Comment by ChuckMcM
15 hours ago
As someone who 'grew up' my career in Silicon Valley my first exposure to this sort of shenanigans was during the dot com bubble, where general partners at newish VC firms were fleecing limited partners (GP's got a salary to 'manage' the fund, LP's were the source of money for the funds.) They would tell the LPs well only one in ten is a real banger, looks like the fund you invested in wasn't a winner.
It reminded me a lot of the Bill Cosby skit about the game Keno, he used an example of a Keno Card that had two numbers on it, you picked one and took it up to the cashier with your $1 bet, the cashier drew a number and said, "Sorry not your number, try again."
The sad truth was that a lot of people who had become wealthy because they happened to be working at a company that went public and had stock, were not particularly sophisticated when it came to the reality that even people "like you" were not your friends. I spent my Jr High/High School years in Las Vegas and got to see so many 'confidence men' fleece tourists with so many schemes. There is a great book called 'The Confidence Game' by Maria Konnikova. It is excellent and reading it you'll come to understand that not only is it possible for even 'smart' people to be taken, there are lots of people who work on being good at it.
But taking all of that into consideration, if you worked at a company, did your job to the best of your ability, and it turned out that it was a "fake" job because some third party was using it as part of a scam, you aren't part of the scam. Any more than happening to be in a bus when the driver whose been drinking kills a pedestrian. You aren't responsible for that pedestrians death and you're not being on the bus wouldn't have changed anything. So you can let that go.
I like the analogy, but lets stretch it to the situation where workers can see that there is fraud and still do nothing.
The passengers on the bus are not blameless if they know or have reason to know that the bus driver was drinking before or while they went down a road with pedestrian crossings. They are not blameless if they take no action, but to sit in the seats and wait to see if anyone gets hit or they all get away with it and arrive at the destination.
Or if they remain in the seats after the first pedestrian and 'hope' it wont happen more.
And how 'blameless' are the 'non-passengers' along for the ride to perform ongoing maintenance and provide fuel and snacks to the driver while on this imaginary trip to hell.
So, I'm all out of 'you're not really the asshole' cards as we watch the whole kleptocratic SV system run Theranos' style over the total sum of human creative production.
Anyone who participates in building the toolchains of tyranny is complicit in the abuse of people with those tools, even if it just a tiny bit.
Sorry, not sorry, if that pricks the consciences of a few pricks; those that can feel shame are the better for it, and those who feel it not we must all be wary of.
Its a reasonable extension. At some point if you discover that you are aiding or abetting the harm of others you have to ask yourself what kind of person you are. That said, I get that "but I need a job!" is a powerful thing and it takes someone with a strong sense of personal integrity to leave. A good friend of mine quit their game developer gig because the product manager and management were more interested in addictive behaviors and reselling eyeballs than they were in game development. But they also knew that was probably the last paying gig they were going to have in the 'games' business because it had gone from people making great games, to things on a phone/browser pulling you down.
So yeah, it is going to test you and you might come up short. I don't judge people who stay when they know, but I do grieve for the damage they do to their souls when they see themselves as someone they no longer recognize.