Comment by steve_adams_86
1 day ago
> and that's pretty important to me
The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble.
I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject misery because of this. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but a large part of the problem was working with people who had very little integrity. They were great at masking it and presenting a different persona, but ultimately, we did bad things to people and made filthy money. I don't miss anything about it.
Like you, I've found that working with people of integrity (or some qualities closely related to that) is very important to me.
Not in a "new-grad or corporate PR appropriating meaningless platitudes" kind of way. But in a "I have seen multiple times how one untrustworthy person can easily wreck all the work of a team or organization, and make their lives miserable, so averting that is a high priority" kind of way.
Lately, in business context, I tend to characterize what I seek from people as "alignment". I think that many (not all) business people are still willing to buy in on that.
And it will just have to be a given that the company and team goals with which people are aligned are respectable.
What seems to be getting more difficult in the last few years is finding companies with respectable goals. Of course you knew to avoid any company in crypto. But now, with with a new VC gold rush of AI (often involving the same people who were happy to run crypto scams), there aren't a lot of startups that look respectable.
Not all AI companies, nor all companies doing AI, are bad. But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush?
As a new grad, I think a lot of the companies that have respectable goals to me only hire at the senior level. So what am I supposed to do, go do something I deeply disagree with for a few years so I can eventually work on something respectable?
Yes, if that's the viable path. The world isn't a perfect place, and you still need to eat.
Also, you can do your own job with personal integrity regardless of what others are doing.
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Congrats on graduating.
Like everyone else at the moment, you're living in interesting times.
AFAIK, there are not enough respectable companies for even the senior engineers.
(And you may have already noticed that a lot of companies are run by people who make a half-hearted effort to drape the company with positive PR language. But they'll soon hint at their true intentions with their actions. Even in a brand new startup, you can simply look at equity allocation, to see what the founder actually thinks about warm-fuzzy ideas like social equality and valuing others: compare their allocation of wannabe-billionaire founder shares, to the token amount of peanuts in stock options that they think the first hires deserve if the company is successful.)
The good news is that a lot of people are looking for high total compensation, or career stability, as higher priorities than respectability, so... less competition for the respectable jobs.
One idea: make a ranking list of companies based on how respectable you think they are (recognizing that most have downsides), and then see how close to the top of the ranking you should focus your energies. Do a first shot at this ranking early on (and revise over time based on actions, not overtures), and you might check yourself when a company with low respectability ranking approaches you.
When you find a good company, let people know.
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> But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush?
Look for those who are trying to serve established respectable professions, ideally have already done so for many years or decades. Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism (in the ideal sense).
Then look at their own mission. Then look at their own work. Do they show their work? Are they open? Do they willingly allow their customers to audit their work product? Does how they talk about their work match the work product itself? Does the thing do what it says on the tin? Are they hypocrites with respect to those they serve or those they manage?
These are my strategies and I’ve found they lead to working almost exclusively with people who have high Integrity.
I especially like "do they show their work?" In a gold rush, obscurity is often part of the business model: vague claims, unverifiable demos, hand-wavy benchmarks, carefully managed customer stories. Companies serving serious professions eventually have to deal with people who ask boring, concrete questions and expect boring, concrete answers
>established respectable professions
>Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism
In America, in 2026, this is a particularly dark joke.
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Maybe a respectable company is one where the answer to "what would make this business more profitable but worse for the world?" is not treated as a product roadmap
The older I get, the more I realize what matters to me as well. I worked a FAANG with a long commute. I then worked a job with a short drive (10m morning, 15m afternoon, both via Uber when it was cheap). I now have a 12m walk to and from. The last one is purely luck, as I didn't know it'd be so close when I applied. (None of this omits the importance of working with honest people who have shared values.)
I am focused on the first part of the original line, however:
> pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it.
When I was ~20 years old, I thought I should avoid working in a job based on computers. I didn't want my hobby / passion to become my work and ruin it. It took several years to realize that I should obviously be in the space because I was good at it. It still took many years to figure out and understand what fine-grained details about the work must exist to do so successfully. I had some misery before finding what I love.
It's easy to have wisdom after experiencing life for a long time. I'm not knocking wisdom or older people who have it (it's hard fought to win it). I'm just lamenting that it's very hard to know these things before you have experience. What I thought would be my dream job was the one I hated the most.
You gotta do it for a while before you can truly understand what and why you love and hate different aspects of a role. Then you extrapolate after multiple variations before you can really apply the knowledge holistically.
I genuinely feel bad for people who get into the space because money. When I joined, it was still all passionate nerds who were excited about what we were doing. Now it feels like the space is full of people who had to pick from "lawyer, doctor, coder," without really wanting to do any of them. I'm one of the luckiest people in the world since I actually wanted to do this and it turned out to be a good career. What a shame for them.
Totally agree, I took a very well paying job with a company doing what I enjoy doing, but the attitude of the company was very much to extract as much money from the clients as possible. We had three hour monthly call where everyone would take turns to explain how they had upsold or otherwise made money for the company that month, someone from each call would get a token award for it.
I hated it, and wrote my resignation during one of these meetings without even having a solid plan of what I would do next.
A company can make money and provide a good service and experience for clients at the same time.
I'm sure it wasn't common, but even in such a company you could "extract as much money from the clients as possible" by delivering as much value as possible. Doing things carefully, solving problems, going a little above and beyond what was expected to the point that your clients were glad to pay your billings.
Also, it's just two sides of a point of view to see something like "upselling" as pressuring clients into buying things they don't need, or making them aware of things they didn't know you could provide.
