Should I take a job to work on something I don’t believe in?
I recently joined a tech company purportedly with a mission I believed in. Before joining I had some hesitance about how their product achieved that mission, but I liked most the people I interviewed with and the offer was good. Turns out despite being profitable it’s a dumpster fire of a company led by a terrible person who is actively hostile towards my coworkers and our customers. So, I’ve been looking for a new role to get out ASAP.
Some challenging factors: the market is tough right now and I don’t get as many interviews as I feel I should, SWE interviews remain extremely stupid, and occasionally my brain just shuts off during interviews despite practicing it a million times. So getting an offer isn’t a breeze.
The question I’m wrestling with is should I join another company whose product I’m very skeptical of? It has market traction and many of you may have heard of it, but it’s not very compelling and it’s in the blighted world of social media (which I largely don’t use). My fear is that a bad product may necessarily mean a bad company. The confusion for me is that every single person I’ve interviewed has been incredibly down to earth and genuinely fun to talk to. They all claim to respect work-life balance (it’s remote too) and it doesn’t seem like lip service; they pay very well too. The opportunity to learn skills I can’t learn in many jobs seems compelling.
The role itself is the title I want, but the focus I’m not wild about. It’s a bit more user growth focused than I’d typically want. The problem is my current job is wrecking my mental health and I’m desperate to get out.
I’m interviewing with two other companies with better missions I’d much prefer to work for but both are dragging their feet and lower pay; one pays pretty terrible. I’m rapidly approaching a point where I will likely have a single offer in hand with no guarantee that others will manifest.
Any thoughts or guidance on how to navigate this? I want to approach this as “a job is just a job” and clock in and clock out, but I’ve seen at my current role that is not possible as I carry the stress and despair into my free time. I desperately don’t want to join another toxic company, but I don’t want to use that as an excuse to stunt my career growth either.
There are some things that you might find morally or ethically reprehensible; avoid those.
Otherwise, I think it's a trap to expect to align with your employer or job completely. Let the work to be a paycheck that supports meaningful interests and activities irl.
After compensation and remote work, I would say the most important things are direct supervisor and whoever you will most frequently work with. To me it sounds like you need a ranking system for what matters most to you in a job. Mission to me is more of a nice-to-have, but it might be more important to you (though it doesn't seem to be most important).
Regarding prospects, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Employers are incredibly indecisive and skittish right now, so if you find one that is decisive and committed to moving forward, that's gold.
A ranking system is a good idea. I’ll write down my aspects and give that a try. I think in this situation what’s tough is the math of “okay this offer is better than my current job but if I reject it I may get an offer that ranks higher on my list, or I may not”. Obviously there’s no perfect way to decide that.
Mission is a tricky one to me. If it was my most important I probably wouldn’t be working in tech, but it does matter. Social media would usually be a hard no-go for me, but they don’t make infinite content feeds so it feels different albeit maybe dumber.
I suspect you’re right about that especially right now. I wish I didn’t have to consider market dynamics, but that’s life.
Depending on the offer's contract (and if enforcible in your area), take the new offer but keep doing the waiting tasks for the other two. You should still be on-boarding by the time the other two make a final offer. Depending on contract, you should still be where both sides can decide it's just not working out, no questions asked.
I’m glad you raised this because this was something someone suggested to me that I was very unsure about. My gut reaction is I would feel guilty for doing that, but maybe I’m overreacting? It feels a little dishonest to me. However, the certainty of knowing I’d have an escape while not closing the door on more exciting opportunities is appealing…
You really shouldn't feel guilty at all - the company certainly won't if they were to decide that they are no longer hiring/found someone better/etc. I also pulled back from an offer/nearly signed contract in the last minute when I got offered something better - they just moved on to their second choice, no hard feelings at all.
This mirrors what others have told me, I think I need to internalize this more.
