Why employees want to work in vilified industries | Hacker News Reader

Why employees want to work in vilified industries

economist.com

40 pointsmckern102 comments

I knew someone who works for a major tobacco company. Nothing fancy, his job is basically just to ensure convenience stores and shops in his sales region stay stocked with his firm's brands. I don't know anyone who is more loyal to their employer than he is.

My uncle was also a corporate pilot for a major defense contractor. He worked there for 30 years. His wife had a advanced breast cancer but they kept him on payroll for two years while he took care of her until she passed. He was able to back to work and stayed there until he retired.

Perhaps these companies have to show more loyalty to their employees to stay competitive while cleaner industries can afford churn. This can cause employees to show the same loyalty in return.

Churn makes for more efficient companies and stronger employees. When you have 20 year veterans who stayed in a single place for 20 years, you have no exposure as a company to new practices developed in other companies. You have no exposure to what performance level your employees could be achieving. And as an employee, your own skills are not well developed by being stuck at a single place for 20 years.

Churn makes salaries adapt more quickly to market conditions too. That's an advantage when the Fed is dumping capital into the market with QE.

The disadvantage is yeah, there's chaos sometimes and loyalty doesn't exist. But you need some exploration AND exploitation too, else you get stuck at a local minima.

It depends on the industry. In any industry not undergoing disruption, having the long-time employees probably is a good thing. They know how to execute processes well, and know the detailed ins and outs when any random thing goes wrong. They also know the 10 or 50 other people to call when help is needed.

When any of those individuals leave, you have to hope they have a successor who's been handed the core knowledge.

Is there any actual evidence of this? My experience has been the opposite, that successful companies have staggering amounts of momentum and institutional knowledge.

It also eliminates chances of a singular long term vision being executed. I'm sure the success statistics of long term visions aren't great, but when it hits, it hits, I think.

I think that comes down to having strong leadership (which you would want to minimize churn in, because the timescales of executing projects as an IC are an order magnitude different from executing on strategic goals). E.g. Amazon, Costco, Patagonia, etc.

If executives could finish meaningful goals in a few weeks like ICs can, I'm sure they'd be switching every 2 years too.

As engineer on an architectural track, I have long term visions for the codebase too :)

Are defense contractors still vilified? Americans (and Ukrainians) all seem to love Raytheon now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Javelin

I expect this goodwill to vanish once the current war ends, and reappear the instant China invades Taiwan.

As it turns out, there's no shortage of goodwill towards the military industrial complex when people feel they're actually making the world a safer and better place.

As it turns out, that's what they were doing this whole time, at least with the Javelin program. Not something you can design and ship overnight.

The military-industrial complex exists for sure, but it's good to have high-tech arms when you need them.

Yeah, it certainly exists, and always did. In greater numbers than people know due to classified defense programs and their budgets.

The real problem is we spend TOO much money on defense compared to other needs. Do we really need so many aircraft carriers? Is that really what is required these days? Or submarines? Or even just soldiers. Defense is expensive.

With drones becoming the main way of warfare, I wonder if aircraft carriers are on their way out, the same way that WW2 was the last gasp for the battleship. Drones are cheaper, smaller, less vulnerable, less risk, less human loss of life, etc.

Fun fact, did you know the Gatling gun was invented to reduce the amount of people killed in war? Oops.

Big ships are obsolete. One missed rocket and it sunk. Russian Moscow ship proved it hard way. Rockets are too powerful and too precise and you can’t count on 100% rockets being intercepted. Modern war machines should be cheap and autonomous. We need some kind of sci-fi power field before big machines would become viable again.

If US would engage in war with some big army, like Chinese, Russian or European their carriers will sunk every day.

You can see this with stuff like the burgeoning market for air launched effects/loitering munitions.

Fortunately, the US military is investing heavily into these kinds of systems.

