big evil corporation, but at least it's honest work and a peaceful life. I could never live with myself if I did something in service of the war machine. To me, stopping what you're doing to go move boxes at Amazon is kinda the baseline to me, like it's not perfectly ethical but if doing that is significantly better for the world than what you're doing, then like... the option exists for you. If you're doing something evil like working for the military industrial complex, then that's on you, sure it might be much less pleasant and less lucrative but burglary is lucrative too and that doesn't make it justified. It's far better to live a small, humble life making sure that you leave the world better than you found it than to have a big impact but it's negative.
I guess some people might be able to tune out the screams or twist their brain into knots justifying it, but idk. If you're walking down the street and you see someone screaming in pain, your instinct is to help them. You want to help them. You want to help them. That urge to help them is your own will. If you take that suffering and hide it away where you won't see it, all you're doing is decieving yourself into subverting your own, natural inclination towards empathy and compassion. That's not really the sort of thing healthy people do, is it? My dabbling in Buddhism is showing here, but that's what I'd call, "taking refuge in ignorance." That's no way to live your life, hiding from the ghosts of your victims.
My time working at a meat counter called my attention to my feelings about meat, and I didn't act on them until much later but it planted a seed in my mind that might not have been there otherwise, it brought my conflicted feelings to the forefront. Every time I ate meat, I had a little feeling of guilt in my heart that I pushed aside, but once I finally listened to it, a weight was lifted and I'm much happier for it. I might not have ever really noticed and examined that if I hadn't had that job.
There's a lot of edge cases no matter where you draw the line, and I say, do what you will, but never turn away from the truth. If you feel conflicted, face that conflict, if you feel uneasy, interrogate that feeling, figure out what your mind is telling you and how best to follow your feelings, judgement, and conscience. And if you wanna stomach something you feel is wrong so you can get that bag, you know, that's your decision, just know that you'll have to live with it the rest of your life.
Not at all. You run burnout territory. Get out quick.
Most people actually do it according to this procedure:
In my experience, it's much more often:
It's honestly weird how most of this thread acts like everyone can pick and choose their employment all the time. Most of us can't, at least not always.
because morals are nice.
but being able to eat, and not be rained on and assaulted in your sleep is nicerer.
Needing to put food on your table is a good motivator.
Also - you might want to check something - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_and_open_source Even allowing for the three Es, MS has employed a number of people who worked exclusively on FOSS projects.
My day job is purely transactional. I used to enjoy working for this company but they've changed. Unfortunately my work permit is tied to them.
It's easy to turn a blind eye when things are going well in your personal life. It's the central theme of "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45"
I used to work for health insurance. I hated the job with a passion.
The way I dealt with it was simple. Each day I tried to push just a tiny bit in a good direction. And when that didn't work, every day I would put out a resume. Eventually I did get a job outside the industry and it was amazing.
Each day you have a bad day, put out a resume. Its a numbers game, eventually you get lucky.
When Mr. Incredible could not be a full-time crime-fighting superhero, he still superheroed by helping people navigate the labyrinthine madness of insurance agencies.
Be like Mr. Incredible.
Historically...I didn't. But I don't want to downplay the situation some people are in where they have bills to pay and need health insurance and such. I've been lucky to be able to just bail on something I don't like. It is a privilege.
I guess if I had to stay though, I'd do the bare minimum and scrape by. Making a game out of not being fired but producing very little.
This is probably the "right" answer if you are morally bothered by your job but not able to just quit. That and continuing to look for something else in the meantime.
i wouldn't judge someone for this. there just aren't a lot of options 😔
Money helps a surprising amount.
By doing the absolute minimum or worse without getting fired. If you can get by as a -10x dev for Microsoft you're doing absolutely fantastic. I.e. sabotage.
You can also try to push for change, apply for other jobs.
The other alternative is to disassociate and sacrifice your morals or somehow justify to yourself.
Not going to tell you what to do, keeping a well paying job when your family depends on you is totally understandable.
I don't. I always consider a company's policies before I hop on-board. If they don't have a solid DEI policy, for example, I'm not interested. Companies who don't embrace DEI tend to have toxic managers in my experience.
I get another job obviously.
Burnout my friend.
I did it for almost 10 years. Most of the work we did was fine, but some was utterly opposed to my personal values. I started making donations to my favorite charities (mostly Planned Parenthood and ACLU) every time I had a new work project that I felt was working against their goals.
When my husband and I were financially stable enough, I noped out of that job and found something that paid less but was affirming instead of soul-crushing.
I worked at a company that made software for multi-level marketing companies (legalized pyramid schemes). Some of our clients sold snake oil remedies and were always getting in trouble for claiming they could cure cancer. I liked my coworkers and the job itself, but I hated the nature of what we were supporting.
I don’t think you can separate one from the other.
