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.
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.
By doing the minimum required to not get fired.
This is the way
I worked with someone that switched careers because his work did not align with his ethics.
He was an electrical engineer that worked with high-frequency circuits. Niche field back around 2000. He worked for a “defense” company working on missile systems.
He could not accept it morally and changed professions. I met him doing IT desk-side support at a large company.
I know he took a pay cut.
Ability to afford food and rent is a pretty big incentive.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism type shit.
There are no companies where I agree with their ethics, but I gotta work. From there it’s just a matter of shades of gray, rather than a dichotomy; there is no clear line. You just gotta do the best you can. Make the best choices available to you.It really surprises me how preachy people can be. When you got a family of 4 to feed, that white collar job working in accounting at Chiquita seems really distant from their literal government toppling conquests of the south.
When responsibility is so plainly distributed in larges companies, individual accountability becomes almost invisible.
I have a lot of random thoughts on this, but they aren’t all coherent. The system is so messed up, you could form an entire major studying just how fucked up capitalism is.
Why do you got a family of 4 if you knew how the world was? Why do you think that making bad decisions absolves you from making unethical decisions? At least acknowledge the lack of ethics.
Case and point with preaching. This answer is undeniably devoid of empathy.
And going through the world without care for it or your fellow humans with unethical decisions is also devoid of empathy
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.
It’s actually pretty easy to compartmentalize your job if you’re not directly confronted with what the company actually does.
If you’re an elevator maintenance technician working for a defense contractor, your job is the elevators, and you and your peers probably only deal with elevators, and the job probably pays pretty well. There’s a layer of abstraction between you and the “bad” things that your company may do.
Also, getting to make an employment decision based on “is this company evil” isn’t a luxury most people have until they’ve built some experience. Most entry level professionals are just happy to get a job.
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
Wasn’t trying to project some bs but just highlighting the thought process ya know. Very unfortunate times and ignorant maneuvers.
Money helps a surprising amount.
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.
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”.
Historically…I didn’t. But I don’t want to downplay the situation some people are in where they have bills to pay and need health insurance and such. I’ve been lucky to be able to just bail on something I don’t like. It is a privilege.
I guess if I had to stay though, I’d do the bare minimum and scrape by. Making a game out of not being fired but producing very little.
You don’t. Stand up for your ethics and morals and leave.
One of the best paying jobs I ever had, directly asked me to perform work that would have have damaged a customers home. When I layed out exactly how and why this was wrong and why I wouldn’t do it, they insisted I do as I was told or be fired.
I walked off the site and never looked back.
I ran into that old boss a while later and he told me he later realized I was right, but insisted I still should have done as I was told because he was above me and had given me direct instructions…
Sometimes you just can’t work with people and have to move on.
Thats absolutely rich well not everyone is as privileged, most of us are easily replaceable cogs in the machine.
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 get another job obviously.
