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> I don't foster any negative feelings towards developers per se. A job's a job

Nah. This line of reasoning excuses any activity one might be involved with because "it's just my job". Doesn't work like that. The idea that you carry zero moral (or ethical or even legal) culpability because you're drawing a paycheck and being "told" what to do is what every person working for the companies that are deeply damaging our society tells themselves. Because the alternative (the reality) is really hard to deal with.

GP is right to be concerned.

If a job doesn't hire you because of the industry you worked in rather than lacking skills, then they're doing you a favor. Purity tests are bad and most successful businesses can't afford to apply them. And if they did they would be selecting for a toxic personality. You may pass your own purity test, but you're likely to find some employee that has a qualm about some choice of yours. Avoid places like that

It doesn’t need to be a “purity test”. It’s sufficient that if there are multiple candidates with seemingly roughly equal skills, the one not having worked in crypto gets the job because they seem slightly more likely to be a good cultural fit.

>Nah. This line of reasoning excuses any activity one might be involved with because "it's just my job".

This comes off as financially entitled, like there aren't pressures around rent and life expenses that take precedence in decisions around employment. Either you've taken a vow of not caring about money, or you already have enough (and assets) not to care, or you're naive about a uniquely lucky time we lived in where employment was plentiful - which is about to end.

Ironically it might end first in the crypto space being discussed.

Spoken like an apologist. There has always been incentive to cross ethical, moral and legal lines "for the money", and this has been so since time immemorial. We are not living in some special moment in history, neither does crypto hold a monopoly on shady actors.

None of your either-ors apply.

There are pressures, making it a choice of the actor. That actor will have consequences regardless of what choice they make. I disagree that 'i needed money' is a valid excuse to do things you morally disagree with. I also disagree that 'i needed money' is an excuse for others to do things that they believe is immoral.

Personally I don't like crypto so maybe that's where my opinion is coming from. But it sure feels like everywhere in life we are presented with a choice to do what is right and what is easy. Both have consequences.

Software engineering jobs are extremely cushy. You are not working in an Amazon warehouse to make the ends meet.

They are when you're 30 years old in a boom market. The fact that people act like unemployment is impossible suggests no one was an adult during 2001-3. That means you know neither age discrimination nor recession.

Ah, the idealism of youth.

> A job's a job

That's something that doesn't sit well with me. Not all jobs are equal. Some are unethical, or worse. And OP is in the unethical camp, at least by association, and also tarred by the stereotypes of exploitation and fraud.

> Anyone refusing you simply because you worked in crypto at some point is short-sighted.

I would also not want to hire/work with anyone who's worked for facebook or google in the past 5 years. It's not as if there was a great shortage of jobs.

>I would also not want to hire/work with anyone who's worked for facebook or google in the past 5 years

These companies have a plethora of things to work on and you have the ability to positively impact most of the planet (billions of people). You are oversimplifing things if you think they are all evil people who would be bad to work with.

> you have the ability to positively impact most of the planet (billions of people)

Hundreds of thousands of people work there, yet they haven't managed to achieve that positive impact.

You don't think Google has achieved a positive impact?

Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Chrome, Android, Cloud, Pixel, Nest, Fitbit, Stadia, Drive? Not to mention their other projects like DeepMind / AlphaFold?

I did mention "the last 5 years". Search is from 20 years ago.

Pixel is just another phone. Fitbit, Deepmind, YouTube and Nest are not Google's. They were bought. And YouTube is a net negative impact.

Android was also acquired, and that was purely to get more control over the user and their data, as was Google Docs and Gmail. Google's management of Android is frankly horrid. Their security update policy? Buy a new phone, loser, and agree to our new terms of use!

Chrome isn't even an original Google project, but forked from WebKit, again with the intention to control the user and their data, and preferably wall them in.

No, Google has had a negative impact on the world over the last years, and they will have it as long as they dominate the markets. And the people that work on it can see it.

>yet they haven't managed to achieve that positive impact.

You don't reach billions of users without positively impacting people who use your service. If there was no positive impact people would simply abandon Google's and Facebook's services.

“If there was no positive impact people would simply abandon meth.”

Yes, if there was no positive impact then basically no one new would start using meth and the meth user population would eventually die out.

If you had an addictive drug and all it did was make all your teeth fall out with no extra side effects almost no one would take it.