There is no way to make cheap, autonomous war machines that can operate at extended ranges like in the Pacific theater. Anything we build to use there will have to be large and expensive in order to meet the mission requirements, regardless of whether it has humans on board or not. For example, the US Navy and Air Force 6th-generation tactical aircraft programs will probably be optionally manned, but will be larger than their 5th-generation predecessors (F-22 and F-35) in order to reduce reliance on vulnerable tankers. Unit cost will be upwards of $300M.

Big ships are vulnerable, but far from obsolete. There are many ways to break the kill chain before missile point defense comes into play. Lessons learned from battles in the congested Black Sea littorals don't necessarily have much relevance elsewhere.

Drones are far from becoming the main way of warfare. That is science fiction, not reality. The small, cheap drones lack the range and sensors needed to fight in the Pacific theater, where aircraft carriers and submarines are the most effective platforms. And autonomous flight software is still very primitive, so any complex drone missions require remote piloting via satellite connections; those satellites are increasingly vulnerable to ASAT weapons.

Drone technology will continue to improve, but it's never going to be cheap to project power over long distances. The defense budget will continue to increase inexorably, until we hit a real fiscal crisis or just give up and decide to allow China to dominate.

You could put the us military budget at zero, and you'd still have an unsustainable high public deficit.

The fact of the matter is that welfare and welfare alone is the highest expenditure by far, and any cuts anywhere else will be meaningless unless deep and permanent cuts are made to the welfare state.

That has already done that in the US.

Maybe if healthcare was sorted, all those profits not going into the system could go back into peoples pockets and there would be space for a little more tax to pay for welfare.

Give poor people money and they spend it, boosting the economy.

How much profit is there in the healthcare system as a percentage of the federal deficit?

I used to work with someone who'd previously been a manager for development of one of the defensive systems.

One time, the manager mentioned that morale on their team back then had been low, and the work was maybe feeling too abstract, so manager had taken the entire team out to see a test/demo of the real system to which the team was contributing. And something about that re-energizing them, as we'd guess.

(If they could've seen a little into the future, they would've seen their system on TV news, shielding real civilians from a real aggressor's weapons, and I guess there would've been no morale problem whatsoever. I'm not sure I can accurately imagine all the feelings when something like that was successful.)

I remembered that story when I started feeling in an enthusiasm slump, years into computer work involving aviation. Simply making photo prints for my office of some of the more exotic aircraft I'd been working with only via code and data, and a trip to the airport to see some more conventional airliners and operations, made it more real/relevant at some level, and was a significant boost.

Since February, yes. But in the decades of the Iraq war and then Afghanistan conflict? They were villainized.

Really? I don't recall that. It was mainly politicians who were villainized. Most Americans aren't even aware of which weapons systems Raytheon sells.

Things like this used to happen all the time

https://tucson.com/news/local/crime/6-anti-war-protesters-ar...

Those were tiny, isolated demonstrations by the usual hippies who show up to every protest. They only even make the local news on a slow day. No one cares.

Could it be that these companies know about their image and heavily engage in countermeasures internally to keep employees happy? Similar to chemical companies where safety becomes number 1 priority and many have a very low accident rate.

I would hope that any company with hazardous environments would have a heavy focus on safety, green or not. It shouldn’t be seen as a benefit.

Most of the time it's just that your concept of "vilified" doesn't match theirs.

I don't see an issue with smoking, with gambling, with oil and gas, with porn or really any of this stuff.

It's just not that big a deal to me. And yeah, I know that tobacco companies intentionally make cigs more addictive. Everyone with half a brain does.

By contrast I think that privacy is more important than all of the so I'd never work at GooSoft.

Outside of hyper judgemental political circles generally no-one really cares what you do. Journalists seem to really get off on claiming that their opinion is "the" opinion, though.

You nailed it at the end. It’s traditional media and social media that vilifies these industries and companies. Which if we know anything is not a common opinion held among most people… it’s just the loudest and most polarizing.

Everyone has beliefs that put them against certain companies and industries but it’s quite varied and hardly anyone is the same.

Which is ironic because a lot of people vilify the journalism industry.

