Problematic Employers in Tech | Hacker News Reader

Problematic Employers in Tech

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47 pointszdw42 comments

I also don't agree with this article.

To me, the author is a coward, and will "find" legitimate justification to work anywhere. It is not because you are too afraid or it is too difficult to work somewhere else, that it is good to work for whatever asshole company offer you a job. Otherwise, you can easily go to work for companies like NSO group that are responsible for the death of a lot of people.

So, it is a personal choice, and anyone can do what they want, but if so they have to accept that others will have legitimate issues with your choice.

I believe the opposite of what the author is saying: it's an important part of the way our society functions to shame people who make personal choices at the expense of everyone else. We're hard-wired to care about social status, and it's one of the mechanisms that pushes us to cooperate.

Also, while I agree that someone on a work visa is effectively an indentured servant and I can't judge them for working at a company that does bad things, peoples' gender identification or the color of their skin does not absolve them of social responsibility. That part is just flamebaiting or self-indulgent (or both).

I liked the article until the author started ranting about cis white males.

I think it's stupid to judge someone for working at Oracle or Facebook. It's cliquey and smacks of resentment. I'm also bothered by the moral certainty implied. I don't work for a "problematic employer" but I have no idea if my work is making the world better or worse and I suppose it's hard to tell.

“Problematic” is meaningless. This post didn’t cite any concrete objections to anything Oracle might have ever done. The worst I’ve heard is they successfully sell to senior VPs over the recommendations of the tech staff, and they sue over severe license terms those VPs probably should have redlined.

"Problematic" is a word typically used when someone wants to get attention by fabricating non-existant greivences they aren't even involved with.

They cast the world as a worse place that it actually is, and in the process make everybody a reading their rant just a little less happy and content. But the virtue signaller gets that sweet, sweet attention they crave without actually having to produce or earn anything.

I’m annoyed by the hypocrisy of taking a giant paycheck and then claiming the moral high ground. You want the moral high ground, go work for unicef not a for profit tech company that happens not to be Facebook.

Eh, stick around humanitarian spaces for more than a few seconds and you'll run into moral conflicts from working with/around the international NGOs as well.

There's no moral high ground to be had when you are working for the proverbial elephant in a space. You have to decide if your individual impact creates more good than whatever harm your contribution enables whenever the elephant thoughtlessly steps on someone (or we could try to build a future where no group has enough power to cause that kind of harm, but that's a different subject).

NGOs may not be so great but at least going to work for one shows willingness to sacrifice. We have a lot of people on the internet very willing to condemn others but not in anyway sacrificing any of their own comfort over their apparently stringent moral beliefs on every imaginable subject.

Working for, and even owning, a for-profit is not inherently bad.

Non-profits are not inherently good, either.

It’s not inherently bad, no. But the purpose of the collective effort is right there in the name—for profit.

Don’t pretend you are trying to save the world when you just want a good living. It’s fine to just want a good living!

There’s a pretty wide spectrum between saving the world and working for Oracle.

Oracle’s salespeople are very aggressive. Oracle doesn’t assassinate people.

"As a young, straight, white, cis male, it was easy for him to assume that those folks were incompetent"

I closed the tab at this point.

Sorry, no.

It’s true whether or not acknowledging it makes you uncomfortable.

Ageism is real. Sexism is real. Racism is real. Homophobia has become less common but is still real and if you’re trans I can imagine it’s like what I heard from gay friends in the 90s. In all of those cases, I’ve heard many stories about people being asked to prove themselves in ways I’ve never been challenged, or low-balled on offers and getting serious pushback on negotiation. A common rule of thumb was that it takes one degree to cancel out each one of those things you are not, and while I’ve heard some fellow white guys question that I’ve never heard anyone else I know disagree.

It’s true whether or not acknowledging it makes you uncomfortable.

It was puerile nonsense. It doesn't have the property of being true of false.

As is the "Gosh, looks like these heavy truths we're laying down are making you uncomfortable" insinuation you're making.

Maybe if people focused on their own privileges instead of coming up with an ever-more-adjectived punching bag for all of society’s ills it would go over better.

Isn’t that what we’re seeing? Nobody is saying it’s bad to be a straight white male, only that people like us are playing on easy mode. The goal is for everyone to be able to enjoy that.