I recently had a candidate do this to me. We had stopped the search, he had a long notice period, and we were somewhat desperate for the hire. He pulled out 2 months after we made the offer and 2 weeks before he was due to start. I was really annoyed by this and it has cost me materially in terms of time, and made some deliverables much harder to manage for the time being.
That said, the relationship is still asymmetric in favour of the hiring company, they can withdraw the offer for reasons, they can change the nature job before you join and long after, they can and often do lie about aspects of the work. Some of these behaviours may be strictly illegal but honestly what are you going to do about it? That's the game. You didn't make the rules and you have to look out for yourself. I don't hold anything against the candidate for screwing me over temporarily, because I reserve rights in my favour (mostly termination during probation), and I'd do the same thing in a heartbeat if I were being hired and a better role came up.
Would it have been better if he quit two months after his start date?
Exactly!
I'm old and jaded, and my kindly idealism were ground down by unworthy companies long before now. My view is that if the contract they send you has NO stipulations on probation and full severance from day one, then follow their lead and only take that position if you're serious. But if it's the standard "just doing business" 3 months probation, then you give them 3 months probation too.
Imagine that you're the sole representative of Chundissimo Corp, and you're just doing your due diligence and honouring the best interest of your organization
I’ve been out of the job market a long time, so I find this curious: “probation” is standard? Which country is this?
In the US - First company I worked for around 2018 still had probation, but every company since then hasn’t.
Aww maybe it's only my country/sector/level of employment. I've never had a job that didn't come with 3 (I've even heard of 6 months from others) where they don't need any reason to fire, no severance, no notice, and no benefits.
Edit: mind, I've never had an employer do this to me, but it's like their safety clause for what if they hired a straight psychopath or their preferred candidate/ original employee came crawling back.
Being a good representative of Chundissimo Corp is good life advice in general :)
Absolutely! I stole that good advice from someone else and it's served me well: I grew up with a very authoritative culture and default to being rather subservient. Only by imagining needing to loyally serve a different master/priority can I stand up for / properly defend myself, sadly.
Remember, it's going to be Chundissimo Corp that sees you through retirement, celebrate your best achievements, enables you to be the best version of yourself for your friends and family, have your utmost interest in mind and be there for you thick and thin. You got this! Congratulations on the job offers btw :)
You may already know or be doing this, but you would be stunned how often the words “I have an offer” will make engineering recruiting teams both A: jump and act much more quickly and also B: give you a more competitive offer because there is broader validation of your skill set being in demand. (It’s dumb, but it happens)
For purposes like this I often create a little spreadsheet where I list all my important factors, decide on a scale for each (usually 1-3 for bad, neutral, good or 1-5 for more nuance), then weights for each. This is helpful for comparing 1:1 in a pseudo-quantive way to avoid blind spots. One important thing is after you've filled in everything and it spits out the "winner" you should evaluate how it makes you feel. I once did this with apartment hunting and the emotional reaction helped me identify the one I was actually most interested in, even though the data didn't bear that out.
These seem like very similar impressions.
The main difference here seems to be the chance to learn specific new things in the new role? Of course you can only learn so much about a company when interviewing, but are you asking the tough questions? "When's the last time you worked a weekend/after 7pm?" "What management style do you wish were different at the company?" "Is this the best job you've ever had?". These are all fair questions for interviewers and might prompt some revealing responses about what it's actually like to work there.
Yeah it’s a good point, it was another aspect I was wrestling with. I’m kind of baffled by how on the whole my company has incredible employees but just the worst management imaginable.
Yes the main difference is the learning capacity and role, but also pay and switching to remote are huge pluses for me.
Yes I feel like I am, everyone has commented positively and given examples about the work life balance being good, but I’m going to try to ask more. Admittedly I’ve become a bit more nihilistic about it. A lot of the answers I got to my questions I asked for my current company were true until two weeks after I started when a restructuring made them untrue, and some of them were just 100% lies.
