For a large chunk of my career, I worked in aerospace and 'defense' machining. Made all kinds parts for all kinds of weapons, it was really cool! Murica! As I got older, I lost my religion, I lost the far right brainwashing I was raised with.

My hands were making weapons that the US government was often selling to other countries. My hands were making weapons to kill various groups of brown people all over the world. It really began to bother me.

I no longer make things to kill people.

Yes, you are culpable for the effects of what you produce in your profession. A thinking person should consider the effects of their work.

I've been an engineer for about two decades now and pretty much everyone I've ever worked with has expressed that they would never work for Facebook, betting companies or defense companies.

Amazon is probably next on the shit list and then Google, but each to a much lesser extent than the ones before. Working for Google still holds a level of prestige for some people.

This reminds me of something I worked on at my last job. I made software to detect plumes of dust pollution from a mining site blowing onto a nearby school and town. The EPA issued fines if they detected too much dust over the town. This system could catch it early for quick intervention.

After it was deployed, I got a glimpse of their production config. They hadn't configured the alarms for early intervention. They had configured them so that they could get as close as possible to their allocated limit before they intervened at all. Because, ya know, spraying water on stockpiles of ore is expensive.

Fucking mining companies, man.

This is an extremist take on a correct conclusion. Just like how "vote with your wallet" and "no ethical consumption under capitalism" can co-exist, so can the idea that there are people in these jobs who simply don't care about the harm as well as people who do but don't have the power to do anything about it - even something as simple as changing jobs.

An easy example is the people left at Twitter. When employees started quitting in droves after Musk started tearing the company apart, I saw people quickly theorizing that the people still working there fell into 2 groups: those who were morally bankrupt enough not to care, and those on work visas who couldn't quit because they risked being deported.

The majority of these companies are based in the US, where workers' rights and protections are often tenuous at best. Whistleblowers have almost no protections and, more often than not, end up serving years or even lifetime sentences in federal jails for their efforts. In most states, it is completely legal for companies to fire you for whatever reason they feel like, and even if you get severance, it can take years of legal battles to get what you're owed. Add to that how long it can take to find a new job (the average time in the video game industry is 2 months), and it's easy to see how that can quickly spiral into putting people into a dangerous financial situation for daring to speak out.

It's easy to lay the blame at other people's feet, but just like saying, "Well, just don't use their products then," it's never that simple.

Cuz you asked me to talk you down here:

If you expand upon the 'trite' phrase "theres no ethical consumption under capitalism" (which itself is talking about how capitalism as a system can not be ethical since any product you buy is owned by a company who "steals" most of the value the workers provide), there is also no ethical work.

in other countries and historically in the us, unions sought not only fair wages and compensation but also representation at the Csuite. The ability to affect the policy of the company.

But that's long gone. How does one who hopes to work for a "ethical" company go about it? What is they are alright but one of their vendors is shitty? A company they choose to contact with? What if they merge with a shitty one 5 years after you start?

I'm saying, if you want to be talked down, How is what you're asking of people even possible? I can't even keep track of who owns the food i buy anymore! Speaking of, these ethical workers are gone burn out studying unethical companies to work at, be sheltered by and buy food from. that reminds me that yeah, there's the whole thing about people needing to work to eat.

Don't blame the little guy, they been using that trick to split us a loooong time. Blame them, those who have the power.

I generally agree. If you work for an Evil Corp, you are just as culpable.

I actually generally hear this phrase IRL from teenagers making minimum wage while trying to get some boomer to stop badgering them to accept an expired coupon.

Being poor never helps. Quiet quit / be overemployed

If you are aware of criminal or unethical actions by your employer... By staying and contributing... You are as guilty as those doing those actions.

If your ethics can be altered for money or power or success

They weren't really your ethics. Their Just lies you tell yourself

Well I threw all my criticality out the window I guess because I totally agree with you.

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Employees make a choice to work there and therefore choose to be part of that problem.

I once worked for a big finical company. Things were great I made lots of money they matched my 401k. Then COVID happened. After watching this big financial company continue to charge interest when, I my manager and his boss knew people couldn't afford to even make payments on their existing debt. Debt they had when the word COVID didn't even exist and when they had a job it effected me and my sobriety. People saying, "We're all in this together" brought me to an indescribable rage. I still know people that work there but I don't think I could call them friends. They're still complicit in keeping the poor, poor and making the executives richer. I just checked they're on $177 billion in assets and meanwhile charging interest during a pandemic.

If you work for an information broker as a free service you're just as complicit in this fucked up system of self interest over collective success. Good post op.

Do you blame the railway workers for putting down the rails that allowed nazi germany to move people into concentration camps highly efficiently?

Re 1: People keep lumping Google with Amazon and Meta, but Google does not sell your private data and alerts you if it finds out the government to accessed your data. People keep assuming that because the general tech community sells data that Google does it too, but check their privacy policy or just ask anyone who's worked there. They don't.

User data at Google is locked up tighter than fort knox. That's why the Snowden leak was such a huge deal, because the NSA was taking advantage of a security flaw that Google didn't know it had to scrape user data. Google patched it immediately after they found out.

Amazon, Meta, and Uber, are much less scrupulous.

It's not new, but yeah.

You're not wrong. The whole system is governed by fear. It is the operating principle by which this world operates.

