Comment by phoronixrly
2 years ago
With regards to the end of the article.
> Can I work for a bad company and still be a good person?
> No.
2 years ago
With regards to the end of the article.
> Can I work for a bad company and still be a good person?
> No.
I'm glad we cleared that up. Now all that remains is a good, measurable definition of what a bad company is.
It's like porn. You know it when you see it and also there's quite a lot of it.
As one grows older, they may find that not everything in reality can be quantified or put into words.
And trying to objectify value judgements is another whole area of contention that inevitably leads to itself.
I realize that.
But the point of reading a blog post would be to learn something insightful, to see the reasoning or argument by which the poster came to this particular conclusion. Hopefully with some consideration that I'd not thought of before.
This boils a complicated question with nuance and problems and facets of debate into a rather vapid "I like this answer." of a post. It's not worth anything: I come away from it no richer than when I came.
Like, trivially, someone could write the opposite answer on another blog. And whose answer is right? (They of course need not even bother actually writing it out. A "right" answer is created by argument, not spilled ink.)
> Now all that remains is a good, measurable definition of what a bad company is.
Lets re-invent religion.
You're trying to get quantitative about a qualitative problem.
The problem is that "bad company" is such a nebulous concept as to be useless, as the JSON license showed with their "shall not use this software for evil" clause.
No matter which company you choose, someone somewhere will find a justification for why they are actually not bad. Weapons dealer? Protecting your nation. Destroying local businesses? "They are just adding efficiency to the market". Kill someone with bad practices? "Still safer than the alternative". Ticketmaster? "The scalpers are giving a subvention for those who cannot afford the real price".
Setting up a straw "bad company" and knocking it down doesn't help anyone on the real problem of people working for unethical companies.
That's their point. They're poking fun at how the OP is speaking in absolutes about something subjective/ opinion based.
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So if you think a company is bad you shouldn’t work for them. Perhaps many of the people working for TicketMaster don’t think they’re a bad company.
If you're asking the above question, it means you already think the company is bad according to your own morals.
I ask myself if my company is bad all the time. They don't get a perfect score, but I feel better about this one than any of the previous ones (that's why I'm here and not there). If the answer is ever a resounding yes, I'll leave this one too.
When most of the relevant work around you is in some way related to ICBM's, you either sell your soul early, or you end up with habits like this. By my reckoning, about 80% of technology companies are bad.
It's not hard if you remove the self delusion. Removing the self delusion is maybe tricky for the individual, but it's easy for people around the individual to see. Societal tools like shame are generally used to encourage people in the right direction, but we don't do a great job of this in America, because money tends to override everything else and I don't think we have good structures around expressing non-monetary values like honor.
Especially on the west coast, we're so passive in our shaming of people that it probably doesn't translate to action. There are people who work at Evil companies like Facebook, etc, who are otherwise nice, but I find myself not including them or turned off to them as friends because this sort of contradiction is hard to square in my brain. Of course I wouldn't communicate to this, being a passive PNW raised wimp, and it's not even super explicit in my mind, it's really more of a bad vibe than anything else. I imagine over time if enough people act like I do, it doesn't actually translate to different decisions from the individual in question, but instead translates to them waking up one day feeling distant and unfulfilled, which is probably the worst of all outcomes. They still work for Bad Company, but are also sad about it, and there's a general sense of malaise pervading life that's hard to pinpoint.
*Obviously this all ignores the people who don't have a choice of employment. But here I'm generally referring to software people who have high pay and career mobility. Things get murkier when the conversation is opened up to people who are just trying to survive.
Yup. I was just discussing this in another comment that Facebook's emotional manipulation of users without consent is ethical wrong. Some people are replying with eh, everybody does it and for 20,000 dollars people will jump to Facebook.
I think the Leetcode grinding, TC optimizing crowd with no real moral judgment which is the majority in tech right now is another reason why things are falling apart. They will happily work for the KKK if they get a larger RSU package.
Your point about them being at least "sad" about it, is a start I guess.
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Does this extend to where you live and pay taxes?
Yes.
So, too poor to move means you are evil. Capitalism wins yet again.
I think we should make an exception for saboteurs.
And whistle blowers. And double agents.
All company's are "bad" in some way... does that mean all employees are bad?
> No.
And pretty much every company is bad. But this is a wrong answer because the question is actually nonsense.
The answer to "What happens when you move faster than light" is not "nothing", it is undefined because the question is invalid. Asking if a person or a company is good or bad isn't a question that can ever have a well-defined answer: the answers we give are rounded according to our own values. To get more specific, not all of us have a huge amount of choice in who we work for.
If apenwarr believes I want to be a good person they should hire me at Tailscale. What's that, they won't? They don't have openings, or I'm not qualified? I guess they're the bad person because now I have to work for a bad company or lose my income. And if I lose my income, my co-habitants lose their housing, and my donations to good causes dry up. Do I just not do enough good for apenwarr? They must be a paragon of virtue. Surely they don't eat meat, or even associate with meat-eaters. Surely they don't fly in airplanes.
It doesn't need a well defined evaluation scheme. You're the one asking the question, you can provide your own scheme, and come up with your own answer. Whether you're honest with yourself in this process is up to you.
It's still useful to point out that IF you think your company is bad THEN you should do something about that. It establishes that "I was just following orders that I know are wrong" isn't a valid excuse (e.g. like if you end up in court for something you did on the job).
> You're the one asking the question, you can provide your own scheme
Well, I'm responding to someone else providing their scheme for everyone else to use.
> the answers we give are rounded according to our own values
I agree with this entirely.
And rounding does not change the answer in most situations.
Something that isn't well-defined can still be mostly-defined.
I have no idea what the point of that strawman is in your last paragraph. It doesn't make sense with or without rounding. Maybe if you round every single value to infinity, but that's not what "rounding" normally means...
I honestly don't know how to respond to this, it's too vague.
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> Asking if a person or a company is good or bad isn't a question that can ever have a well-defined answer: the answers we give are rounded according to our own values.
Counterexample:
Was Hitler bad?
Good/Bad are consensus votes. Its hard to escape their use just because of how deeply ingrained the programming is. We just think it makes "sense" and is "obvious" because its a meme that is already in our head. There is nothing inherently evil or good about any past/present/future animal on this planet.
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That really depends if you ask a neo nazi or not.
Due to chaotic effects of causality, most of us would not exist if any significant event from that long ago had happened differently.
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If the answer is yes, does that mean a junior web dev who implements user tracking on a shopping portal is equivalent to Hitler? Or is every who does less evil than Hitler "not a bad person"?
I don't think it's useful to say "Hitler was bad." Hitler did a lot of specific evil acts that are more useful to analyze. If anything, it's counterproductive to say "Hitler was bad," because lots of people do bad things and then say "well, at least I'm not Hitler."