I was wondering , if you will be ready to work fof an organisation that you oppose ideologically , for instance you are against big oil but you get a job interview in exxonmobil with good pay , would you consider it ?
*Edit : Recently a friend of mine got a marketing job for a company that had shady business practices , selling their product to gullible parents. Since it was a marketing job , the pay was good but my friend left it within a week , saying it does not suit his ideology.
Definitely. I’m a whore.
As long as it isn’t something obviously evil like religion.
What about something obviously evil like selling personal data as a business model?
Or drilling oil
Name a successful tech business that doesn’t sell user data. Some companies, like Google, just make it their only business model.
Does Google sell user data? They profit from it for sure, but they keep it to themselves to do so as far as I know.
Technically they sell ads that rely on user data they collected. I was just trying to say they are uniquely evil in that their entire business model revolves around user data while claiming they are a search company or OS company or email company whatever project they will start and kill next.
Most POS companies like LexisNexis are very open about their business model being people’s personal info.
This is quite a relevant question for me. In Greece there isn’t a lot of innovation and the government doesn’t really give a shit to fix the root problems, all young people that can change the scene leave for better countries.
That leaves us with very few companies that do something respectable and are worth working for, and a ton of gambling companies that feed off of the uneducated people. Those gambling companies are making huge profits and doing very well in general, so working for them is usually a nice experience from what I’ve heard of.
It’s often tempting, but I can’t justify participating in this disgusting industry to get more money, benefits and time. It would never sit well with me, but it always feels unfair how many jobs there are for that industry compared to anything else.
Can you leave Greece as well?
Not really, and I don’t actually want to.
Thankfully I’m working for one of the companies that are an exception and are actually pretty innovative, it’s not bad despite the pay being a bit worse and the hours longer.
Unless you’re supportive of the concept that you’re a non-capitalist drone working to make a capitalist rich… You already do
I think it’s more a question of where the line is. You virtually always have to compromise in at least some small ways.
Would you work for a company where the CEO is an outspoken bigot? What about a company that constructs weapons for the military that you know will be used to kill thousands? Or one of those scam call centers, where your entire job would be scamming the elderly? Or taking to even more extremes, what about a criminal gang where you may have to directly kill people? For that matter, what about indirectly killing people, like if your employer is a massive polluter?
Some of these I’m not even certain of my answer for. In my current situation, I’m well off and don’t need to worry much about pay and finding work is easy. But what if I was in a desperate situation, where I was struggling to find work that paid enough to sanely live on? I know I’d definitely have a lower threshold then, but where exactly it lies is hard to say when I’m not in such a situation.
It’s the same with boycotts. If you’re in poverty and the only close store is a Walmart, good luck boycotting them. You do the best you can within the means you have.
I currently do! I work for one of the huge mega tech corporations.
They pay me very well, I have great benefits, and a I get a ton of paid time off. They don’t work me too many hours. They were very flexible with me when my wife was in and out of the hospital. They give decent annual raises and bonuses, and great stock bonuses.
Unless something changes, I don’t see myself leaving, even though I know I could get money by bouncing around, because my job is very easy and the pay is very good for how easy my job is.
Lol - sounds just like me.
I also work for a mega tech, and I genuinely have concerns over some of the bad press we get.
But I find it hard to resist the benefits for me and my family. I’m now in the last 15 years or so of my career. I need to finish big, for my family.
To a certain degree, there ain’t really that many companies that are ideologically aligned with me lol
Absolutely. And I did so to afford my family’s medical needs, food, shelter, etc. The pay was almost 3x what I made previously, which wasn’t a lot. Benefits, flexibility, all that shit. And then they laid off my entire team hahahahahaha
and I’d do it again
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I work as a consultant so I’m always dealing with different customers. We had one client who operates payday loans. I refused to do any work for them and thankfully my company didn’t argue when I said I couldn’t morally work with them.
That said, I have a child with autism and I’m spending tens of thousands of dollars a year on getting him the help he needs. My companies insurance sucks and I saw a job posting at Raytheon I was a perfect fit for. I’m still conflicted on if I should apply just to get better insurance and help my family.
Imo do it. RTX does fine work. They don’t exist to scam people. The primary problem with them is how governments use their tech. Even so, without them we would in fact be worse off. In this case your family comes first.
