Which companies would you never work for, and why? | Hacker News Reader

Which companies would you never work for, and why?

19 pointsflancian29 comments

Credit to codesushi42: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21065327

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Google.

Consider:

- donations to climate deniers such as CEI

- work on totalitarian tools such as project dragonfly or PRISM

- sabotage of competitors, e.g. breaking search and YouTube on Firefox

- feigning investment to steal ideas

Of course, in big companies, bad stuff is bound to happen every now and then. I just think that the above can't be explained away as isolated mishaps, because it happened (or is still happening) over long periods of time, involving many people (quite a few of which resigned as a consequence).

Similar criticism can obviously be leveled at the other big players, and I wouldn't work for, say, Facebook either.

On the other hand, I wouldn't expect, say, Microsoft, to develop a dystopian search engine for an authoritarian regime.

Surely, most people who are working at Google do so without contributing to any sinister purpose (unless you consider ads evil I guess). I just feel there are other companies with considerable impact where I wouldn't have to worry as much about potential abuse of what I'm building.

> On the other hand, I wouldn't expect, say, Microsoft, to develop a dystopian search engine for an authoritarian regime.

Funny that you bring this up since Bing already does everything project dragonfly intended to do and is available in China.

Does it? I've read that one of the goals of dragonfly was to allow the government to look up the full search history of every user, which seems to go far beyond Bing's complicity in censorship.

On the other hand, Microsoft was the first external partner of the PRISM program, and gave away backdoors before it was mandatory, so definitely in the "big brother knows best" camp :(

Google login breaks YouTube for me on Chrome (for two years now) so potentially it’s just incompetence.

It's super hard to avoid "evil" in BigCo.

If you drag the chain of evilness long enough, you almost don't want to work under any tech companies. Depending on your willingness.

Like Intel CPU R&D center is established in Haifa, Palestine, Palestinian Arab villagers literally driven away, homes were destroyed, they never returned back. Today almost everyone uses Intel CPU, including Palestinians (ironically).

Or even any US companies in general, where native Americans are driven away from North America.

Only shit, didnt know this. Do you have more info about haifa and intel? Why did they build there?

To get this started: Palantir. I know the world, and myself, may change; but I choose to believe that I would never work for "defense" or the military-industrial complex.

It could become inconsistent as a position in the long term, as we might be headed towards a future in which most leading IT companies collaborate with the military-industrial complex via contracts in some way or other. Hopefully not, though, and until then I'll refrain from working for companies that are explicitly in that space.

Pornhub.

Why? And what do you think I would say to my family - that I code using PHP & jQuery? ;)

Doesn't pornhub stream a lot of video (high quality I would suppose) and is also much more effective at dealing with child porn and revenge porn than say YouTube ?

Any company which makes money out of others misfortune - this includes gambling, military/defense, finance, etc.

I want to look back on my career and say I made a POSITIVE impact on the world somehow.

I share your view about gambling and defense (and porn), but what's wrong with finance ? unless you are referring to things like binary options trading

Same here, but I add advertising to my personal list of sectors to avoid.

Figure Eight (formally Crowdflower). They hire people and then lay them off 6 months later, on a regular basis. They have tons of burried negative reviews on glass door, but since they pay Glass Door, it's hard to find them or even get them publishrd. They also have big military contracts doing some of the AI bigger shops won't do because of the bad press.

I never sign if a company wants to own the IP of what I do in my free time, and require supervision of what I talk / write about.

I’ve just got one; EqualExperts. They’re a bit like thought works in the UK. I went to them when I needed work and was told I didn’t have enough years experience in the industry.

The issue with this was that someone I used to work with, who was a little older, had significantly less. He’d moved from being a junior developer, and not a particularly good one, to being paid a decent amount more with a fast track interview experience.

I wasn’t as strong of a developer as I am now and I’m happy to admit that, but I asked them if they were willing to give me the technical test anyway and use that to judge. Nope. I was too inexperienced because I didn’t have 8 or more years as a developer.

EqualExperts, you can permanently fuck off from now on.

I'd never say never. If the choice is between working for a bad company or starving and becoming homeless I'd choose the former. Companies I avoid working for include casino and online gambling sites and companies in the fossil fuel industry.

Yes, I agree. I should have written "never" in quotes.

One way to think about this is: which companies would you never work for without feeling you have relinquished some part of your identity?

I'd risk saying that most people here are quite privileged, and losing a fair chunk of that privilege (and, for example, ending up homeless) would be a significant hit to most people's day-to-day identity.

Not that I think this state of affairs is good, or being homeless makes one less of a person (I don't). This is more of a statement of fact.

Tobacco, etc. Because life is too short to think you're helping people become sick.

It might be interesting to split this questions into two:

(1) Which companies would you never work for due to ethical reasons

(2) Which companies would you never work for due for non-ethical reasons (e.g. poor leadership, bad work/life balance, dying industry, etc).

It seems like most people are answering (1), which is cool, but I'm also curious about (2).

"never" implies a really strong sentiment that is rarely evoked by the issues in (2). I think most people would not let these issues deter them if there were sufficient benefits to set them off.

Some people have strong feelings about the choice of technology or way of working, though, so interesting questions might be: which mainstream programming language would you never work with, no matter how great the product? would you work with waterfall on a dynamic product if the salary was high enough? etc.

Well, no specifics, but any company responsible for creating malware, or selling software to totalitarian regimes for enforcing unjust laws against the public would be places I'd never work for.

Probably any operating in the tobacco industry too, though other 'vices' wouldn't be off the list there.

No company at all, I'm determined to make it on my own like the contrarian I am!

I avoid any company that has forced arbitration as a condition of employment

Y Combinator, because they fund(ed) drug dealers.

Could you elaborate?

Google “YC marijuana” or “YC cannabis”.

Would you work for an alcohol, tobacco, or firearms company?

I’d avoid YC because it’s against the law and I think being openly involved in organized crime like that is utter madness. But also, funding crime and spitting on rule of law is immoral.

Anything with post-its on the wall.

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