There are plenty of people in those 'privileged' categories who are not playing on easy mode. A given person fitting that description isn't necessarily represented by the average

It’s okay for privilege to be intersectional. A straight white cis male can still suffer from ableism and classism. But it’s also okay to acknowledge that even in circumstances like being disabled, being perceived as a white cis straight male will have benefits compared to a black trans woman in the same situation, even if that situation sucks for both parties.

It's also okay to not assume that certain categories of people are sheltered and naive, based solely on their gender status and inferred ancestral composition. And in need of a public calling-out and talking-to, based solely on those observed properties.

Which is what started this whole sub-thread, after all.

If people were focused on their own privileges you’d see concrete examples. The parts of the article talking about green cards is a good example of this. Straight white male (and now add cis, able bodied, etc, etc, etc) used as a talismanic phrase is not focusing on your own privileges. It’s just creating a scapegoat and letting everyone that doesn’t match every last adjective off the hook.

The goal is for everyone to be able to enjoy that.

That may be the "goal". Whether public drag-outs as displayed in the OP serve to achieve that is another matter entirely.

> It’s true whether or not acknowledging it makes you uncomfortable.

I judge most people's competence long before I am aware of their cis or straight status, and often age as well.

Thank you.

How many of us think the anti-white narrative is extremely harmful?

I am white and I am a good person. I have done nothing wrong. Why should I feel negative?

You shouldn’t feel negative about it, the article doesn’t say anywhere that you should feel negative about it, where are you getting that?

Instead of asking you to feel guilty about who you are, we’re asking you to consider the differences in the way society as a whole treats people of your identity compared to other identities. It’s not about which groups are better or worse, though I agree some of the rhetoric can come across that way.

Visible minorities think you guys are all messed up with that self hate stuff.

I just read an article from a woman who was raped by her transgender friend and then was called transphobic when she threatened to call the cops. Meanwhile comments calling pretty much calling her a white supremacist.

I think some of these whiney kids need to speak to their elders to see how life was when there was real discrimination.

I don't apologize for my skin tone and you shouldn't have to apologize for that either.

I don't agree with the premise of this article.

We're talking here not about Amazon warehouse staff, but white collar software and systems engineers. These are people with many employment options.

I am totally free and valid to criticize those who go work for Amazon, the CIA's sysadmins, or those who go work for Microsoft, who makes the software that helps the USG run concentration camps, same as I am to criticize people who write software for smart munitions at Raytheon.

To play the race/orientation/gender card to shut down entirely legitimate moral criticism of certain employers is entirely unreasonable. :(

Many of us have studiously ignored recruiters from Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Goldman-Sachs, ransom gangs, Oracle, and the like, and have commonly suffered lower compensation as a consequence. We jealously defend our right to disparage those who did not.

Yet, it remains true that most of us elsewhere are privileged in being in a position to turn them down; and that there are many not so privileged who might anyway need the credential of a stint there on their CV.

Several people I admire actually were hired into Oracle, and stayed there, and continue doing good Free Software work there. Oracle is big enough not to be able to salt every corner of every field they come into possession of.

So, I exercise care not to punch down. Everyone is struggling, and we generally discourage them from revealing the details.

> These are people with many employment options.

No, they aren't. The post mentions the lack of prospects many of them have due to visa issues, as well as bias against their gender, age, or race.

Want to reduce the power of problematic employers? Encourage your unproblematic employer to hire people like these.

> Want to reduce the power of problematic employers? Encourage your unproblematic employer to hire people like these.

A strange challenge with this approach is that large and often problematic employers are on something of a buying spree. So a smaller, less problematic employer may not exist very long.

Slippery slope in the wild?

I don’t doubt that sexism and anti-LGBT sentiment was much more prevalent back then. But can someone fill me in on the landscape nowadays? I’ve hopped around a few notable companies and have seen nothing but acceptance at minimum. Many of them have gone above and beyond with dedicated groups and communities within the company for identity. Out of three employers I’ve had two female director of engineering, and only one cis white male direct manager. I’ve made some non-straight friends and while they still face challenges, they’ve never talked about being uncomfortable at work.

Sorry if it seems like an aside. Reading this article made me curious.

I can say that I’ve seen blatant sexism at a place I worked previously. It often felt like being back at college working with friends in a frat.

Often fun, but I was glad when a female intern complained and they took cleaning things up seriously. That was within the last 5 yrs.

Apparently this was something that was an issue talked about among the women at the workplace for awhile and I only became privy much later when hanging with some of them outside of work and presumably they felt comfortable speaking about it.

