Comment by ivraatiems | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivraatiems | Hacker News Reader

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I appreciate this guide, truly, but one of the things I was struck by was how few of these companies I'd be willing to work for. Let's go down the list...

Apple - lots of evidence it's a toxic work environment, highly secretive. Maybe not an instant veto, but skeptical.

Deliveroo - Gig economy gets a veto from me.

Uber - ditto, if anything, even worse.

Spotify - Would have once upon a time, but these days they seem pretty awful, and their front-end tech is sorely lacking, to say the least.

Amazon - intensely and notoriously abusive to employees at all levels.

Netflix - high-pressure work environment not for me, some disturbing practices.

Palantir - state-sponsored spying, no thanks. Lives up to its name.

Google - mostly an adtech business at this point. Skeptical.

Meta - I'd rather be homeless than help Meta do anything for anyone.

The places above, I'd be reluctant or outright unwilling to ever even bother applying to. That leaves Babylon, Cloudflare, Monzo (where the OP was hired), TrueLayer, Instabase, Microsoft, Shopify, Wise, Revolut and JP Morgan as orgs I didn't immediately veto or view with high suspicion, and I still view the several related to finance as inherently pretty suspicious.

I can't be the only person out there with a robust "will not work for" list. Fortunately, there's no shortage of tech companies. How do people filter out companies when considering who to apply to?

Spying, Spamming or Manipulating. That is what you will get paid to do in the vast majority of cases. If you are not first order then you are a second order spy/spammer/manipulator. It's why I did go homeless. Now thankfully I got a grant to work on the next gen internet stuff. This has gone far enough.

Interesting, who do you work for?

I just got a grant from nlnet, NGI assure fund.

I think this is common, or at least not uncommon; I'm in the same situation though it's more of a "strongly prefer not to work for". If I didn't have any other options that could provide a bare minimum salary that I can live off of, I would certainly apply at the "evil(tm)" companies. It's an unfortunate symptom of capitalism that evil tends to get ahead.

I also think this is part of the reason salaries at these companies are so high (exceptions aside, they're generally higher than at less evil companies). If they didn't distinguish themselves on salary, people would always go with the underdogs which may not be as corrupt yet.

I'd like to believe that if I had no choice I still wouldn't go work for Meta. Many of the other ones, though, I probably would.

I understand the ethical concerns when choosing to join a company, but I'm not quite sure I follow your reasoning regarding some of the specific companies you listed. Skeptical about Google and Meta, but not Microsoft, which also doesn't exactly have a clean name when it comes to questionable operating practices? Suspicious about Netflix, but JP Morgan seemingly flies under the radar?

To be honest, I was giving a gut first impression. A lot of the financial companies are without a doubt questionable as well, just not in ways that came immediately to mind as soon as I heard their names. JPMorgan definitely qualifies, but for whatever reason, I don't personally think "morally bankrupt" or "abuses its employees" when I think JPMorgan, even though both of those could be true. Successful marketing on their part maybe, given their role in the '08 crisis and so on?

Microsoft, to be honest, I'd still be open to. Their anticompetitive behavior is a big issue, but I don't know that I find them to be as 100%-tainted by it. With Microsoft I'd be more concerned about lack of quality control or care for end-users.

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