I feel in my gut that this job would be at minimum marginally better but imperfect, and I don’t want to make perfect the enemy of good here. But I also don’t want to impulsively choose the first escape hatch available if it’s going to lead to more dismay. It’s a tricky problem for me.
Sounds like you're doing the right stuff. It's never an easy decision and always involves a bit of a leap of faith. Here's a framework I used for my last job search decision if it's helpful:
This really helped me make the leap to my most recent role, and it's interesting looking back at it now that I know what I'm actually getting working there. Most expectations were met, some were exceeded, and some things I thought would be really important to me aren't as important now that I've been here a couple years given the broader picture.
Good luck! Job searching and interviewing sucks, but it's the most important work you can do since the resulting job dictates so much of your time, brain space, and general happiness. You got it!
Job is a job, unless its making you miserable I say go for it. Very few people are lucky enough to work on something they're passionate about, and they get through life just fine. You just need to fulfill yourself with other things like hobbies, friends, family, etc. I think there's very little chance that this new offer will be a downgrade considering what you've said in your post, so there's really nowhere to go but up.
And hey, if things don't work out, at least you won't be completely miserable while looking for another job right? It takes a lot of pressure off things when you can passively look for work while you already have a job vs feeling pressured to take another job because things are miserable where you are now (basically the situation you're already in)
I was lucky enough to work on a product for four years that I was passionate about, but the floundering business side of it drained my passion for it. I’ve also seen other companies where passion is abused to extract bad working conditions from employees.
There is a risk this job will also be miserable, but risk of misery is better than a certainty!
And a minor point on top of yours, I’ve found interviewing while working in an office to be extremely difficult, and I’m only in office 3 days a week. So going remote would help me a lot if god forbid I find myself back in this situation again.
Interviewing just sucks in general, especially in tech. They always want way more interviews than are required. That being said, in today's market it's far better to have a job already and be interviewing vs the alternative of not having a job and watching your savings get drained as every company slow rolls you into finally saying "sorry we went with another candidate." Although it sounds like your skills may be in enough of a demand where that isn't really an issue for you. It's a pretty miserable experience that makes you feel like you have to take anything that comes on the table despite it being a downgrade.
Like others have said, there’s a big gap between working for a company you find reprehensible and working for one that’s just meh. I’m assuming it’s not the former, and if it is I’d straightforwardly say don’t do it.
If it’s the latter, that actually fits very well with the impression you’re getting about pay and work-life balance. People aren’t going to be working through the night for a product they don’t particularly care about, nor are they going to make financial sacrifices to take that job - but plenty will happily turn up, build the thing that makes the money, and then go home leaving work at work. Compare that to “passion” fields like academia or game development, where poor pay and workplace toxicity are absolutely rife because people are willing to put up with more when they’re doing something important to them.
It’s not always the case in either direction, of course, but it’s perhaps a decent thing to keep in mind when considering why the staff loyalty at your current workplace has prevented it collapsing under its bad management, and why the “worse” company appears better in that regard.
On the rest, others have said more and better than I can - I have a strong personal preference towards working on something that’s meaningful to me in some way, but that’s backfired on me more than once for exactly the reasons I mentioned, so I’m probably not the best person to advise but I thought I could perhaps help explain!
The trick is to find something that you like that most people dislike or are indifferent to. That's actually a good general life hack.
I've worked on projects where I was severely passionate about the project. It was all the more heart-breaking when leadership decisions fundamentally sank one end of the boat, leading to a collapse of our end. You want a project you believe in to succeed. And it's all the worse when it doesn't.
I've also worked on projects where I didn't care about the product. My work was done, it met the spec, and it's upto the sales team to sell it. I don't have to be passionate about the product or leadership, to do the best at my job. And if it fails to succeed, I can be emotionally divorced from it.
Sounds like a tough situation, certainly one I've been in a few times.
One thing I'd suggest, though I suspect you've thought about it before: think about what your day-to-day would actually look like in this role. Who would be reviewing your PRs? Who would your manager be? Who would you be asking for favors outside of your direct team of peers? Who would you be planning with and meeting with at a potential on-offsite?
