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.
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.
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.
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
Alt text: A screen grab of an early Simpsons episode where a sign which is understood to have read “don’t forget: you’re here forever” has selected letters and partial letters covered with photos of Maggie so that it now reads “Do it for her”I like having a roof over my head and not starving to death. It really is that simple a transaction.
because morals are nice.
but being able to eat, and not be rained on and assaulted in your sleep is nicerer.
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.
Either you unionize, you leave, or your ethics aren’t worth shit.
Sometimes you don’t wanna be homeless and starving.
Yeah, let that happen to some other guy.
Or for your family to be.
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.
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
Yeah, a lot of people in this thread are delusional. Any big company is up to shady shit, you only need to dig deep enough to find it.
In my last job, I was stonewalled hard when I cautiously inquired why a huge 1st world company, selling seemingly innocuous products, had so much “value creation” done in 3rd world countries. If you live anywhere in the world, including Antarctica, you probably have some stuff of said company in your home right now.
As it turned out, they were taking advantage of the lack of regulation and/or enforcement in these countries, big time. The worst thing to me were all these smokescreens, the schmoozing with politicians and the goody two-shoes image they created to hide all of this.
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.
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.
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 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.
