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Comment by Macsenour | Hacker News Reader

I came back to CA for a job. I quit after 3 weeks when I was told that a big part of my job was to lie to the employees about their paychecks being secure.

I took a part time contract but it was cancelled in 2008 do to the economic downturn. I couldn't find work. I moved all my stuff into storage and lived in my car.

I now own a home in Oakland with a great job at a great company.

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Congrats on quitting that job after 3 weeks. I am always disgusted when people do terrible things while employed and write it off as "I was just doing my job." "Just doing my job" is EXACTLY IDENTICAL to "I just did it for money." For some reason we see the two differently, but there is no difference. Quitting or turning down a job on moral grounds gives you an ability to look yourself in the mirror and say 'I am not making the world a worse place' and an unfortunate few people can do that.

Thank you. You got it exactly right, I knew I would have to look at myself in the mirror every day. I remembered what my mother, an amazing manager, taught me... the 5 most important words when managing people: "Never FK with people's money".

"Just doing my job" is the same as "I was just following orders".

I think there is a bit of a difference, just because the only reason one has a job, ostensibly, is to get money so one can feed themselves and others. Usually signing up with a military has more to it. But, even in those cases, the US Soldier's Oath I know explicitly includes an oath to never follow an illegal order. And we found out during the Nuremberg Trials just how dangerous it is when people put their head down and say 'just following orders'. Every human being is given the ability to control their own actions, and that responsibility can never (OK almost never, humans are complicated, one might argue soldiers that are trained to the point of killing on reflex and who then get PTSD from seeing their body do something their conscious mind would never permit before it can intervene might have a case) be given up.

The people who genuinely "were just following orders" in WWII would probably be shot for disobeying those orders and then their families treated as if they had been traitors.

That's a lot more pressure to conform than losing a job.

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