The entire country seems built on taking advantage of people, from my vantage point right now. Whether it’s attention, drugs, or business/legal leverage, everyone is out for advantage and they’re not even pretending to care about people they affect.

I live in a state in the U.S. that’s had legalized gambling for decades. I grew up seeing gambling addicts walk around my city.

It’s always been bad, but in my eyes it’s so much worse now that anyone can tip tap on their phone and gamble away everything they have. At least you used to have to fly to Vegas or something to bet (and lose) big.

> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.

Can't say I agree with that specific take (and find it a bit naive to be honest), unless you're also not hiring anyone from companies like Amazon, Meta, and all the other tech companies that have also ruined/preyed on society in their own way just as much as any gambling app has.

> I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to prey on a subset of humanity

This triggers thoughts. I don't like people being taken advantage of. At the same time, I like my personal liberties.

It feels like you can spin this idea for nearly anything. Apparently 25% of alcohol sales are to alcoholics. That sucks and you could spin this has the liquor companies taking advantage, but I have tons of friends that enjoy drinking and tons of good experiences drinking with them (wine/beer/cocktails) in all kinds of situations (bars/sports-bars/pubs/parties/bbqs). I don't want that taken away because some people can't control their intake.

Similarly the USA is obese so you could spin every company making fattening foods (chips/dips/bacon/cheese/cookies/sodas/...) as taking advantage (most of my family is obese (T_T)) but at the same time, I enjoy all of those things in moderation and I don't want them taken away because some people can't handle them.

You can try to claim gambling is different, but it is? Should Magic the Gathering be banned (and Yugioh Card,Pokemon Cards, etc..)? Baseball cards? I don't like that video games like Candy Crush apparently make money on "whales" but I also don't want people that can control their spending and have some fun to be banned from having that fun because a few people can't control themselves.

I don't have a solution, but at the moment I'd choose personal liberties over nannying everyone.

> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.

I appreciate your approach, but I wonder: would you hire somebody with a past in Meta, or ByteDance (to just name two)? They are at least as bad in pushing addiction to people, maybe worse if you think about the scale.

Gambling and weapons (or "defence" depending on perspective) are two industries I refuse to work on principle.

On my deathbed I want to look back on life and feel I've made a small positive impact on the world.

> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.

I do not like gambling or the prevalence of gambling products, but this is not a good thing for you to do.

You should not ban people from your job for reasons that are not relevant to the job you're hiring for. People take jobs for many reasons, including some times simply needing to take the first job they can get in order to pay the bills.

People also change their minds. Working for a gambling product company doesn't mean the person is still pro-gambling.

> have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.

That's a bit cruel. Sometimes tech workers don't have the luxury of choosing their workplaces. Also companies pivot. So, say, a cryptocurrency startup might have later become a gambling website.

Super surprised to see Ireland mentioned at the top comment here. I've always thought it catastrophic that betting companies could advertise on TV here, but never really considered how other countries compared to us. Is it really the case that we're outliers? Would love to see laws change here.

At the very least we should make it like smoking. Let people do it if they want but definitely dont allow advertisements.

Anyone who worked in it? Like someone who needed a salary took a job, and now due to your grandstanding they're locked in to keep working in that industry because they can't get a job elsewhere?

I'm not sure your virtue signalling has the effect you want it to have. In fact I think it has the exact opposite effect

If you're from a place like Malta it's basically the only way to do IT and perhaps "escape" it later.

what do you mean legal "for many years"? it was never illegal. we have had telephone betting for decades, gambling for centuries...the reason online gambling was banned in the US was because the biggest donors to both parties requested it...there is no other reason because banning is a proven way to maximise harm (and even overly restrictive regulation has been proven to be very poor, as in Hong Kong).

thanks for telling everyone you are in senior leadership

God forbid some poor soul who needs a job to feed their family works for a casino. snob

Same in Australia and only recently (that is, in the last year) has there been any restrictions on showing gambling ads during live sports events.

It’s difficult to compare how normalised it is here versus what the US is currently going through.

As for sportspeople throwing games, well that’s been happening for as long as betting has been around as well, see countless examples from football (soccer) and cricket.

i live in a small midwest town and had the privilege of watching it slowly atrophy into near nothing over time. the steel mill closing, 2008 market crash, fentanyl crisis, covid, both shopping malls turning into liminal spaces frozen in 1994.

The real nail in the coffin was watching the Sears in the mall turn into a casino about a decade ago. Having failed their people at all other prosperities and futures, politicians turn to the last grift in their arsenal and roll out legalized gambling before packing up and leaving town or retiring.

having failed the digital future, ransacked it for every last penny, politicians again in 2025 turned to the supreme court to legalize online gambling and in doing so obliterate a generation of young adults. in another decade i expect a political movement to "hold these scoundrels to account" similar to Facebook, long after any meaningful reform or regulation could have been made and the industry itself is on the decline. just one last grift for the government that enabled it in the first place.

So you want them to keep working on those products?

> anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired

Respect for that. Everybody seems to give up to all-powerful corporations and greed for short term profits seem to blind many otherwise brilliant folks into amoral and/or outright stupid shortsighted behavior and moral 'flexibility'. Nice to see good reason to keep some hope for humanity.

I do myself just a sliver of this via purchasing choices for me and my family, its a drop in the ocean but ocean is formed by many drops, nothing more.

> and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.

I encourage this concept but also to expand it further, including the ones who work on other evil schemes like the ones used to violate your privacy, sell your data, and participate in sketchy business and/or contracts. Just like how I don’t want to work with someone who develops a gambling platform, I don’t want to work with someone who’s building a cameras spying on public, an app that use facial recognition against strangers, an app that track people, an AI to automate killing, a cloud that host and process such systems. There should be an open source database that has lists of all people who worked/working in such companies, categorized by industry (gambling, privacy, etc.), where anyone can look up potential employees, getting the names is easy when you have the best OSINT goldmine out there (LinkedIn), plus manual submission. Some people have no morals or intrinsic values to prevent them from working in legal yet shady businesses, those however will double think their decision when they know there will be a consequences and they won’t be hired anywhere else.

> made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired

As in, even a dev, HR, etc person having worked for an online gambling company? I feel this may be a slippery slope..

Here in the Netherlands we have a big building housing a pro gambling lobbyist organization. Their sole goal is to bribe politicians and spread misinformation on public tv channels. A typical example of rottenness inside the western society.

They’re the financial equivalent of recreational drugs.

Not everyone gets addicted, but many do. Harms your own health/assets. Can destroy lives. Has spillover effects into general society.

The libertarian/authoritarian argument is much the same.

Care to disclose the company you work for? Is that the stakeholders stance too, or just your own? Did you disclose this policy to your bosses if any?

EDIT: Due to the downvotes without comments, here is my point: As an employee, you manage someone elses money in that position. As such, you have to holdup morals of the company and follow the companies interest, not your own - unless you are the 100% owner of that company. If you are not, and impose your own morals using someone elses money, you shouldn't be taking the moral highground here.