With regards to the end of the article.
> Can I work for a bad company and still be a good person?
> No.
> Can I work for a bad company and still be a good person?
> No.
OP wasn't the one trying to define it.
No matter which company you choose, someone somewhere will find a justification for why they are actually not bad. Weapons dealer? Protecting your nation. Destroying local businesses? "They are just adding efficiency to the market". Kill someone with bad practices? "Still safer than the alternative". Ticketmaster? "The scalpers are giving a subvention for those who cannot afford the real price".
Setting up a straw "bad company" and knocking it down doesn't help anyone on the real problem of people working for unethical companies.
Especially on the west coast, we're so passive in our shaming of people that it probably doesn't translate to action. There are people who work at Evil companies like Facebook, etc, who are otherwise nice, but I find myself not including them or turned off to them as friends because this sort of contradiction is hard to square in my brain. Of course I wouldn't communicate to this, being a passive PNW raised wimp, and it's not even super explicit in my mind, it's really more of a bad vibe than anything else. I imagine over time if enough people act like I do, it doesn't actually translate to different decisions from the individual in question, but instead translates to them waking up one day feeling distant and unfulfilled, which is probably the worst of all outcomes. They still work for Bad Company, but are also sad about it, and there's a general sense of malaise pervading life that's hard to pinpoint.
*Obviously this all ignores the people who don't have a choice of employment. But here I'm generally referring to software people who have high pay and career mobility. Things get murkier when the conversation is opened up to people who are just trying to survive.
I think the Leetcode grinding, TC optimizing crowd with no real moral judgment which is the majority in tech right now is another reason why things are falling apart. They will happily work for the KKK if they get a larger RSU package.
Your point about them being at least "sad" about it, is a start I guess.
If you no longer feel pride in your work, then money takes over. In my search, no employer cares about this anymore because the newer generations are only here to grind for gold.
I don't question that the problems you're describing are problematic, but what do they have to do with postmodernism? It seems like in the cases you're describing, the postmodern approach would be to call into question whether the abstractions in use ("value" in this case) are applicable, and to instead march to the beat of your own drum in some way.
When most of the relevant work around you is in some way related to ICBM's, you either sell your soul early, or you end up with habits like this. By my reckoning, about 80% of technology companies are bad.
And trying to objectify value judgements is another whole area of contention that inevitably leads to itself.
But the point of reading a blog post would be to learn something insightful, to see the reasoning or argument by which the poster came to this particular conclusion. Hopefully with some consideration that I'd not thought of before.
This boils a complicated question with nuance and problems and facets of debate into a rather vapid "I like this answer." of a post. It's not worth anything: I come away from it no richer than when I came.
Like, trivially, someone could write the opposite answer on another blog. And whose answer is right? (They of course need not even bother actually writing it out. A "right" answer is created by argument, not spilled ink.)
Lets re-invent religion.
> No.
The answer to "What happens when you move faster than light" is not "nothing", it is undefined because the question is invalid. Asking if a person or a company is good or bad isn't a question that can ever have a well-defined answer: the answers we give are rounded according to our own values. To get more specific, not all of us have a huge amount of choice in who we work for.
If apenwarr believes I want to be a good person they should hire me at Tailscale. What's that, they won't? They don't have openings, or I'm not qualified? I guess they're the bad person because now I have to work for a bad company or lose my income. And if I lose my income, my co-habitants lose their housing, and my donations to good causes dry up. Do I just not do enough good for apenwarr? They must be a paragon of virtue. Surely they don't eat meat, or even associate with meat-eaters. Surely they don't fly in airplanes.
Counterexample:
Was Hitler bad?
I don't think it's useful to say "Hitler was bad." Hitler did a lot of specific evil acts that are more useful to analyze. If anything, it's counterproductive to say "Hitler was bad," because lots of people do bad things and then say "well, at least I'm not Hitler."