My very unscientific impression is that GooBook get a lot more negative media coverage than tobacco, gambling, oil, porn, etc., companies. Which might fit with your conclusion: GooBook is the competition, while the others are either customers or locked out of mainstream advertising.

We could ask the reverse question: how many industries aren't vilified in some social circles? Heck, even the people who gave us Covid vaccines received death threats.

I was a sub-consultant on a few projects for Phillip Morris, the tobacco company. The primary consultant was an architect. He ran his own firm and explained that where he worked before he went out on his own, PM was a client and they basically kept his old company afloat during the 2008-2009 financial crisis and prevented himself and a lot of his coworkers from being laid off, so he felt some gratitude for that.

The headquarters / factory seemed like a really nice place to work, all things considered. There was a great cafeteria with discounted, healthy, fresh food. Everything seemed clean and well organized. Apparently the pay / benefits were good for the area. It also smelled heavenly. (I quit smoking many years ago, but fresh tobacco smells good, not like cigarette smoke.)

I think for the most part, businesses exist because they serve a need people have. If they don't, they go out of business. You can rail against fossil fuels, but people still need to drive to work and heat their homes and there aren't other good options that are available yet on a scale that can replace everything. Until there are, we're going to continue having to use fossil fuels, so vilifying the people who provide them doesn't do much good.

I do wonder how anyone justified working at Purdue Pharma, though.

What need does the tobacco industry serve that was not created through addiction and marketing?

The oil industry knows about the damage they've been doing to the planet for decades. But not only they ramped up production but also lobbied hard against any form of regulation that might affect their business. The result of this is not that we have a need for it, but dependence.

People work to be able to give themselves and their families a good life, everyone wants to be happy. That's it, what other justification is needed? Most of these industries might have been born from a need but their whole goal as they develop is to get society to depend on them so that the need is not covered by better (less impactful) industries.

You could ask the same thing about alcohol, or gambling.

But people have been doing these things since before there were industries for them, so there’s apparently something besides marketing that causes humans to want those things.

The better way to combat these “evil” industries would be to fulfill that need as well or better in less destructive ways, making the industry obsolete.

Re: Purdue, that's easy. Painkillers make living with intense chronic pain bearable. Oxycontin was a great pain med for a lot of people. A friend of mine has a mangled spinal cord, and she's severely crippled by the pain alone. But then the opioid crisis happened, they forced doctors to stop prescribing long-term opioids and now her liver's failing from the sheer stress of her writhing in pain constantly.

So if I'd worked at Purdue, I'd think of the patients, rather than the junkies, the way you think of the cafeteria rather than lung cancer.

Feeding your family is your #1 priority. Everything else is a distant second.

The survival instict of a human overpowers all others, any other discussion on this topic is just empty intellectualization.

Do you really think any sane human would be like

"Sure my kids won't be able to go to college, I'll work 2 shitty jobs and our house will be taken away by the bank, but hey, atleast I'll be able to brag before my collegues how good of a person I am".

C'mon, at least in tech there's plenty of jobs that feed the family without having to compromise your conscience.

Every large tech company does some shitty things. Every employee compromises their conscience. It's just a matter of degree.

And degree matters.

Well, no one would frame it like that. Also, very few people are in that false dilemma.

Not everyone is working in tech.

I can't think of any type of job that is both vilified AND one that you could take on the cusp of destitution.

And at least for me personally, setting the example to my kids of integrity being one of the most important characteristics you can develop, is a top priority. Taking a position in an evil industry doesn't top that.

> I can't think of any type of job that is both vilified AND one that you could take on the cusp of destitution.

The people who give out parking tickets, but I agree that falls into a slightly different category.

> I can't think of any type of job that is both vilified AND one that you could take on the cusp of destitution.

Telemarketing?

(Edit) MLM would be another answer, and is pretty popular among some of my extended family who are deep in debt that they'll never get out of.

Maybe this is specific to natural resources but as someone who grew up in area that was economically based on a vilified industry AND started my career in said industry, the VI is regionally normalized when all of your friends, family, and neighbors also work in that industry. The people doing the vilifying are generally outsiders and thus dismissed.

