alt Hacker NewsI chose to spend most of my career at a company that did stuff I found morally acceptable (inspiring, even). I made probably half what I could have made at places that were more dodgy.
I have found that mentioning that, elicits scorn and derision from many in tech.
Eh. Whatevs. I'm OK with it (but it appears a lot of others aren't, which mystifies me).
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Your comment really resonates with me, I’m in a similar position though much more junior. My colleagues in tech can’t fathom that I actively choose to stay where I am and make 50% of their salary.
I’ve found talking about ethics and moral responsibility with people working in big tech is futile and frustrating. Almost everyone takes it as a personal attack though I never hold anyone else to my moral standards.
I think the heart of the problem is that we’ve somehow conflated the highest paying Eng jobs with being the most prestigious.
People feel like if they want to climb the prestige ladder, they need some way of justifying the business practices of the megacorps.
In contrast, I feel like it’s well established that gigs in big law or finance or medicine have found a way to decorrelate pay from social status. You can make a choice between chasing money OR prestige.
its because it hurts peoples feelings to confront the truth
For what it's worth, I personally have a lot of respect for people who do this (or at the very least, people who forego higher salaries to avoid working for companies they find morally objectionable).
I believe what you are running up against is a tendency to externalize shame as anger.
Part of the tradeoff the parent comment references is a lack of thinking about the moral ramifications. Thus, when you mention your position which is grounded in that tradeoff's opposite, the reaction is not surprising. They are largely incompatible. Because your position hinges on a moral component, you are thus passing a moral judgement on others. This is often met with scorn, most especially because people have an aversion to shame, and it doesn't help if it's on the behalf of someone essentially randomly declaring they are morally better than you anytime the topic of their employment comes up.
So really, I'm not sure why you would be surprised, though I sympathize with your general sentiments, in a way you should know better. Surely you are aware of the aversion to shame writ large. That seems a logical predicate of your own conceptualization of your position.