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.
This is the way
I do that anyway
Ability to afford food and rent is a pretty big incentive.
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.
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
probably does not come right away and I would not be surprised if ultimately they stiffed a bunch with that. Likely its something that gest “vested”
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.
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.
As an adult the very first thing we try to feed ourselves are our morals and principles. And once we find out that they don’t fill your stomach? Well. You’d be surprised what you’ll do to not starve.
name checks out
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.
But as we will see for so many others here, there are no moral companies, and even if there are no one is hiring.
So yeah, I could be completely moral. Lose the house to the bank. Not be able to eat. Not be able to provide for my family. We’d be destitute but I could confidently tell you that we were moral. What a win that would be.
There are certainly less immoral companies though. Avoid arms manufacturers, fossil fuel, big tech, the police and chemical manufacturers, obviously.
There’s vaguely ethical jobs in manufacturing, retail, government (e.g. parks, urban maintenance), academia, the NGO sector, and many other spaces
Of course, and I think everyone has to decide what their line is, their own personal Rubicon and if they have crossed it or not. Those lines can shift too, a company that was okay last year may not be this year. It could be that all of a sudden you find yourself doing things you wouldn’t have dreamed of 5 years ago. Maybe it is time to look for a new role. It’s completely a personal decision.
The blind “Just quit your jobs” is what annoys me, and doesn’t add anything valuable to the conversation.
In my defense, I never said “just quit your job”.
I said, start looking for another one. There are other jobs out there. There’s nothing that forces you to work for, meta, or google, or alphabet, or whatever the hell they’re calling themselves.
If you are working for a company that you find personally immoral and you are bound to them because of financial reasons, then I will stand by the statement that one of the best things that you can do is to find a way out, and one of the best ways to do that is to replace it with a different job so that you do not financially suffer through the transition.
I don’t really get how anyone would interpret that as a blind “quit your job”.
Ah yes, just avoid [lists all of the country’s biggest industries]…
Maybe stop huffing fatalism. its not good for you.
I gave clear and simple things that can be done by anyone with a minimum amount of effort to improve things. That’s all it takes to be moral, to be willing to improve things.
You’re right. Small steps matter, and I’ve made plenty myself to live and work more ethically. But that’s not what your original comment said. You said:
the ideal scenario would be that you exit that situation as quickly as possible
You suggested an oversimplified binary situation. That’s simply not realistic for most people. Suggesting be a half-ass employee isn’t meaningful advice either.
A better way to approach this is to recognize that everyone has a moral line they need to define for themselves, and to regularly reflect on whether their work crosses it. If it does, they can decide whether leaving is feasible, or start moving toward something more aligned with their values.
“Just quit your job” is not an answer. As The Good Place illustrated perfectly, modern life makes it impossible to be entirely moral. They highlighted that by buying a simple tomato you are indirectly supporting big farming, greenhouse gas emissions, unfair labor practices, even slave labor. By participating in society at all you are an immoral person.
So yes, we should all try to do better, but we also need realistic paths, not platitudes.
I was wondering how far I’d have to scroll to find a The Good Place reference. Thank you for your contribution.
The job allows me to spend a lot of time volunteering and doing good deeds on the side. I don’t think I could use the cheat code for just any company. My main problem is that I’m very anti-capitalist (don’t have a solution, just think we have proven thoroughly that this isn’t it). Getting a different job won’t fix my problem.
This is so real. I generally find my job morally commendable (I work in emergency management) but even working around disasters there’s improvements to be made (ugh, the recovery process! Definitely entrenched in a very biased, racist, system!) There is no morally perfect job you can land that avoids those deeper systemic issues.
Not at all. You run burnout territory. Get out quick.
because morals are nice.
but being able to eat, and not be rained on and assaulted in your sleep is nicerer.
Most people actually do it according to this procedure:
Be young
Start to think only at a later age.
In my experience, it’s much more often:
-
be young
-
be very passionate about the ability to afford food and shelter
It’s honestly weird how most of this thread acts like everyone can pick and choose their employment all the time. Most of us can’t, at least not always.
-
Justify earlier decision somehow.
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.
By doing the absolute minimum or worse without getting fired. If you can get by as a -10x dev for Microsoft you’re doing absolutely fantastic. I.e. sabotage.
You can also try to push for change, apply for other jobs.
The other alternative is to disassociate and sacrifice your morals or somehow justify to yourself.
Not going to tell you what to do, keeping a well paying job when your family depends on you is totally understandable.
I studied physics in university. I didn’t put any real thought into what I was going to do with it afterwards, I was just choosing something that seemed interesting and helped me make sense of the world. What I discovered afterwards is that the main use of physics in the economy is to find new and exciting ways of blowing people up. I had been drawn to science by the idea that I was going to work towards the benefit of all humanity. I’m ashamed to admit it, but there was a moment around when I graduated when a friend of mine joined the Navy, and I really considered it. Fortunately, I came to my senses and said no.
Instead, I wound up working the meat counter at a grocery store. This was before I went vegan but I still had negative feelings about it. From there, I wound up picking in an Amazon warehouse for a couple years, and I’ve kinda bounced around other warehouses, occasionally getting involved in some technical roles in them.
Amazon’s a big evil corporation, but at least it’s honest work and a peaceful life. I could never live with myself if I did something in service of the war machine. To me, stopping what you’re doing to go move boxes at Amazon is kinda the baseline to me, like it’s not perfectly ethical but if doing that is significantly better for the world than what you’re doing, then like… the option exists for you. If you’re doing something evil like working for the military industrial complex, then that’s on you, sure it might be much less pleasant and less lucrative but burglary is lucrative too and that doesn’t make it justified. It’s far better to live a small, humble life making sure that you leave the world better than you found it than to have a big impact but it’s negative.
I guess some people might be able to tune out the screams or twist their brain into knots justifying it, but idk. If you’re walking down the street and you see someone screaming in pain, your instinct is to help them. You want to help them. You want to help them. That urge to help them is your own will. If you take that suffering and hide it away where you won’t see it, all you’re doing is decieving yourself into subverting your own, natural inclination towards empathy and compassion. That’s not really the sort of thing healthy people do, is it? My dabbling in Buddhism is showing here, but that’s what I’d call, “taking refuge in ignorance.” That’s no way to live your life, hiding from the ghosts of your victims.
My time working at a meat counter called my attention to my feelings about meat, and I didn’t act on them until much later but it planted a seed in my mind that might not have been there otherwise, it brought my conflicted feelings to the forefront. Every time I ate meat, I had a little feeling of guilt in my heart that I pushed aside, but once I finally listened to it, a weight was lifted and I’m much happier for it. I might not have ever really noticed and examined that if I hadn’t had that job.
There’s a lot of edge cases no matter where you draw the line, and I say, do what you will, but never turn away from the truth. If you feel conflicted, face that conflict, if you feel uneasy, interrogate that feeling, figure out what your mind is telling you and how best to follow your feelings, judgement, and conscience. And if you wanna stomach something you feel is wrong so you can get that bag, you know, that’s your decision, just know that you’ll have to live with it the rest of your life.