I've frequently made the mistake of mixing up "good vibes" from interviewers with actually good coworkers. But then I start work and it turns out to be a soul-sucking trap because I was putting a good face on in the interview and a lot of interviewers in my line of work just aren't the people I wind up working alongside every day.
So think about your direct peers. If they're great, it's largely up to you to decide if your moral compass is compatible with the company's mission. For instance, I'm not sure I could work at Facebook/Meta at this point even for the greatest team. But that's a very personal choice. If your team's product isn't indiscriminately evil and your coworkers are nice, it might be worth the risk. You have to grade on a bit of a curve when you're currently trapped in the jaws of toxic culture.
It’s unfortunately a great point. My would-be manager seems great, but she wouldn’t be embedded on my team. The people I’d work closer with I’m pretty sure I haven’t met, and may not get the chance to.
This company definitely is not in the realm of Meta, which I could not work for. They’re closer to Discord (kinda), but their product has fallen out of fashion in my eyes. I also only recently tried using it and found it pretty unappealing…
Not evil but merely uncompelling is fantastic! How do the users feel about this product? I ask because I'm old now, and there are things I really like that I know are never going to be mainstream or "cool", but I love the little community of users and I'll be very sad when the product goes.
Think of it like selling pies but your clients want to yeet them at each other instead of eating them. You'd rather your company sell pies to five star hotels and the secret weapon of boutique restaurants, sure, it'll sound more cool to your SWE friends too, but hey, those clowns super like these pies for not-eye-stinging-ness and they appreciate how easily it washes off their creepy shirts and baggy pants in the machine.
There's also the possibility of it being meh to everyone and they'll go under soon too. But it's remote and there's a chance it's not run by a big jerkface, so take the side-step-up and recover your mental health first. Switch to the nippy fish tank and get out of that shark tank.
Love this analogy, thanks
A lot of Reddit discourse points towards people no longer using the product or feeling like it went downhill, but I think that just means the user base has shifted.
The pie analogy is hilarious and an interesting perspective I’ve never thought to look at it from.
If the company is actively terrible and you want it to fail, then you should simply help them do that. Take the job, and simply be the worst employee you can be - without pissing off colleagues or impairing your career, of course.
This will require prioritizing. Your boss may tell you that being late to work is bad for the company, but the reality is that it doesn't make much difference, so you should instead save your political capital and strive to arrive on-time every day unless arranged otherwise with your boss.
Damaging a company to the tune of millions of dollars only requires one exceedingly poor decision made in the right area, so keep your eyes open for it and make plausibly reasonable decisions in the meanwhile.
Having been on this roller coaster of desiring my work to have social benefit and being forced to work within the context of capitalism, my best advice is to negotiate a divorce between your self-esteem and the company you work for.
Corporations are comprised of people. It's lovely to work with people you care about, for a purpose you can dedicate yourself to. But the corporation, the control structure for that work, is not human. It's a legal algorithm for distributing profits to shareholders and owners. This creates opaque incentives and punishments that distort relationships and undermine the ostensible purpose. You're going to find some degree of this wherever you go in private industry.
Even non-profits suffer from the problem of bad bosses (a friend had to sue one that fired him because his boss didn't like out gay people...).
My advice:
I appreciate the thoughtful response.
On the two weeks notice, I’m a bit torn. I’ve always in the past given two weeks, and at my last job I gave more because of how long I had been there. I don’t want to “burn bridges” but also this company has been so resoundingly terrible to everyone working here AND I’ve only been here three months. Do you think I still should give two weeks? At one point I was so distraught I thought I’d just give 0 days of notice and quit on the spot, but now I’m leaning towards just 1 week.
After only three months, it's likely you're not deeply into critical projects or sustaining important customer relationships. I'd say give two weeks if they ask, but otherwise walk out the door.
Take the job, working with pleasant people will make your life so much better