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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

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. :(

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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?

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