In this case your family comes first
This is a great point. I’ve already decided to get out of Texas because of my family. For the longest time I refused to move because I felt like that was giving up. Especially since my district was pretty well split 50/50. However, the things that have happened over the last year have made me loss all hope. And there is no way in hell am I raising my daughter in a state that would put a bounty on her reproductive rights. What type of parent would I be if I didn’t do what was best for them?
Sincerely, thanks. I think I just needed to hear someone else say what you said.
It’s a trade-off, so it depends on both how good the pay is and how opposed the company is.
I’m currently working for a crypto company, and have worked for other similar ones in the past, and these all tend to be libertarian types which I don’t agree with, but they pay well.
On the other hand, a previous employer tried to get Saudi Aramco as a client, and I made it clear that I would not support this. Fortunately those talks didn’t come anywhere.
So yes, there’s certainly a line.
No. I actually did quit a job in the past when I realised they are buying email lists to send around “newsletters”.
No. Worked for a facility that did lethality testing on various animals for potential drugs. I recognize the need for such things, but it wore on me until I had to quit.
Oh 100% I’ll take a job with any company for the right pay and benefits. It helps that I’m an IT guy so any nastiness the company is involved in isn’t directly my job.
I currently work for a national company that does contract work for food processing plants, so plenty of nasty stuff involved, but my hands stay clean as I primarily manage their ERP software and build reports and workflows to hopefully help keep what happens at the plants as above the board and by the book as possible
I feel it out. To some degree EVERY job has SOMETHING that opposes my ideology. So I play it by ear.
Like there was one company I worked for that used invasive telemetry on a product. But still I served as best I could.
Then a couple months ago I was approached by a couple that was dealing with a website issue. After an hour of talking about the issue the owner said, “oh, btw, this is a p*rn site site.”
My conscious bothered me. I had to walk away, despite the fact that I really needed the money.
Porn sites are the next big thing, forget AI, ML
I’m only half joking, hear me out
As technology innovates, we need to adapt to it. Netflix’s network infrastructure probably looks like a kid’s science experiment next to the hub
Nope. Any job I had where they required me to do something I thought was unethical like selling credit cards or upsetting I just refused to do it until they let me go. I would rather enjoy being unemployed than stoop to that bullshit.
I don’t know about ideology, but I definitely don’t believe in the industry I work in. I work for a WISP; wireless ISP. We provide internet and L2 connections to remote places: homes and oilfield sites. It’s the 2nd such job I’ve had in 20 years.
The first was back in the late 2000s. The equipment was either cheap, or way too expensive, and needed to be replaced every five years to keep up with customer expectations. I remember my old boss once texting me around 2005ish all proud that he was sustaining 5mbps through the gateway. Today thats a single Netflix stream. The 2 and 5 ghz bands were overcrowded and noisy. The government licenses and equipment manufacturers were not at all in tune with the reality of last mile delivery Ubiquiti and Mikrotik were the only affordable options. Everything else was too expensive.
The cellular companies should have destroyed WISPs entirely by 2015. They had the tech, the financial resources, the frequencies, the government cronnies, and an existing customer base that grows every year. Cell cards are easily added to laptops and tablets. They have access to frequency licenses that us small wisps will never be able to afford. They have relationships with manufacturers who won’t even look at us. But they keep targeting cities and population centers. I don’t understand why they fall short on rural distribution. Especially since governments keep giving them money to do exactly that (instead of giving it to the companies who are actually trying to do it).
Then along comes Starlink. Say what you want about Musky, but Starlink for the most part works, and they are slowly eating our lunch. They have a reach and flexibilty we will never be able to match due to geography and money. Even if we had unlimited money, no-one is going to run fiber through the Rocky Mountains let alone build towers all the way from Calgary to Kelowna.
Between cell and Starlink I honestly expect to lose the entirety of our residential customer base by 2030. Maybe we’ll keep a few old timers who don’t want to change and a few small businesses who want to be able to call in for support. Our saving grace will be the bigger businesses who want or need higher upload speeds, L2 circuits, and support. Even those will thin out because it will cost us more to service them than they are willing to pay.
The governments are clawing back frequencies to auction off to bigger players and forcing CBRS and licensed channels down our throats. Manufacturers are more and more moving to the cripple-ware pay-to-play model, and they want subscriptions for management software.
That said, my pay cheque has never been late, I’m learning a lot of cool stuff about networking, and the boss is willing to invest in growth. The company itself has it’s fingers in other pies and the owner is fairly business savvy. It’s the wisp side of things that I don’t have a lot of hope for.
