Please talk me down: "I'm just doing my job" is the new "I was just following orders".
Please talk me down: "I'm just doing my job" is the new "I was just following orders".
The only thing worse than an echo chamber is letting a self-created bad idea fester in the head.
I came to the conclusion a few months ago that software developers and coders who worked at Meta, Google, Amazon, etc are as culprit as their CEOs and the company itself. I will lay down my points below, but I understand that this might be a logical extreme of my distaste for these corporations.
Here's my rationale:
- Actions of the company they serve: The corporations they serve actively disenfranchise users, track them, sell their private / personal information to unscrupulous parties without any care on how it affects the person, or the society. They thrive on engagement rather than content. They have "commodified" the fundamental right to privacy. This has real world implications that has directly resulted in the spread of misinformation, political unrest, threatened elections, riots, and deaths of thousands of people.
- Awareness of the consequences: By virtue of their position, these are people with the capacity to read, and think for themselves. There are news articles: across the political spectrum in all major news sites, that report how the platform/ company they serve negatively affects society. Facebook's Cambridge Analytica fiasco, Snowden's expose, etc are credible and well documented examples that even non-tech people are aware. Yet they choose to ignore all this, and continue working / seek to join these companies.
- Cowardice: It is often wrapped in the garb of "self-interest", but they do not raise their voice when they know that the software and platform they're told to develop is going to be used to spy on their brethren. 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.
It's not new, but yeah.
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.
This was maybe a good point to make back during the pandemic when programmers actually had good job opportunities and could find somewhere else. Nowadays you will struggle to find a job as a programmer unless you have lots of experience. So people have to take any job they can get, whether they like it or not. Some people working in this field have gotten themselves into financial trouble doing things like buying houses based on their salary and then getting fired and only having lower paying positions available.
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.
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...
Red Hat works for the US military among other things, too. Not the greatest.
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.
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.
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.
I'm more concerned about the sociopaths that try to run everything: the ones who have no qualms running through anybody who tries to get in their way.
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.
I think you should've reported them and probably even destroyed the software so the whole thing shut down.
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
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.
There's no ethical consumption under capitalism. And yet, we're still forced into capitalism, with little choice but to participate or starve. You can object to a system and say that it's unethical, but also necessarily play into that system.
We all gotta eat. Long as there's our current form of capitalism, we all gotta pay rent (or mortgage). Until those needs relax, we're essentially saying "pick between your needs and being a good person." One of our strongest drives is to survive, and so if the only way for some to survive is off the backs of others, it's the inevitable outcome.
Of course we should all be striving to change this. Effective change comes from slow, repeated effort though, not just fruitlessly chasing an ethical job. If you just stay where you are, then that's fine. Do what you can from within, safely. We all do that, and we'll slowly steer this ship.
Europe does have some Union representation in the corporate org structure, fwiw. How much that helps... well... i'm not sure, i haven't seen it up close.
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.
Sports betting is an interesting one. It's a growing industry in the US. While things like Amazon are sort of nebulously evil, I think more people can agree betting is dangerous. I was unemployed from about July 2023 to Feb 2024. I turned down a sports betting job early on because I didn't wanna do it for moral reasons but months later I pursued a different one because I was more desperate for a job. Luckily they turned me down and I found a different job. That sucks, but at least I don't have to feel like I'm doing something wrong.
Loads of people working for these companies are also on special visas that have been described as modern slavery... so maybe they are culpable of signing up for such jobs/visas, but once you are in such a setup the threat of immediate deportation to some 3rd world country is quite real.
I work at Microsoft and it's well known that you get paid way more at Facebook and Amazon. We like to call it a "sin tax". Their employee retention is basically how long you need to stay to get your whole signing bonus.
Microsoft is far from perfect but I thoroughly enjoy working there in gaming.
How hard is it to get into Microsoft?
The privacy nutter part of my brain hates them about as much as the other (insert acronym here) companies. The "I have a family" part wants me to get paid enough to secure our future, so I'm looking into getting a US tech job in the next ~5-10 years (I'm aware that it's a PAIN of a process if I need sponsorship, but luckily Microsoft has EU offices too)
Not anymore!
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.
Do you blame the railway workers for putting down the rails that allowed nazi germany to move people into concentration camps highly efficiently?
No. But if u r a rail worker in Germany, Hitler is clearly talking about murdering minorities and u r aware of this information and yet u stay, then yes. U r complicit in the crimes of Hitler.
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.
The police told the suspect, Jorge Molina, they had data tracking his phone to the site where a man was shot nine months earlier. They had made the discovery after obtaining a search warrant that required Google to provide information on all devices it recorded near the killing, potentially capturing the whereabouts of anyone in the area.