People in coal country work in coal, people in places with a lot of oil work in oil, etc.

But unless a person doing the vilifying actually purges all, say, petroleum products from their lives, they are just as much the participant as someone who works for BP.

Coal only recently became possible to eliminate from the US power generation question, as a result of other vilified US gas production.

Lots of people like to vilify, it’s not often helpful.

Purchasing internet service from comcast, the only internet service provider allowed in my area, in a day and age where internet service is necessary for nearly all aspects of life, does not make me an active participant in comcast's bad business practices.

Likewise purchasing products which can not be readily substituted or purchased from a better source does not make anyone an active participant in the decisions of the company supplying those products, especially when the unethical practices go beyond what is necessary to produce the purchased good. I'd love to take an electric train to work, but somebody lobbied to have a highway built instead. I'd love to drink from a renewably sourced bottle, but somebody flooded the market with cheap petroleum derived plastic. I'd love to just fill my gas tank from an oil company that didn't actively lobby for lax environmental and safety regulations, but alas there is no such option. None of these actions are necessary for producing the oil products I consume, and my purchases are not endorsements of any of these practices. The false dichotomy that you must either boycott a product or endorse it is nothing but corporatist propaganda.

You could very well move to a place with a different Internet provider, I have had availability of the local fiber provider be a big part of the choice of where to move.

You could let public transit availability be an influence in your decisions about where to live and where to work, I certainly have let commute time influence which job offer I chose to accept, working from home or having a job within biking distance.

There are plenty of electric cars on the market and plenty of ways to get renewable electricity to supply them.

You probably shouldn't buy bottled water, and if a reusable water bottle made of a material you approve of is out of your willingness to pay for to stand up for your beliefs, you can't be helped.

I see this a lot and it annoys me. The "I have all of these strong opinions but am unwilling to make any life decisions that align with them and am helpless to change". Exactly zero change will ever come from people who make every decision to support status quo (because they are helpless to make different decisions) but complain about it to make themselves feel like they are doing something.

Yeah except I did move to a different city and then comcast came here too. Commute time is my primary concern for where I live, but the war on sensible public transit happened everywhere. You can get an electric car but the emmissions from battery production are actually worse than moderate driving nonetheless electrified public transit. I don't buy bottled water, but if I did the fact remains no one is selling water packaged in a sustainable material. At best, you can vote with your dollar for which corporate dystopia you want to live in, but you can't vote your way out.

When someone pulls a gun on you and asks you to hand over your wallet, are you supporting crime by giving them your money? Sure you could just move to a different place with lower crime rates, but that's not fixing the problem. Or you could stand by your beliefs and let them shoot you though they will just take the money from your corpse. No, there is a fundamental difference between the person who chooses to go out and do unethical things to other people for their personal financial gain and the people they take money from. In a functioning society, people need to be held accountable for their decisions. Bootlickers blaming victims instead of holding the decision makers accountable is exactly how we found ourselves in this mess to begin with.

Show me the oil company that doesn't lobby against public transit, or environmental and safety regulations. Show me the oil company that doesn't engage in anticompetitive behavior. Show me the oil company making good faith investments to diversify into renewable energy. I'll gladly pay a premium to support this good company which isn't a villain. If you can't show me a non-villainous oil company, then the claim oil companies are villains stands.

> But unless a person doing the vilifying actually purges all, say, petroleum products from their lives, they are just as much the participant as someone who works for BP.

Don't be this guy: https://thenib.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/mister-gotcha-...

I'm not that guy.

I'm the "be the change you want to see" guy.

a great of this I suspect is post hoc rationalisation - we find a higher order rationale to explain our choice (presuming availability of choice) of employer, in order to preserve our self perception of being a moral actor, when we likely made the decision mainly on practical grounds.

Engineers might also have this mental process to make - would you work for Palantir (example) and build spyware for the CIA? You might for the money, and then explain to yourself that its for good of country

When I clicked on this Economist article, there was actually a CIA recruiting ad displayed (!!).

haha very good. And then...no surprise. Pretty sure natsec and establishment media have already a tight relationship

Last time I saw a CIA job it was for a very niche skill set and they pay range was not reasonable for DC.

