Comment by kortilla

> We must balance optimizing for oneself with optimizing for others, including the public good. So how does working for Big Tech thread this needle? This is the question that people who work for Big Tech must ask themselves.

This is a bullshit premise. Many people who worked at Google when I was there (including myself) sincerely believed that Google was good for society.

People sitting on the outside have an incorrect mental model of how people work at companies like this.

A very very small minority work there and think the company is evil. The ones who think that do not last long because it’s insufferable working with people drinking different koolaid. The same thing is true for working for Wall Street, defense contractors, drug companies, and whatever else you can think of.

If it’s a company that defines and leads the space, it’s likely filled with motivated employees that already think the company is doing the right thing.

So there is no ethical quandary of “what is good for me vs what is good for society” because the employee thinks he/she is doing good for society by working there.

> Uber skirted regulations, shrugged off safety issues, and presided over a workplace rife with sexual harassment.” Was it ethical to have worked at Uber under Kalanick?

This is the false dichotomy that doesn’t apply to people who drink the koolaid. If you think Uber has saved thousands of lives via reduced drunk driving and available rides out of bad areas, disrupting/ignoring local regulations is easy to justify. A leader who had sexual harassment issues is completely irrelevant because of “the mission”.

Implying that someone is unethical to be at Uber while that was going on makes as much sense as implying someone is unethical for being a research professor at Harvard when others there have published fraudulent papers at the same time.