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Comment by sorokod | Hacker News Reader

So, a question to developers reading this: would you be happy to work alongside a person who participated in the development of this system?

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Happy at work is the thing of inspirational propaganda, upper management and elite techies who can afford to be choosy. The rest of us have mortgages and families and health care premiums.

Not a Facebook employee, but I've wrestled with these questions after years in investment banking and a bit of adtech.

Almost anything that pays well isn't going to the end goal of feeding orphans, or improving society in any way.

Trick question. Typically, when assigned tasks at work, one doesn't have the forbearance or clairvoyance to asses the moral implications of the task.

The fairer question to ask is if the strategy team pitching such work/product understood the moral implication of the work.

This is Facebook we are talking about. One does not need to be clairvoyant.

A fairly large cross-section of big corporations will say things that are shockingly evil to even moderately critical minds. You work there to put food on the table, not to make the world a better place.

Depends entirely on how they feel and act about it. If they were pushing to make my company the next big surveillance org then yeah. Otherwise I probably wouldn't even think twice about it.

If they felt bad about it but carried on with it anyway, is that any better?

Absolutely not.

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