I hate Google as much as everyone here, but we shouldn't equate complying with a warrant to "give it to the cops when asked." They were required to give it.
If by "when asked" you mean "given a search warrant with very clear evidence that this man had stolen a car", then... Yes? I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here.
The ex-boyfriend had signed into the guy's phone. It's not like the police just cast a wide net and randomly got his data.
Its a fair point, and definitely worth pointing out. They aren't as bad as the others in that very specific way, which is commendable for now while it suits them. The moment they can make more money by selling vs. holding your data, I have no doubts they will pivot.
Google is as bad as the others but in different ways. I‘m dont have the time to research for you rn but just check monopoly cases against google. I hope they get broken up.
I generally agree. If you work for an Evil Corp, you are just as culpable.
Being poor never helps. Quiet quit / be overemployed
problem here is you want to keep learning and growing which has the unfortunate consequence of improving the software.
Improve yours, not theirs.
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.
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 generally agree but not everyone can choose where they work. For many people, the choice is starving on the street or work for Evil Corp.
No one who qualifies to work for Evil Corp is going to fucking starve on the street if they decide to look for work elsewhere instead.
Exactly, if you choose to work for a company then that is in support and furtherance of that companies goals / operations.
We are not so helpless as we sometimes like to claim.
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'm not gonna talk you down. U rite
While I agree with the general ideas mentioned, each of them is much more complicated than that, except for the first point, that's a point that's nearly impossible to counter honestly.
Point 1 is, in my opinion, it 100% accurate, ad I mentioned above.
On point 2, pero everything, from my perspective, is absolutely correct, except for: "Yet they choose to ignore all this continue working / seek to join these companies.". A lot of people don't really have an option at the beginning. We all need to make a living, and finding well paying jobs is difficult enough across the board, and becomes infinitely harder if you get" picky" about where you apply or which companies you accept offer from. In a perfect world developers that get hired and well paid by any of these disgusting corporations would accrue some good cash to be financially secure for a few years and then quit and move to, like you said, creating the "counter-product/service" to what they were working on, adding the ethical factor. In reality, unless you're loaded, we all need to start somewhere, and everything costs money.
Point 3, I would say there is some true to the cowardice side, but I also believe that, at least temporarily, some just don't have a choice, for the factors mentioned in my response to point 2. "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.", as mentioned above, everything costs money. A more realistic approach would be getting that spiteful job, cashing out with a good sense of financial freedom, and then endeavoring into countering these companies.
It's taken me 12 years to finally be in a place where I can make a slight difference in my industry by opening my own business, and after almost a year since I started, while my employees and contractors all earn good money and get paid always on time and gather pretty good benefits, and my clients are (I believe) the happiest in the industry, my wife and I (the owners) have still to get paid the first time. Imagine the shit show that my life would be I'd I had gone the ideallist way without considering all the financial aspects of trying to improve this industry.
I do not work in the tech sector, but we do use tech for everything. My platform is currently the most secure and private of the whole industry in the US, and that alone ate through around 75% of the starting budget, the rest has been allocated to pay staff and services while we bring this to cash-positive status.
It's not as black and white as some may think.
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.
New?
cant talk you down when i agree with you completely
At the end of the day people need to make a living. Also I am not sure why you are so upset by these companies. You don't need to use there products.
Also we aren't exactly taking about war crimes here.
Don't you need to go really out of your way to not get caught in their web of data mongering if you intend to use any part of the internet?
You CAN take steps to limit your exposure in varying levels of effort, the problem is a lot of that means "not using the thing" (ie gmail, Facebook, etc) and most people are not about that life, gripe as they might.
I've paid for private email hosting for over 5 years, run grapheneOS on my phone, my fb is deactivated with messenger having limited perms on my phone and kept in an isolated container on desktop, self host a number of services like password management and storage - etc etc.
Am I safe from big tech? Not completely. There's still 1000 ways your business gets out and about, and on desktop I still use YouTube logged in and all (no yt on phone though.) They're still only getting a small fraction from me compared to other people though.
Sure, but if you really cared, then you'd put in the effort. Or are you "just following orders"?
The point is that he blames the people working for these companies with a blanket statement while not taking any responsibility for his own agency in the situation. It's a lot more nuanced than just "why don't these other people do x." It's like "vote with your wallet" vs. "no ethical consumption under capitalism."
If you're able to get a job at Meta/Google/etc, you're also able to get a job at a less shitty company.
"No ethical consumption under capitalism" is the new "just following orders." If you can afford the product, you can afford to buy something more ethical.
Imagine working at Microsoft. What do you even tell your family and friends so they're not ashamed of you? Make up a fake company? Say you're unemployed? Say you're a prostitute?
"I work on a Linux competitor"
Perfect :D
"I make online honeypots."