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.
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.
ice applicants have entered the chat
God help me if it comes to that. Nobody is helping me and I’m getting desperate.
Take the $50k signing bonus and use it to fuck off to Belize or somewhere
Wasn’t trying to project some bs but just highlighting the thought process ya know. Very unfortunate times and ignorant maneuvers.
They don’t take desperate people they take violent people.
If they’re desperate that’s more fuel for their racial hatred.
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.
Did you just “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” me?
Are you stupid?
Yeah, but not because of this thread. Plenty of other reasons.
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!
Thank you. Was in a love my work hate my job situation. I minimized my discretionary spending and saved for a year to be able to afford the pay cut. Keep minimizing until annual raise next year. Will be ok unless something truly calamitous happens.
Yes, I experience something similar working for one of the two major gambling companies in the US. It is possible to move and get a raise; several colleagues have done so moving to Black Rock or JP Morgan which both have high barriers to entry and are more demanding of your time.
I’m based in the UK so not sure if the job market is as toxic as the US with LLM CVs and HR/TA processing of said CVs. When I did recruiting a year or so ago I found a lot of CVs that people had generated from their LinkedIn profiles and they looked terrible: do not say you are a 10X developer rockstar on your CV!
At the moment I’ve been at the company for over 2 years so that affords me a lot of rights in the UK and in a climate where there are a lot of layoffs, I’d hesitate to move. Like a few years back I was being spammed with recruiters trying to get me to join Spotify months before they axed their entire data team - if I’d gone for it I would have been totally screwed and with a mortgage I don’t feel I can take risks.
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.
Just a guess but I think it has something to do with people not wanting to be homeless
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.
Love your name here.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism type shit.
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.
Why do you got a family of 4 if you knew how the world was? Why do you think that making bad decisions absolves you from making unethical decisions? At least acknowledge the lack of ethics.
Case and point with preaching. This answer is undeniably devoid of empathy.
And going through the world without care for it or your fellow humans with unethical decisions is also devoid of empathy
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 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.
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.
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.
I get another job obviously.
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.