I imagine the Google engineer thinks "well, at least I'm not at fucking Facebook." And the Facebook engineer thinks "well, at least I'm not at fucking Palantir." And the Palantir engineer thinks "well, at least I'm not at fucking Tik Tok." And the Tik Tok engineer thinks "oh man I love video processing almost as much as I love malware, and I fucking love malware."

Fucking lol. You should make that a meme with the grizzly bear in the snow.

Slight correction: at least when I was at Facebook, we said: "At least I'm not at fucking Uber."

Palantir didn't even have an on-site sushi chef, and I've heard that the agave hibiscus iced tea there wasn't even real agave. ;)

I think TikTok engineers think. Hey we aren't doing any more spying than Google et. Co...

I remember one high profile ML engineer who went really ballistic on his peers at Facebook due to holding them responsible for Trump's election. He worked at Google himself.

Shit I love malware, maybe I should apply to TikTok.

I think that's definitely true of some people, but I think for a lot of people just helping the world isn't super important to them. I'm a pretty practical person and don't think what I do is really helping anyone (though I don't think it really hurts either, though I'm sure many would disagree) but don't really care. I find what I do very mentally stimulating and it also has large upside potential. That's simply good enough for me.

yep that is a perfectly reasonable (and perhaps in the end, most moral) position to take. It is probably a healthy thing to refocus on your immediate self, or at least oscillate between that and taking a wider view upon occasion.

For six months one time I rented a room in the massive London house of a psychiatrist who had just spent a year working for the UK government. Though he never went into detail about what it entailed, he intimated to me at times that he had made an absolute fortune in that period, which had enabled him to buy outright what was practically a mansion in one of the most expensive areas of one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Yet he hinted to me a couple of times that he was haunted by what he had done in that year. I shall always wonder!

So not NHS work then?

I'm thinking not.

Maybe, he was part of an interrogation team.

CIA hired psychiatrists to conduct brainwashing experiments on unwilling subjects. Maybe UK government also tried that out.

In a university lab that had sponsors/prospectives and VIPs coming through for demos almost every day, one time, visitors from a major name in tobacco were being scheduled.

An official said something about students not having to meet with these particular visitors if they really objected, and voiced the example that some students may have had a relative die from lung cancer.

I volunteered to demo, with my price being that I then didn't have to meet with visitors from one particular tech company. (Who in the past had stood out, as individuals, as uniquely non-collegial, out of everyone who'd come through.)

So, I met with the visitors from big tobacco company, and they all turned out to be nice and humble, a bit quieter than average.

One bit that stuck was when I started demoing a Web prototype, with an example that included an article about cats (mild dry humor about cats being standoffish, or something like that). There was a slight genuine earnestly plaintive note in the voice of one who interjected, "I like cats...". Which of course was ambiguous, but which made me instantly wonder whether the student before me had given them the cold shoulder, or they otherwise felt defensive or hurt.

I thought the tobacco company people were fine, and I wouldn't read too much into where someone worked. Today, when I hear of someone working at one of the companies that I dislike, I've stopped thinking "what is wrong with that person, to work there", but more hoping that whatever evil might be in the DNA of the company doesn't end up treating that particular employee poorly.

If you think of the lower ranks, for example IT admins who ensure that the computers are working smoothly, what's the difference between company A and company B? What do they experience? In most cases they do the same work regardless of which company they are in. The company culture in how people treat each other and how the work is organized in general is what they see. If you have a company with a clear internal structure, a clear product vision and well adjusted workers, then I suppose that work for IT is quite fine. So, I think for 90-99% of the employees it doesn't really matter what the product is. Their work is the same and a well organized company makes it pleasant. So it's not hard to imagine how employees can be happy there.

For the higher-ups who make the decision to create and sell products that hurt or kill people I see more of a moral dilemma. But I suppose they are compensated well with money and would have difficulty to find a better job elsewhere. Not sure if they feel the weight when they go to sleep.