I think that's why integrity matters so much: it removes a whole layer of moral bookkeeping from daily life
The older I get, the more I feel it’s becoming in shorter supply. Even when I don’t like associating with those that seem to lack it, they seem to find me everywhere I go. This is professionally, as a consumer and even just socially. I’m probably just old and grumpy and this is a yearning for the good old days, but, when I look around it just seems to be getting out of control. For example, politics is huge indicator that exemplifies and reinforces the behaviors.
Weekly church attendance is at all-time lows. Nobody I know today goes to church. It was common when I was a child. And I'm not talking about going to save your soul from damnation, but for regular reinforcement of the Golden Rule, and other wisdom on how to live, and belonging to a group of people who care enough about those things to show up for it on a regular basis.
Teaching of right and wrong in school has fallen off. Anything touching on traditional morals risks being conflated with religion, which is kryptonite in the public schools. So now it's much more about how you feel, and excusing bad behavior because of hurt feelings, "disrespect," or some culturally or socially disadvantaged group you might claim to belong to. The soft bigotry of low expectations. We've stopped demanding that people follow the rules. If a kid got in trouble in school, he could probably expect to be in trouble at home too. Now, it's more likely that the parents will call the school and complain.
I also think a big part of it is that it’s becoming more and more easy to cheat your way through life in many respects. Many people always chase the thing that makes the most money, and they’ll take every shortcut they can to get it. And the tools for cheating your way through life are evolving. Every aspect of the tool chain.
I’m not sure whether it used to just be that everyone had to pretend to have integrity, whether they did or not, since the appearance of integrity was something we indexed on pretty heavily as a society.
I definitely agree with you though: it seems like the need/desire to pretend isn’t even there now much of the time, and I suspect that overall this means there is less integrity: some people who were pretending in the past may have “faked it til they made it,” and even if not, it at least faking it would have led to fewer obviously integrity-less actions being committed in the public sphere.
> we did bad things to people and made filthy money
I blame society. It systematically rewards sociopathic behavior.
I was raised with integrity and honesty as core values. Every single day I am psychologically assaulted by the fact we not only have all these sociopaths running around but also the fact that they are the ones making it.
It makes me wish I was one of them. Maybe one day I'll finally break and start carelessly exploiting others for my own gain.
From my perspective, they aren’t making it.
It have a sense of relief that I’m content with so much less. Yesterday I made some sourdough bread and it was so gratifying. They cost around 70 cents CAD when you break down the costs for flour, salt, and energy to cook them. When you pull them out of the oven they do this incredible thing where they crackle and pop as they cool, and the rock-hard crust gradually softens. The smell is incredible. The first slices are always this impossible combination of crispy, glass-like crusts with a chewy, pillowy, delicious interior. It’s so good.
I’m in the worst financial condition I’ve been in my life. I earn less than half as much as I used to. Yet I enjoy things like this, I love my job, I can afford to take care of my family, there are countless things I want to do that I can still afford to do. Explore the outdoors, swim, dive, read, fish, spend time with friends.
That stuff is making it. I don’t need to exploit anyone to enjoy those things. In fact, I can make people’s lives better! I can give my neighbours nice bread. I can share fish I catch. I can take someone to an amazing spot I found.
The world doesn’t ask anything of us beyond that. It’s a choice to pursue more, and it’s a choice to pursue more at the expense of others. I really believe that choice comes with a consequence, too. My impression is that people who choose poorly tend to live hollow and discontented lives. I don’t think there are many exceptions, and when there are, these people tend to share a lot of traits with psychopaths. I don’t envy them either.
Let me ramble about this: in your position you have to pay a moral price to make more money. It's just logical. But it creates a systemic incentives problem, especially when the cost of living is going up, making the price you have to pay relatively lower, or in other words making you can't afford to not pay it.
I hate this kind of people. But some of them simply can't afford not acting this way, more than you do. Instead, people of power, who can and do set the agenda, don't care about it, because again, incentives problem - they won't change the system to one in which they make less money.
Part of this in my opinion is the fact that the western world ideology, the trash can we are all eating from, is simply money.
I wonder what Slavoy Zizek would say about this.
> It makes me wish I was one of them.
Imagine feeling starved no matter how much you have, knowing the vast majority hate you and would gang up on you, so you form close alliances with others who (like you) would mercilessly betray you if they felt it would benefit them.
Society doesn’t reward every sociopath or even most of them. It rewards people who are smart, disciplined, charming, and (in other ways) lucky.
But society is not the true reward granter, the self is. The real winners are those content with what they have.
I'm a loser then. I'm definitely not content with what I have. I want more. I want to make it.
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Integrity is important and missing. I think there's a contradiction in what you're writing though. Recognizing the importance of personal and social relationships is what's keeping the no integrity people around and/or getting them promoted. It's the networking for networking sake as well as the more mundane social lubricating they do in contradiction to integrity. It's disagreeing with discussions, projects, companies, leaders and going along with it and expressing agreement. It's smiling, being "enjoyable to be around", being naive or presenting as naive, and being easy to work with. And more specifically being easy for the many liars and sociopaths to work with. Caring for personal and social relationships is not inherently reinforcing of all that is good. I wouldn't know how to count, but I feel there's quite a bit of it reinforcing the bad.
There's a difference between "networking," and "having a relationship."
I worked for a Japanese company, for a long time, and the Japanese were really big on personal relationships.
They weren't necessarily "warm and fuzzy" ones, but they were based on mutual respect and shared interests. I worked with many folks for decades, and we got to know each other well. We didn't always like each other, but we respected and supported each other.
Personal Integrity isn't something that can be faked. If you are in the kind of relationship I just described, fake integrity will be exposed fairly soon.
Yes, integrity is important no argument. I also agree it distinguishes "networking" and "having a relationship." I do think it can be faked though and I think we see plenty of that.
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