Screening for cultural fit is a common strategy by many of these companies - FAANG companies especially. Culture includes morals and the actions you are willing to take or not take to do what is right or wrong. If you've been screened out for cultural fit, it may not be your age or race or other demographic. It may be because you will not be compatible with the value system at the company. Who you hire today dictates what your culture will be in 1-2 years.
We are complicit in our employer’s deeds
81–90 of 192 posts
Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds
#82I think there is one morally solid reason to stay at bad acting employer: if you are actively driving change of the behavior you consider bad. I pick this quote from Brays post: > I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. He only left after he felt he had exhausted his options of influence (This being my interpretation). Leaving just as a knee jerk reaction without making effort to change would be bad,…
That's a reasonable point of view, but I think your obligation extends primarily to saving your own soul, as it were. It's not your responsibility to make others do the right thing. If you think the organization is engaged in an enterprise that is fundamentally wrong, helping them to further their aims in a slightly less bad way doesn't change the moral calculus.
Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds
#83The industrial revolution was a period of unprecedented growth for our country and the world as a whole. It ushered in a new era, built immense fortunes, and led to the creation of critical infrastructure that we still use hundreds of years later. But with the great achievements came the unparalleled exploitation of the poor, minorities and even children, resulting in some of the most progressive labor laws ever developed. History rightly criticizes the robber barons and clearly illuminates the miseries they inflicted upon mankind for their wealth.
Software engineers are going to be faced with the same moral reckoning that the industrialists of the past faced, it’s inevitable. So it’s worth wondering if this time we will take some moral leadership and actually build a world that benefits humanity, or merely profit from it.
Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds
#84Uggghhhh, the entitlement of well paid and under qualified developers is loathsome. To everybody else who doesn’t share that entitlement it looks like gross ethnocentricity. Look, if you want all your crying and personal opinions to actually mean something start someplace rational. Start by asking (demanding) for a uniform of code of ethics. Every other professional industry has this, but not software. https://en.m.w…
Didn't realize that all value judgements were ethnocentrism. Thanks for letting me know! Let's all just slave for the borg, after all, it's not my fault the money is so good.
Or, y'know, you might not know what that word means at all.
Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds
#85If you eat vegetables in the US, they were probably picked by farmworkers paid below minimum wage who are probably do not have legal work authorization. If you eat meat, in addition to having killed an animal (which isn't an ethical issue for everyone) meat processing plants continue to be the source of endless health and safety violations and which also exploit immigrants, both legal and illegal.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. And by extension, there is no ethical employment under capitalism.
The notion that you can get a single job that somehow places you outside society and the economy and puts you above other workers morally or ethically is fiction. By all means, seek to minimize your impact or make your own ethical choices, but there is no choice without some sort of ethical compromise.
Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds
#86We technologists like to pretend we're powerful, that we could bring these giant megacorps to their knees because those fancy suits need us, right? No. They need an engineer, not any one specific engineer. Companies like Amazon reject many candidates that could probably do the job they applied for, but were rejected because they can afford to be picky. If anything changes at Amazon it not be because of the loss of th…
What is an ocean, but a sea of drops? It starts with employees speaking up individually. Raise your voice and be heard. Upper management won't learn moral lessons on their own; they need to hear employees nagging them to be better people.
Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds
#87This really got me thinking... of course, what Amazon is doing is bad, I don't want to deny that - OTOH, for a tech company, they are an easy target - for example, Google doesn't have as many low-paid workers, so we don't know if they would treat them more fairly. How about the contractors hired by Facebook to weed out the worst posts by extremists, terrorists and other lunatics so our sensitive eyeballs aren't confr…
A company which automated away all the menial jobs and work would probably get better publicity than one that paid people to do it.
Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds
#88Tech has a tendency to view the world in isolation. You can't work in fashion because it uses child labor. Rare metals used in electronics are mined in places with terrible work conditions. Don't even get me started on petroleum dependent industries. What does that leave us with ? Even companies that build apps or SAAS make their money from clients in these industries or consumers who are as a majority employed by th…
> Public companies have a responsibility to their share holders to maximize profit. Every legal avenue there is to do, will be used by these companies. If Amazon stops doing so, someone else will and eventually they will have enough of the market that the responsible company will have to close shop.
> Take the example of a multiplayer game. It should not be the responsibility of the player to not exploit the rules of the games to their fullest. It should be the responsibility of the developers to fix exploits and ban/punish gamers who outright attempt to break the system (cheat).
Those aren't mutually exclusive, IMHO. Instead or in-addition to patching the "exploits," the law could be changed to make it clear that companies have obligations besides solely delivering "value" to their shareholders (IIRC that understanding of companies is actually pretty recent). Obviously it'd take more work to figure out how to do that than an internet comment warrants, but I'm not convinced it's impossible.
Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all devs have the privilege to make that moral choice. Especially devs who are in the US on a visa. Unlike Canada / Australia where folks can get a permanent residency relatively quickly based on education + job offer. The US has a long PR process which is tied to a visa, the visa in-turn is tied to an employer, instead of an industry(such as Tech / Software). So every job switch is rolling the dice and wading th…
Author here. I decline to extend my comments to H1B workers, I agree that they don't enjoy the same level of mobility as programmers who are US citizens. This is a problem in and of itself, but I don't hold H1B's accountable for their employer's deeds due to these extenuating circumstances. The point of my article is that you should be held accountable for things which are within your control, and for US citizens wor…
This is a very myopic view. Very few people have the luxury of quitting a job because they don't agree with 100% of things their company is doing.
It's an extremely privileged view to have. Especially given that exactly 0 companies, anywhere, will do everything you agree with.
Re: We are complicit in our employer’s deeds
#90We technologists like to pretend we're powerful, that we could bring these giant megacorps to their knees because those fancy suits need us, right? No. They need an engineer, not any one specific engineer. Companies like Amazon reject many candidates that could probably do the job they applied for, but were rejected because they can afford to be picky. If anything changes at Amazon it not be because of the loss of th…
"the true power in society is held by a relatively small number of people who hold a massive amount of capital" ... so they can direct collective actions (eg. a free enterprise).
So why would your top-down collective action be any different?