I worked in defense for a while and have zero problem with it. Someone else might vilify it, but it just seems naive to imagine that eliminating all of it is even remotely possible.

I have a much bigger problem with my skills being used in the past to work on advertising tech.

We need a strong military with modern weapons systems to keep us safe. Else we will get a very bloody transition phase where a stronger military will take over. The moral burden does not lie with the tool but in how it is used.

See, here's a better analysis of the question than the Economist's. I bet the people optimizing ads or pay-to-win game addiction say something similar, "at least we're not making killer robots". Maybe one of you have a better point than the other, but either way, we know this is one of the ways people rationalize it.

Or maybe different people have different values.

Or maybe we just can't feasibly weigh the relative harm of two evils with broad network effects...

I would think it depends also on your sense of responsibilty. For some people, the person building a missile has as much responsibility as the person who fires it. Other people might look at it as being entirely the fault of the person who fired it, and therefore there being nothing wrong in building it. The latter would not really care about whether he's building missiles or selling tobacco as the buck stops with the end customer.

While the true fault lies on the voters and the funders of politicians who ordered those missiles and strikes...

So... I took at job at BP. I’d rationalised it as me being paid stupid money, and probably not contributing much because most software projects and large non-tech orgs are stupid wastes of time lead by non-technical people with insufficient skills in building software and I’d just be a cog in some SCRUM machine.

Then nature decided to warn me of its power by breaking my ribs on both sides while I was trying to learn to surf about a week before I started. But the killer for me was really learning that BP’s original name was British-Persian and is the main reason that the democratic government of Iran was deposed, the Shah re-installed and the Islamic Revolution happened leading to the regime that exists in Iran to this day.

The combination of physical pain, sudden awareness of deeply troubling political context and a warning from nature caused me to re-evaluate and take a contract with a crappy bank instead. Although to be honest, the realisation that I was actually going to be working on something useful and well-thought out also caught me off guard. (I do normally work extremely hard to have a positive impact, but had rationalised my involvement as being likely to have no impact.)

I actually know the work environment at BP would have been much much better than the bank.

Perhaps at those companies, bad managerial practices get exposed very easily, because the employees won’t stick around? Perhaps they can also afford to pay more due to the reduced competition in ‘evil’ industries. A good work environment and the ability to support your family without constantly getting involved in death-march development definitely goes a long way.

I work in a vilified industry (gambling). I work there as they pay a very well, excellent medical insurance for my family, and other benefits. We mainly make our money from rich people, so if they loose money gambling. I don't worry about it much.

Is that true? I've been curious lately about the economic breakdown of customers for stuff like casinos and lotteries. Do casinos make more from whales or gambling addicts? I imagine it might vary by the casino.

In our case it's certainly the whales.

Say what you want about smartphones, but I swear I’ve never seen people as glued to a screen as in casinos.

It’s usually the whales.

I think it's a fair rationalisation, but what you're missing is the perhaps thousands of very poor people who give you a large portion of the little they have.

Of course this looks like almost nothing on a margin sheet, but it's still lives that are destroyed.

You could argue that it's their money, their choice, but gambling itself always sells better to poor people, the hope that their luck could change and they'd be out of poverty.

Some companies (perhaps not yours) target poor people specifically with their marketing and messaging.

Betfred/PaddyPower in the UK for example are almost exclusively located in deprived areas, in fact you can usually tell the economic status of a section of city by how many WilliamHills and PaddyPowers there are.

It's true and possible. I worked in e-commerce before and you could argue, that I was optimizing our conversion rate, so more people would buy more shit they don't need. They should spend their money on their kids instead. That is a valid point of view but that is just most business.

there is a difference between these types of addictions. Granted, someone might be "addicted" to buying clothes/shoes/etc. but that person won't take debt to try to get more shoes, whereas an addicted gambler might just do it to get his money back... also, nowadays, with a smartphone always ready, gamblers have less options to avoid their addiction (whereas with casinos they could ask to be blacklisted. Also they always had to go there, which takes time and effort. Taking the smartphone does not. A very small lapse of 5 minutes can lead to losing a lot of money. Also with internet ads they really can't escape nowadays.).