Personally I’ve only worked with one person I think I’d feel comfortable discussing any discrimination I’ve faced.

I suspect that’s pretty common, not that discrimination is necessarily common but that people feel uncomfortable talking about it.

This is a valuable piece, it brings to light just some of the hidden stories that explain why job distribution is the way it is in a world where we know some companies do more active harm than others. It’s much more valuable than the world in which we just pretend it happens because people are evil or cowards. Truthfully speaking, the number of people I’ve met in the tech industry who are in it (long-term) for a love of the industry is slim. People have families, and want to make good money to take care of them or even just their friends.

I’m also guilty — When I was a little younger I would also look down on coworkers who worked at known evildoing companies. Sometimes things are as simple as a money hungry engineer. Often they’re a little more complicated.

IMO there aren’t any perfectly ethical companies. Even the six years I spent working in tech for non-profit orgs lent itself to some ethical dilemmas for me.

It’s a personal decision on who you work for and what work you do. There are some tech companies that I would not want to work for, mainly because their core business model IMO is a net negative for society. Or in other cases their business model is supported by exploitation of some worker class.

Others might think they could do good at one of these entities by building more equitable business practices or beneficial products.

One of my friends works for the USG in a national security capacity. While I view that space as fraught with ethical and geopolitical implications, their perspective has always been this is their way of serving and protecting their country.

Bottom line, I’m the one that has to live with my choices and maintain a way to pay the bills. A tech career gives me the freedom to make that choice without having to sacrifice too much in the way of pay or benefits.

> Instead, address your concerns to the companies and the leadership that made those companies problematic in the first place.

My knee-jerk reaction to the conclusion of this piece was to recall a couple of lines from The Universal Soldier:

"But without him how would Hitler have condemned them at Dachau?

"Without him Caesar would have stood alone"

My feeling was that, while any one software developer doesn't necessarily cause significant movement of the needle, in aggregate, the choices we make collectively about who we choose to enable have significant consequences to how the future unfolds.

Trying to look up the lyrics, though, I was once-again reacquainted with a snippet of an interview with Buffy Sainte Marie prepended to a video of one of her live performances in which she recalls seeing enlisted soldiers during the Vietnam war repatriating their casualties, horrified, and looking for someone to blame. Unable to blame the soldiers themselves, starts off blaming senior military leadership, but over time shifts, first to blaming politicians for having directed the actions of the military, but eventually ends up deciding that ultimately the responsible party was "us" - the citizenry, having elected and enabled to politicians to take the actions they did.

While it seems uncomfortably presumptive, if not pretentious to propose any kind of general equivalence between tech workers and soldiers, the parallels between the odd, internally contradictory idealism found in tech, and the contradiction of fighting war indefinitely, hoping to ultimately bring about world peace seem eerily apt, with the themes of The Universal Soldier being worth considering anew in the context of 'big tech' in 2021.

This entire article reeks of "I'm angry at VOE, who you will know who i, so I'll take a general position and construct specific cases where it doesn't work".

It's totally disingenuous to claim that if I'm liable, say, to think less of you for working at Oracle that I'm incapable of distinguishing whether your circumstances (say: healthcare, green card, having been taken over) are a factor - compared with, say, accepting a job offer there.

As the VOE put it (paraphrased):

"If you work at Oracle, will I think less of you? YES! Of course I will. Your name is on the flag supporting <despicable behaviours>, But: You don't have to think anything of that. Why is my thinking less of you a problem for you? Unless, maybe, that's your conscience?"

How is Oxide doing these days, have they launched anything?

They are a very transparent company, if you want to know their status, seek and you will find. (Hint: Twitter spaces archived to YouTube.)

That's the rant the came to my mind as well

IMHO it's not anyone else business to know why people would work in a certain place, as it is not people business to tell others what are they allowed to dislike paradoxically, i personally stopped seeing friends who went to work for Google and another for Facebook, are they free to do their things? am i free to non appreciate someone who actively support things that i consider evil?

> Instead, address your concerns to the companies and the leadership that made those companies problematic in the first place.

Lol. Let me know how that goes for you.

Personally i wouldn't criticize someone for working at fb. FB is not a saint but its not nearly as evil as people make it out to be. However there is evil in this world, and people who work for them are culpable. Like if someone works for a randsomware group, i fully believe the employee is evil.

And yes, people do have reasons for staying at morally questionable job. If behaving morally didn't come at a cost everyone would do it.

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