It's still useful to point out that IF you think your company is bad THEN you should do something about that. It establishes that "I was just following orders that I know are wrong" isn't a valid excuse (e.g. like if you end up in court for something you did on the job).
Well, I'm responding to someone else providing their scheme for everyone else to use.
I agree with this entirely.
And rounding does not change the answer in most situations.
Something that isn't well-defined can still be mostly-defined.
I have no idea what the point of that strawman is in your last paragraph. It doesn't make sense with or without rounding. Maybe if you round every single value to infinity, but that's not what "rounding" normally means...
You said when people look at moral situations, they use their own values to round their measurement. And I thought that was a good way to describe things.
Then for some reason you acted like "rounding" turns things into strawman-level black and white. The slightest blemish (not hiring a specific good person) qualifying as evil.
Let's say a scale of 0 to 10. If people disagree whether some issue is a 3 or 4, and a few people say 5, and that's 95% of responses, then that disagreement isn't a big deal. It doesn't matter that it's not well-defined, it's sufficiently-defined.
That would be rounding. Showing that the question is not nonsense.
If they disagree whether it's a 0 or a 10 that's a totally different thing that is not rounding.
> Then for some reason you acted like "rounding" turns things into strawman-level black and white. The slightest blemish (not hiring a specific good person) qualifying as evil.
This was in direct response to the top-level comment making that very assertion (via a blog post). If I'm understanding you correctly, I think we're actually agreeing that it's absurd. The CEO of a "good" company indirectly, but unambiguously, called me a bad person for not leaving my job. I say, if it's so cut-and-dry, and I want to be a "good" person, why aren't they helping me get a better job? Of course, it's an absurd ask.
Somebody isn't only allowed to be "good" if they do every good thing possible to them. And I am sure said CEO does many acts others would consider "bad", such as eating industrial meat or flying, both of which participate in the generation of immeasurable harm.
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Also, with regard to your scale - you've given the question too much credit. The question doesn't ask "how much are you good or bad?", it asks and receives a binary answer. And the vast, vast majority of people can't be assigned one of those binary categories of "good" and "bad".
"A good person is obligated to quit a bad company." is a far more reasonable statement than "A good company is obligated to hire every good person."
> Also, with regard to your scale - you've given the question too much credit. The question doesn't ask "how much are you good or bad?", it asks and receives a binary answer. And the vast, vast majority of people can't be assigned one of those binary categories of "good" and "bad".
You can pick a threshold. Your strawman would categorize 99.9% of things as bad, which is obviously the wrong threshold, and very obviously not what the OP meant. The failure of that method doesn't make the entire idea of judging companies invalid.
I'm not giving it "too much credit" to take a sane and quite obvious interpretation.
Yes, the bar is higher (higher means it's harder to qualify as bad, right?) when talking about needing to quit.
> I already asserted at the very beginning of the comment chain, almost every company is bad. That went unchallenged
Because you went on to say it didn't matter anyway, so I focused on the latter part of your post.
Though I'm confused. You showed an argument that sorting companies into good and bad results in absurdity, but it only results in absurdity when the bar is super low. Why is your conclusion that sorting is impossible, rather than "the bar is too low", if you were already seriously considering that the bar needs to be higher?
I also thinks it's misleading and not very useful to call people good or bad, in general. I'm more comfortable with calling capitalist corporations "bad" as a blanket statements; resource-hoarding is their utmost priority, and I consider that an evil motivation.
My conclusion isn't that sorting is impossible, it's that people are too complex to be sorted into "good" and "bad", in general... and that it's shitty and incorrect to call ordinary people bad if they aren't willing to risk everything to work for a slightly less evil company in a world made of evil companies.
In particular 'slightly less evil' is not the goal.
Again, I think we're kind of on the same page, but our solutions are different. The original question refused any kind of nuance, and we both seem to agree it's not a question that should ignore nuance. You choose to answer a binary question with a grading system, I choose to substitute a different question.