Still, it is a legal business so basically it appears as if (in a working democracy) the community has decided that gambling is ok overall. (personally, I'd like more regulation because the benefits of gambling, which is taking money from addicted people with basically no value add, do not outweigh the costs)

They’re poor, not stupid. They know what they need to survive. The absolute number of people “destroying their lives” in this manner is very small. This disconnected brand of pauperate paternalism is very degrading.

The number of people seriously harming their lives with gambling is not small. And it's not just poor people.

People know what they need to survive, but they don't just want to survive for survival's sake. There has to be something actually living for. When those things for various reasons seem hopelessly out of reach, you will usually gamble in one way or another. It's natural to take chances when playing things safe will lose you the game.

Ironically enough, games are a great way to illustrate this and think about it. Let's say there's a game where you roll a die four times after each other, and the goal is to get a sum higher than 20. For every roll, you can pick a regular die, or you can pick one which has one side show 8, and all the other ones 1. The regular die has better expected value, but the optimal strategy incorporates the other die.

Gambling companies seek out people who feel (rightly or not) that they've rolled a 1 on their first roll. And they offer them what seems like a chance. But we should give people in that situation a better option, damn it.

I do as well. It has been a great place to work so far - nice colleagues and supportive management. Even the application process treated me more like an applicant than a supplicant. I've done more morally dubious things working in adtech, and before that even in a relatively small web agency. Neither of those are vilified to the same extent by the general public though.

I think other developers need to have the humility to admit that the act of automating anything has the potential to ruin livelihoods (for better or worse).

Really? Working for a Chinese company is the same as working a tobacco company?

I feel like I personally know different groups of people in my own life who would say either one is worse than the other.

Is it money? I can't tell since I'm paywalled. But I feel like it's got to be money.

You have to pay people MORE to work in bad industries, since there are a lot of people who won't want to work there.

You can pay people less in fun industries, even if there is a lot of profit. Like video games. Look at Blizzard.

"The most basic reason for that is a classic free-market narrative. If you believe in freedom of choice, and companies having the licence of society to operate, that is justification enough to work there. This may not seem especially purposeful: many employees would regard operating legally and serving customer needs as a requirement rather than a source of pride. But it is a perfectly coherent position"

I've been approached a couple of times about working in the tobacco industry and money is definitely part of it, but there's also a feeling that there's less competition so the role will be more stable, and a lot of self justification from hiring managers to make you feel less guilty.

I mean, yeah sure there might be less competition but that's not the whole game. I think it's much more the moral question to be honest. The real way to figure it out is to look at the number of people applying to good and "bad" jobs, and the amount of money they make. So compare tobacco to say FANG, or whatever. Then compare Blizzard to FANG. Let me just say now, Blizzard will be the least, even though they have the most applicants. I know this because I worked there.

Let's look at another "bad" job I've been approached about and gave it a thought about the money but then didn't bother because of the moral question: hedge fund trader. This is something that you don't want to give any random person, a bad programmer could easily sublimate millions of dollars before you know what happened. On the other hand, there's probably a lot of people who would kill for a job that would pay that much. I didn't even call them back, and their emails got so desperate that they said they'd pay me out of the rest of my SpaceX stock vesting. Maybe should have taken that one. I'd be at least 4x richer. And they were offering $500k/year in cash salary, and I assume there was probably some kind of perk for performance, as is typical in hedge funds. But yikes. I hate that shit.

> I didn't even call them back, and their emails got so desperate that they said they'd pay me out of the rest of my SpaceX stock vesting.

FYI there are automated systems that do this drip campaign. You just click a button while browsing LinkedIn.

It's less about bad/good and more about whether the work is fulfilling I think. Gaming is a lootbox gambling hellhole now, yet people love working on games, so they keep flocking to it, despite the objectively negative impact of microtransactions, systems designed to maximize addictiveness [1], etc.

