alt Hacker NewsAs I said before. Its very easy to suggest that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds when its someone else you've never met.
You have to understand, this hypothetical guy has never met zuck. He's quite possibly never met anyone who has never met zuck. He may well not live in america.
The job market for programmers is not good right now. Estimates put average time in unemployment at 12+ months. Would you inflict this on your family? Because a different part of the giant company you work at did bad stuff? people you've never met, working on a product you've never worked on, did bad stuff? as opposed to all the other extremely moral giant companies you could be working for?
This is, of course, oversimplified. Dave was probably laid off months ago anyway. Was he in some sense responsible for his own redundancy?
I understand the feeling that we have to be able to pin some portion of blame or responsibility on companies. They are often able to launder responsibility through their sheer size, and their byzantine processes. But there are real people responsible for setting strategy! the people at the bottom do sometimes resign out of protest at immoral actions! but it has to be pretty naked to come to that. There are literally management strategy books about how to build departments to avoid workers realizing the purpose of their work so you can get them to do things they disagree with.
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You are confusing pointing out that people are morally responsible for the their actions with suggesting "that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds".
I get that you (and most of them) want to cash the checks without feeling responsible. Tough. People make the choice to work there, and they make the choice every day to keep working there. Other people get to make choices too, including about how they think about, describe, and treat people who profit from harming others.
Freedom of speech and freedom of action does not include freedom from consequences. Your freedom, or that of people making bank at Meta, is not more important than anybody else's freedom.
> As I said before. Its very easy to suggest that someone should leave their job on ideological grounds when its someone else you've never met.
Happy so say the exact same thing to their face for what it’s worth. There isn’t anything complicated here, if you choose to work for a company known for doing bad things you’re obviously taking part of the responsibility.
If people aren’t willing to leave when things are still very comfortable for them, because they might have to accept a lower salary for not working for EvilCorp, that sets a pretty bad precedent for leaving when things are even worse. You can rationalize, but that doesn’t remove the responsibility
Do you see how this topic might mirror something like some dudes just working on the Death Star, never having actually met a sith?
There's been whole genocidal campaigns waged where people were just treating it as a day job.
I think you’re treating the people at these companies as more dumb/powerless than they really are. I used to work in big tech and quit after a few years due to similar concerns that are being raised here. I will tell you anecdotally that everyone there I worked with thought our company was a net negative on society and that our work was at best indifferent and in my case likely exploited weak labor laws in poor countries to overwork people who we never were allowed to speak with for cheap data labelling. Yes, there definitely was some organizational shuffling to make it hard for us to see. We all knew, we weren’t idiots. My personal favorite book on similar concepts is “Modernity and the Holocaust”.
I would argue the organizational tricks exist more for the benefit of the worker than the org itself. The “powerless software engineers” there wanted the excuse to accept the huge salary for very easy work. The organizational tricks don’t fool anyone it’s a favor to the workers at these companies. They exist specifically to ease the cognitive dissonance just enough continue doing your job so you can get paid as much as you want without having to take guilt home with you. I’d say the same is true of my friends in the aerospace defense world. Do you really think they can’t put two and two together and understand that their “flight stabilization module” isn’t going to be used to blow up some school in another country?Your argument is just giving these people the ease of conscious which they want.
On the decision front as well I’d say most of the actual decisions in my org were not actually being made by C-Suite level or even executives. The managerial class at these companies are playing a totally different game than engineers. All the managers care about is that they have good metrics to show their boss so they can get promoted before the person on their sister team. I didn’t interact with a single person above VP and on my projects (as a recent grad mind you) I couldn’t even get my product manager to make a decision on how my product should be implemented. Everyone in the managerial class in these large companies largely exists to provide the illusion that you have no power. Meanwhile they have no idea what anyone in their org is actually working on and as long as they get a nice number to show their boss at the end of the quarter they won’t bother looking too closely.
I think we’re going to have a reckoning in the near future where we’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that the surveillance state which we’re scared of has been designed and built by the “powerless” engineers. The world is too complex for executives to actually have any understanding of what’s being done beneath them. There is SO MUCH room for the average engineer to shape their work in a more positive direction but that would actually require taking ownership over their work and risk some mental connection to its implementation. The average big tech employee already exists on the precipice of too much cognitive dissonance so they can’t afford to try and change anything otherwise they’d be convinced to give up their mid 6 figure salary while already having a larger net worth than 99% of the world will achieve in their lifetime. You cannot equate the life of a software engineer at a large company with the struggle of the working class in any meaningful way. Having a large mortgage is not at all similar to living paycheck to paycheck with variable hours at multiple jobs.
I’m being a bit brutal here I know but I’m so tired of people making excuses for themselves and others for living a life devoid of responsibility. If what I’m saying has struck a chord with anyone who is in a similar spot as I was, I’d suggest strongly questioning your position in the world. I have since found a different career path where I have clear ownership over my work and direction and am much happier now. I’m not fixing the world or anything and took a huge paycut but I agree with the outcome of job and am actually willing to work hard without resentment. I also applaud those who fight against the indifference of their coworkers in these companies since I know they exist. If every worker took responsibility for their output I promise you the parasitic Google or Meta as we know it would not exist. We are not the victims here. If we were desperate coal miners, I’d agree with you, but we are a class of workers with a level of financial flexibility, education, and freedom in our work most of the world has never been able to dream of. The success of these companies exists in how much responsibility they can put in the hands of their engineers who ultimately make most of the meaningful decisions whether they’re willing to admit it or not.
Meta hasn’t suddenly gone bad in the last 12 months. Anyone who has joined in the last 15 years has done so knowing full well what sort of company it is, and what sort of evil it does.