The company was always getting screwed over by dishonest clients, but we never sued because it would be bad for our reputation. The financial pressure grew until we started acting like a much dumber business: taking bad deals, outsourcing to cheap overseas teams, forcing everyone to work crazy hours, doubling up on the “we all have to make sacrifices” kool-aid, the list goes on. I didn’t stick around for long.
I’d do it again if I had to, to keep food on the table, but that experience taught me there’s no “right way” to operate in a bad industry. Eventually you either assimilate or go out of business.
I took an almost 50% pay cut leaving a job once. I received training, skills and equipment and I use those to support things I am aligned with. Now I work a job that doesn't pay as well and isn't quite so reprehensible, then on the side I assist in-need charities and groups.
I assume FOSS dudes taking Microsoft money can at least steer the ship to try to funnel more effort to those programs or at least use the insider knowledge to improve the code base overall.
If the company is doing crime, document and blow the whistle. If it's evil in a way that doesn't have legal consequences, try to start a union so they fire you, then cost them as much money as you can with lawyers.
Unionize
next question
I work in gambling and have done for over 3 years. I do it for the paycheck.
Edit: My last job was in adtech doing web attribution online and I initially thought at least the gambling customers are willingly signing up instead of just being spied on without their consent in many cases... Then I read some of the comments on my company's subreddit and it made me wonder if certan customers were able to consent in a meaningful sense.
ITT: Some people would rather face privation than compromise their morals, some would not. Saved you some time.
A friend of a friend worked at a petrochemical plant of some sort. They took the job reluctantly, because they had been struggling to find work for the kind of engineer that they were without it being somewhere deeply unethical. They reportedly ended up covertly feeding intel to climate action protesters and direct action groups.
Apparently it helped somewhat, but it was still pretty stressful
I don't.
Money can't buy morals or ethics. If I hate the company, guarantee you I won't be there in six months, let alone five years.
Maybe other people can. I can't. Inevitably, I get into some kind of spat with a boss or a manager over morals, ethics, or how we're being treated. Or how I'm being treated. And they make up a reason to fire me, or I get so mad that I quit.
Take their money. Give your very best every moment you're at work. And find a job that you can better live with. Or better yet, build one.
Your first priority should always be to take care of and protect yourself and your family. Build systems that enable you to be as self-reliant as practicable. You can't help others if you, yourself, are are constantly being knocked flat on your ass.
I mean, as long as I'm not directly working on a weapon, its fine. Every job you do for money is contributing to the GDP and indirectly supporting your country, any corruption, police brutality, human rights violations, persecution, war, everyone is contributing to it in some way.
The only way to truly decouple yourself from the system is going offgrid and farming for yourself, otherwise, everyone is complicit, we are all "sinners" in this world.
The Good Place talks about this. You buy a random tomato and you are contributing to climate change, you lose points for it, you end up in "hell" (The Bad Place).
I've read a lot of comments in this thread, but this one feels the most accurate to me.
Companies can do many things. If a company actively saved the lives of 100 people, but also actively killed 1 person, would you work there? Is there a number (either) where you would? Companies can be grey, many are.
It's not a "free pass", but look at the overall ethical footprint. If you're ok with it, it's fine. It doesn't need to be pure, you just have to be ok with it.
I don't?
(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences ...
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision—raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
(1) Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses.
(2) Prolong correspondence with government bureaus.
(3) Misfile essential documents.
(4) In making carbon copies, make one too few, so that an extra copying job will have to be done.
(5) Tell important callers the boss is busy or talking on another telephone.
(6) Hold up mail until the next collection.
(7) Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.
(1) Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job ...
(2) Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can ...
(3) Even if you understand the language, pretend not to understand instructions in a foreign tongue.
(4) Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions.
(5) Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right.
(6) Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.
(7) Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.
(8) If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on.
(9) Misroute materials.
(10) Mix good parts with unusable scrap and rejected parts.
(a) Give lengthy and incomprehensible explanations when questioned.
...
(c) Act stupid.
(d) Be as irritable and quarrelsome as possible without getting yourself into trouble.
(e) Misunderstand all sorts of regulations concerning such matters as rationing, transportation, traffic regulations.
...
(i) Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion ...
...
(k) Do not cooperate in salvage schemes.
I've always thought it was funny how much of this list is basically like good governance and double-checking things and involving multiple people when decisions are made. You can really read between the lines that the writers believe a strongman CEO type who just does shit is vastly more dangerous than a group of individuals who have to find consensus before acting.
I see a fair mix of insisting on structure more than is needed (to slow things down), and slip in chaos where order is better (to mess things up).
Poison the well.
Slowly.
Ive had enough choice to be able to pick companies with culture I agree with, at least for a few years until i got sick of it.
Most people dont have that luxary, which must be soul killing.