[1] https://www.destructoid.com/ea-filed-a-patent-in-2016-to-tin...

As many comments said, not everyone has the same list of "vilified" industries. I wouldn't expect to find a vegan working at KFC or a very religious person in the porn industry. But it's only based on their own moral & principles. Not something intrinsic to these industries.

What I will add and what I find ironic is : the "journalists" at the economist virtue-signaling with such articles from a position of moral superiority when it can be argued that one of the biggest pollution of our time is mental pollution, with the kind of articles their colleague in the publishing/media industry are doing...

Good question, but poor answers. There's not much in the discussion of it, and what is, is really shallow (these industries are legal so that means it's fine to work for them! this also happens to be the ideology that funds the Economist)

I did a job for a "famous fried chicken chain" in the US once, and the end-goal was to "increase consumption of 'heavy users' from 3x a week to 4x a week". They didn't even bat an eye at their use of "heavy users".

Maybe that's why I'm now working in the medical space...??

Why they would not work there? Most people are happy to get a job that pays rent and living expenses. Have you seen rents recently? If you can choose your employer based on some arbitrary criteria, you are quite privileged!

Let me provide my take since I qualify: I don't vote with my employment or even wallet mostly. I don't accept solutions that don't address the root cause of a problem. If an industry is harmful then isn't it a government's role in society to regulate or disband that industry? We live in a society and it isn't the duty of the common man to regulate corporations, in a society of rule of law it is the government's role to do that.

Many people that want to work at a company that makes a difference or whatever are speaking from a position of luxury and leisure. When you grow up seeing poverty and your loves ones suffering needlessly and even then you are still much more privileged than those in 3rd world countries who literally die from starvation and have to hold their babies and rock them to their last sleep before dying of malnutrition you can appreciate a bit more what employment means.

I have a responsibility to do well for myself more than anything else. And next to that to care for those that mean most to me. My employment is a means to those ends. I have my priorities set right.

Tobaccon? Climate change? Pharmaceutical industry (glorified drug dealers), crypto (pro scammers) you name it I will work for them if it is the best way to acheive my goals. Most industries, including tech do a lot of things that are harmful to society because they too have their priorities straight with profit being number one.

I live in the US which is arguably the most poweful government on the planet. We can talk about politics and political participation to enable laws and restrictions that prevent harmful practices borh by corporations and individuals but my employment is a business relationship and as such my priority is profit.

I do not for one second buy into the bullshit "we care" crap from corporations which is maliciously incentivized to prop up social causes and weaponize businesses as tools for socio-political conflict.

It is your job as a voter in a democracy to convince your peers and elect officials that affect change. Period. If that isn't happening then I am open to discussion inculding and up to using violence to enable change.

Stop thinking as a half minded capitalist and practice proper politics where the root cause lies. Money affects politics so do well and if you care that much spend your money and free time on political causes. You can even work in indistries you dislike so you can understand your adversary from the inside out well so you know exactly what policies to support politically.

Look at tech for example, you can avoid working for google because of their anti-privacy practices or you can work for them and do your job really so that when you support a poltical candidate or attempt to convince your fellow citizens you are an exper insider on the subject matter!

That's my perspective and I am open to discourse and discussion on the subject.

My counterpoint to those of you who avoid working in harmful industries: so long as you live in a democracy how are you any less responsible for allowing harmful industries to continue to harm? Do you do your best politically to affect change? The what else can reasonably be expected from you? Are we to live as hermits that come our from our eco friendly progressive isolated bubbles only to complain about the left and the right before casting a vote on election and day and retrearing back into our bubbles??

I agree with your sentiment, but not your prescription. The law shouldn't rule where it violates an individual's negative rights. Tyranny of the majority or the political representatives thereof is not a solution. There shouldn't be a ballot on what I drink, own, wrote, manufacture, or fornicate with. And yet all of these choices have, at one point or another, been prohibited or limited by a democratic. Ultimately, it's issue of rights not politics. While the two have often been conflated, they are not the same.

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