Anyone that says "I'm just doing my job" living their life based on fear, and not reason. All it does is give the psychopaths running everything more power.

We need to stop being afraid. Believe it or not, it is a choice. You can wake up every morning happy, and at total peace. No matter what is happening in your life. Mind over matter, as they say.

You're right but... Capitalism is a good system to chew that out of you. You touch on it in point three. Seeing how Snowden was treated was not reassuring that the electorate would back you, or the free market for that matter.

The issue is that you lump people closer to the peasant class in with the modern feudal lord class.

The CEOs and major shareholders of said companies already have all the wealth they could ever need. They do it just to make number go up. They COULD spend their money and time on enterprises that benefit humanity, but that's just not profitable so it's not fun. Most employees, however, could last maybe a year or 2 without their salaries if they've been saving up a lot. Or maybe a week if they haven't. Average case for software engineers at huge companies, probably a few months.

They claim they’re trying to make a living, but can use their skills to develop counter products to these horrible companies, or work for those that are sensitive and conscientious towards customer’s needs and welfare.

There's just a lot less money in that, and thus fewer jobs (and the ones that DO exist, pay worse).

If you want to retire early, or if you have kids whose future you want to secure, you want to get the best paying job possible. It's well known in my country that the online casino software companies pay way more than most non-casino software companies. You know when people start looking into those jobs? When they start families.

Let's take a look at an example here: You're currently being paid to work on the Windows operating system itself. Certainly spies on its users, puts ads everywhere, etc. Good news, there ARE companies that develop counter products. You could work at Apple (comes with its' own ethical issues), or at one of the companies working on desktop Linux distros. So mainly Red Hat or Canonical, because most desktop Linux distros are community-driven, but Fedora and Ubuntu are two great examples that have paid devs.

Canonical is trying to be the Microsoft of the Linux ecosystem (through enshittifying the desktop with snaps and ads, as well as selling you on Ubuntu Pro), whereas Red Hat is... trying to be the Microsoft of the Linux ecosystem (by reducing source accessibility of their enterprise offering, though at least they're not doing that with Fedora). Oops!

What IS the alternative here? Work on desktop Linux software for free, in your free time. But that doesn't put food on the table, so you'll still have to work at one of those evil corps.

Similarly for Meta. Facebook is huge. What are the alternatives? Lemmy for Threads, Friendica for Facebook itself. What are the devs being paid? Nothing, really. I think Dessalines is slowly starting to approach a livable salary for Lemmy, looking at his Patreon. Friendica's Tobias doesn't even seem to have a donation page anywhere.

If you've got the luxury of plentiful free time, definitely contribute to open source alternatives to commercial projects. But if you don't, you have to put bread on the table somehow...

I'm not gonna talk you down. U rite

You’re correctly assessing the situation but the conclusion you reach is wrong. Here’s how:

As another person said, just tack on no ethical consumption under capitalism and you’re golden. Soon you’ll be crunching through critiques of Goldman and speaking in ways that make normal ppl make the brotha eww face. But the big difference between just doing my job and just following orders is degrees of separation and situation.

Even though people in positions you describe at companies you’re talking about ought to be able to understand the connection between their work and the immiseration of all humanity, it’s very easy to imagine someone who through choice or ignorance doesn’t see that connection. Our higher education programs have been removing humanities and arts in favor of stem associated education and ideas like effective altruism are renewing the randian tradition. Further, the work of many people in engineering is partial and atomized. Who wouldn’t want to put in the time designing a hermetically sealed self oiling piston that never needs maintenance over a million cycles? Who wouldn’t refuse that job when shown the patent drawing in which it’s a crucial component of a captive bolt gun against a human head?

The situation itself can’t be undersold. Soldiers (and hired workers!) on trial for war crimes couldn’t claim they were just following orders because they saw directly what their labor wrought. There was no degree of separation. Our expectations for that closeness to atrocity are different than when there’s a few veils between us and the subject. We expect people to get a different job, to defect, to sabotage, to kill their COs.

I wouldn't work at those companies, but I wouldn't say the developers who work there are quite as evil as the directors at those companies. It's true they were just doing their job, like they were just following orders, but people do need to work at the end of the day. Whether they work there for prestige, or for the pay, and sure you could argue nobody needs that pay, we have already seen people who stick their necks out at those companies get their heads chopped off. Not everyone who works there is going to be fine with (or worse, happy with) how evil the companies are, but also not everyone there is going to stick their neck out either. In summary, I don't think it's fair to blame the developers who work there. I once worked at a mid-sized advertising company, they hid that they were an advertising company and at that point it was too late.

Besides, not everyone has enough experience that they can quit their job at the drop of a hat, especially in this pro-business layoff-heavy economy.

I would work at them but im sorta glad for the tech places I have worked but then again can you work anywhere and not be adding to it? I worked at an onlinemarketplace for consumer to business that had a fair amount of competition and it was easy for new competition to spring up. As such they had to balance what their businesses wanted with what consumers wanted because one paid but there was a lot of competition to keep the consumers. The businesses themselves compete with each other so they also had to be very neutral there. Still it was integrated with all sorts of data broker cookies and pixels and whatnot. Im now working for business software in a regulated field so that helps. We are a framework so the data collection happens at our business customer level and not us but it still happens. How do you get away from it? I mean seriously I have about the best your gonna get private sector wise but everyone cannot work in the public sector.