28
votes
What's your line?
When do you decide you can no longer ethically work somewhere?
What would be your line?
Would your ability to do harm reduction or meaningfully change the situation make a difference in your decision?
Have you acted on these stances before?
I left the television station I worked at once they were bought out by Sinclair Broadcast Group. I don’t know how well they’re known outside of America but Sinclair is an extremely right wing company who has been (not so) stealthily injecting their views into local news and trying to make it seem as if it’s local sentiment. They’re extremely insidious and evil.
I will admit it took longer than I’d like to leave, but I work in a relatively specialized field and jobs are mostly gotten through networking. During that time though, I did speak to several media outlets that were doing stories on Sinclair at the time. I was quoted (anonymously) in a few articles giving them some background on how this story went down. Not anything major or amazing, but it’s something.
So I guess that’s my line?
I only know about them because of the chilling "This is extremely dangerous to our democracy". Not working for them seems to be a pretty reasonable line.
That was the first time most people had heard from them.
Good for you. I'm constantly shouting out the danger of Sinclair to friends and family who genuinely don't know they're watching propaganda. Its very cool that you walked.
Every time I try to say anything they just tell me that my news is propaganda lol
I passed up a job offer because I didn't want to assist with the damming of floodplains, damaging local ecosystems and pushing flooding downstream to poorer communities to the benefit of property developers.
It's quite amazing how stunningly bad 80 years or so of "flood management" techniques that amounted to "push it downstream as fast as possible" have wreaked havoc on ecosystems.
Rivers and creeks were meant to meander and soak up things. You want small amounts of flooding everywhere to prevent flash flooding wiping out communities.
Unless, of course, you value said communities about as much as the average person values the homeless person begging at an intersection.
Most recently, I gave official notice that I would quit if my employer asked me to do work for an ICE-operated healthcare facility. Turned out I wasn't the only person to protest, and the salesperson shut that bid down in a hurry.
I did quit a job where I was asked outright to abet a federal crime by destruction of evidence, but that was more of a "last straw" than a hard line given that the crime in question was related to copyright infringement by software piracy.
When I was younger I worked for a large company that wrote software for call centers.
I thought the application was cool at the start but the more I learned the worse it got.
And then the new features started coming and they were so gross. I felt horrible thinking that it was actually humans who the software was targeting.
I was too young and naive to make a real move out myself, I ended up being "made redundant" aka fired. But it was because I was refusing to engage and doing basically no work on purpose.
If that was today I'd be job seeking immediately.
I worked briefly for a small MSP. Contracted IT for other small businesses that couldn't afford or need their own in-house IT. While I learned a lot during my 18mos there, there was shady shit going on. Like for example, replacing a router with issues at one client, then being told to visit another client and replace their also maybe broken router...with the maybe broken router I just swapped out. Obviously the first client got charged full price for a brand new router. But so did the second client. For a used router that might not even work.
Often, we got free ethernet cables and other things like HDMI cables from clients. Maybe we were simplifying or cleaning up their networking closet. Or we replaced their desktop monitors, but they already had HDMI cables, so we just took the ones that came in the box with us. Technically, if we used those at another client, we were supposed to track it...because then the other client would get billed. Like, WTF, we didn't even pay for those. So a lot of times, I wouldn't track them if I was using some "extra" cables that I knew I got from another client (if it was from our actual inventory, then I would track it).
Also, sometimes felt like things we should've fixed for good the first or second time...We left unfixed and just did workarounds that lasted for a day or two, because we could generate billable hours. Now sometimes it was definitely the client being cheap that didn't allow us to, for example, replace something that would fix a problem once and for all. But there were times I felt like it was us not pushing the solution because we could make more money this way.
When a place I used to work at for a long time, a non-profit, came calling, wanting me to come back, I jumped. It was a no-brainer. Never had any major ethical concerns at the non-profit.
But had they not called, would I have left the MSP on my own? Eventually. But it was also early 2021, when we were still in the grips of the pandemic. Not exactly the best job market around then. Regardless, I wouldn't still be there today.
15-ish years ago (give or take) I was working for a social networking company that wasn't doing so hot and had gone through a few rounds of layoffs while was there. Some of my ex-coworkers hit me up to join them at a company that one of them had started after leaving and got acquired by a big advertising company. They were extremely vague about the kinds of stuff they were doing (basically just said they were developing "browser extensions"), but it would come with a pay bump and it was definitely time to jump off the sinking ship I was currently on, so I accepted. Here are some of the things I worked on while I was there:
I knew the whole time that all of it was bullshit and I was being a shitty person. The straw that finally broke the camel's back was that one of the higher-ups had discovered some Chinese malware for Windows that was somehow able to steal browser cookies and silently install apps onto the user's iOS phone (the same way we were already doing for Android by stealing Google Play cookies). I was trudging through the decompiled source code for the Chinese malware and just thinking why the fuck am I wasting my time and talent on this horrible bullshit. I refreshed my CV and wrote up a cover letter basically begging someone to save my soul, and that landed me the first job I applied for (which was in the medical/genetics industry and such a breath of fresh air compared to all of my prior experience). It got me out of Florida too, which was a not-insignificant additional bonus.
After that whole experience my line has tightened up a lot. I don't want to spend one more second of my life working on something that makes other people's lives worse instead of better.
Honey?
Pre-Honey by a long shot, but essentially the same scummy business model. The hook for ours was if you shopped with our toolbar, you wouldn't pay any more than normal, but a "small percentage" of your purchase price from "participating merchants" would go to "charity" (we were never any more specific than that).
I don't really have an explanation of my ethics here, just an arbitrary line in the sand I've drawn to make myself feel better just because I was chasing a paycheck. The company I currently work for has definitely caused some harm in the world but since I work in a completely different organization that worked to connect people and make their lives "better", I feel better about myself working there. My previous company was a bit better since it was a purely enterprise-focused software company but my current company is a consumer-focused company that just so happens to make tools for businesses to reach consumers.
Due to a variety of reasons I haven't been able to finish my higher education or university degree and enter the workforce. I suffer from mental illness and am working my way through it.
What irks me is that people so easily forego their rights for minor gains. Concretely, this means that I've slowly gained the inability to see the value in work at all. Most of us will gladly waste away hours for a meaningless company doing barely anything to better humanity, all under the guise of having to cover costs of living.
This to me is just another form of slavery. You not being paid what you are valued for is the premise and theory behind capitalism but I cannot see myself working for any company that doesn't align with anything that won't benefit humanity in the long run.
Selling electronics? They're all produced in China, convince me otherwise. Cheap furniture or interior? Hardly contributes to a livable, sustainable future.
We are blindly churning out so much CO2 so someone can have a slightly different experience. It's obscene.
So where do I draw the line? Fairly early on.