While yes, Meth is dangerous and addictive I don't think what Google and Facebook are doing is bad. How is Google giving people access to the world's data or Facebook connecting the world a bad thing? They are trying to do good things and are constantly trying to reduce the harm their services bring to people. They have entire organizations within these companies for doing so.

> If you had an addictive drug and all it did was make all your teeth fall out with no extra side effects almost no one would take it.

I can't help but notice that you dropped "positive" here, and I can only assume it's on purpose, as otherwise your argument would like quite silly. People using something does not mean it's positive. The list doesn't really stop at meth.

Do you really equate product growth with a positive impact on people..? Developers working for Facebook or Google are fully aware their employer pays their salary by selling other peoples data. There is no excuse other than immorality.

Yes, no one is forcing people to use Google's search product. People use it because it has a positive impact in helping them find things easier.

>by selling other peoples data

Neither of these companies sell user data. Both these companies take user privacy more seriously than almost every other company on Earth.

> Neither of these companies sell user data. Both these companies take user privacy more seriously than almost every other company on Earth.

That depends on your idea of privacy. Collecting and retaining incredible amounts of data about people even without their consent isn’t my idea of respecting privacy.

Yet GP said "selling data", not "collecting data". Google and Facebook collect hordes of data and sell access to insights of it, but not the underlying data itself as that data is far too valuable.

We can play semantics all day, but both companies sell insights and slices of data to ad customers, while acting benevolent and community-focused to their users. The valuable hordes of data you mention have been collected without users actually understanding what or why this is happening.

If you only care about getting a good pay from such a job, fine. But that just makes you immoral in my book.

Except the claim was that Facebook and Google can't possibly be privacy conscious as they _SELL_ user data.

Every part of that sentence was wrong, and you are trying to pretend otherwise.

In your opinion. Other people disagree. Whose opinion should they listen to?

(And more in the spirit of the specific question parent raised - someone working at Facebook on funding charities. Are they "bad" for doing that job?)

That's not really an opinion though. Facebook continues to ignore morality in it's chase to maximize profits.

Can you provide some evidence behind this claim that they ignore morality?

If the people who work there have the power to make it good … why didnt they do it the last 20 Years. Insted the collectivly build one of the worst side of internet

Can you describe what makes you think it's one of the worst sides of the internet? I get immense utility from Google's services using mostly free services. All of these free awesome stuff makes it one of the best sides of the internet for me.

It was more facebook. But google sucks also. You are just selling your data for a service that would cost you 10 bucks a month. And google is pushing there internet standard instead of gnu or free ones. And google has also a adnetwork that has the same harm potential as facebook … only a little less worse

Edit: youtube is a win for me and i use it a lot … but its the same. I give data away that I dont want to share. I would rather pay for services than pay with data

I wouldn't hire anyone who used google or facebook because they are unethical. And if I see someone wearing a brand I dislike I pour paint over them. Stereotypes are perfectly acceptable to go by in 2022.

>A job's a job

But most people involved in the scam claim to be "just doing their job".

If you're working for an employer or in an industry that you yourself consider a bit shady, you are morally obligated to leave. Society can't function otherwise.

Is a bartender morally obligated to leave because they acknowledge the harm alcohol causes to society?

Is the crypto dev more or less obligated than the bartender?

Really I agree with you, but also feel like this is a thread that people aren't that keen on unravelling or talking about because it leads them to realize that their job probably isn't as 'un-shady' as at first glance.

My favorite conversation to observe in person now is the “yea my industry isn’t actually bad and I’m a good person (says the person in finance, social media, etc) but yours is, how do you live with yourself?”

The bartender is morally (and occasionally legally) obligated to not serve alcohol to someone who is drunk. And to take car keys away from impaired people.

The analogy holds, imo.

Fair points, however at least in Australia is that bartenders are legally supposed to stop serving people that are drunk, (Our Responsible Service of Alcohol laws say 'it is against the law to serve alcohol to an intoxicated customer'. My anecdotal evidence is that you actually have to be too obliterated to verbally get the order out or to stand up for that to happen.

I understand a job's a job, but it's not as easy as you make it sound. Developers have ample opportunities and have the luxury of being able to make career decisions autonomously. Ofcourse I don't hate crypto developers, but it's not wrong to question their decisions.

Well - it's a gold rush - so I see no reason to not get everything they provided - especially the bad parts.

And yet after the gold rush there is stuff left - San Francisco for example. After the crypto rush is over some infrastructure, knowledge, code will also be left and it may find uses and applications.