Interesting, from reading her post you'd think it's a real challenge to avoid working in a company that will eventually become evil. My first thought was that there is a failure in the system if it inevitably leads companies to become evil as they grow (maybe a failure of government?).
But then I realized looking back at my career, I have not worked for any evil companies to my knowledge, at least not cartoonishly evil. It seems most of the companies she mentions have one thing in common, they are by the bay, part of a local system that's one of the economic engines of the U.S and favours growth over any other considerations, including ethics.
So my conclusion from this post would be, if it matters to you, don't work in the bay? There are many industries beside software where good software engineers are needed and you can do good, challenging, and very innovative work "to make the world a better place".
Unfortunately most companies don't exist to make the world a better place, most companies exist to make money - the more, the better. And if you want to make more money, there's definitely a temptation to use unethical (while still legal) methods. And companies that make less money tend to be bought by companies that make more money, which tend to be higher on the "evil scale". Or sometimes, a not-so-evil company will buy a more-evil company which then eats them up from within, like Google with DoubleClick or Boeing with McDonnell Douglas.
Glance for a moment at the Wikipedia list of profitable companies [0]. Observe that #1 is Saudi Aramco, which supports one of the more horrible regimes.
Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large.
There is a great reason that companies are freed from the requirement to be morally good - because human instincts are not calibrated to run an 8-billion-strong postindustrial globe. It doesn't work. If we let people do things completely on instinct most people will die quite quickly, and the leadership will turn out to be corrupt anyway.
We do things this way because a lot of experiments were run, and free market economics gets much better results than all the systems people swear do better. It harnesses greed to the cause of ... if you won't admit it is good you have to at least admit it is effective. Honestly, I think it is good too. Good and evil are not the right mental tools here, morals don't cope with the scale that humans need to operate on now.
That's an astonishing argument. You argue that companies collaborating with evil regimes to produce oil is good, because... when something happens that means we have to stop buying their oil (Russian invasion of Ukraine)... we're suddenly in a lot of pain?
I come to exactly the opposite conclusion from that.
We'd have been far better off not putting ourselves in that position, i.e. in a position of dependence on those regimes in the first place, not to mention funnelling billions into their treasuries. Countries like Russia and Saudi have been using our cash to prop up their repressive regimes for decades, causing untold pain to their population, building up their military and using those funds to destabilise democracies across the globe.
If we'd put that money into nuclear and renewables instead of being happy to embrace greed (and I'd have been fine with legislation to achieve that) we'd have energy security, we'd be looking at much less devastation from climate change and the world would be in a much better place in general.
> If we'd put that money into nuclear and renewables instead of being happy to embrace greed...
The regulators have been squeezing the life out of the nuclear industry for what, 40 years now? There is that wonderful chart floating around [0] showing what regulators have done to the learning curve. You're not going to get a more hardened and cynical capitalist than me and I've been spewing for more than a decade about the Australian government blocking me from investing in nuclear power effectively. Their policy is a disaster on multiple levels.
It isn't greedy people holding back nuclear power, it is the dreamers looking for an industrial power supply that doesn't cause pollution while we run out of fossil fuels. It'd be great if we can find that in renewables, but we'd have gone heavy nuclear decades ago if it was left up to raw greed.
People also whinge about Texas being greedy with their massive investment in cheap renewables rather than winter hardening them. Damn those greedy people for going all in on cheap renewable, I suppose. Again, the issue isn't greed, it is the reactionaries getting antsy when capitalists do things the cheap way. I point out that the Texas grid was still better and cheaper than what the Germans managed with their Energiewende and social whatever it is they wanted to feel moral about.
I have no idea, I only started paying half-attention when the Energiewende started firing up and I don't read German. But I went to have a look and found someone saying they had a 30 hour outage for 30k people in Berlin in 2019.
Things break, and you need to be ready for blackouts. I'd still rather take cheap and 99% availability than expensive and 100%.
That was just the usual local incompetence. They cut a cable and couldn't get it reconnected. I don't recall the exact number, but it wasn't many houses.
Europe is actually pretty connected wrt the electricity network, so if we'll ever encounter an actual blackout you can expect it to be covered everywhere, especially in Chinese/Russian media as they'll be meme-ing how much better they're.
Despite having countless localized outages all the time, but hey... You know how dictatorships work. Can't let the truth get in the way of propaganda after all.
The linked article is about the fact that there isn't a plan how to handle a full blackout, precisely because there hasnt been one. It's the same for all developed nations, outage just haven't happened in ages so contingencies have been forgotten, basically.
1) Texans pays something like 15c/kWh and Germans pay something like 30c/kWh. The German grid is far inferior to the Texan one given that they'll both have availability in the 99% range.
2) In Texas you have to be ready for a 48 hour blackout in case your supplier is incompetent. In Germany you have to be ready for a 48 hour blackout in case of ... usual local incompetence? Although the Texan grid is obviously less reliable, that doesn't actually change the amount of preparation that households should be doing.
3) There is also a pretty reasonable argument that it is better to have a rare blackout than to have no plan or experience for a major blackout. It is terrible planning to assume that nothing can go wrong.
4) Texan greed got them to ~25% renewable penetration in their electricity mix. It is cheap and sustainable. The German energiewende has got them to around 40% renewable penetration and "highly dependent on Russian energy, as it gets more than half of the natural gas, a third of heating oil, and half of its coal imports from Russia. Due to this reliance, Germany blocked, delayed or watered down EU proposals to cut Russian energy imports amid the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine" [0]. This wasn't a close contest, the Texan regulators - the ones who leave it a bit more to greedy capitalists - are the ones that people should be putting in charge.
The failures of putting non-greedy people in charge of the German energy grid was so bad it had geopolitical consequences! That is why we try to leave it up to greedy people. If they'd listened to us greedy types they'd be knee-deep in reactors and not crippled by the threat of Russian sanctions. The people pushing the Energiewende thought they were a force for good, and it turns out they were the exact opposite. They were empowering a land war in Europe.
>Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large.
Well I don't see how people in Western Europe (i.e. excluding Ukraine) are in danger of starving and I would actually argue the people that we are seeing being killed at the moment are a direct consequence of buying cheap energy no matter the ethics. If Europe would have invested more strongly into becoming energy independent instead of chasing the cheapest oil and gas, we might have a slighly lower standard of living, but much of European politics would not be infiltrated by money from resource oligarchs and likely Russia would never have invaded so people would not be dying in a pointless war.
The whole western world took a gamble that Russia would behave within acceptable constraints (ie only bringing misery to its own citizens) because the costs of stepping outside those constraints would be too high economically, due to sanctions or just lost trade. I personally still believe that to be true - Russia is now done as a serious participant in the global economy; they won't be trusted for a generation or more. Living standards there will fall dramatically unless they become a vassal state of China. Where the west miscalculated was in expecting the man in charge to remain a rational actor. The last decade has shown us that such an assumption (as applied inside western democracies as well as outside) is no longer valid - so it now seems reasonable to assume un-ending volatility until a new order establishes itself. The next decade will be decided by whether the USA wants to retain its hegemony badly enough to stand up to China, or whether it will retreat into isolationism instead. Currently, sadly, my money is on the latter.
They ware a perfectly rational actor so far, Europe and the west in general has mostly just spouted empty platitudes and always blinked first.
Nothing happened with the two Chechenyan wars, with Georgia, nobody did anything about Syrian cities being bombed to rubble and the 2014 sanctions post-Crimea ware rather weak.
During that time everybody continued to buy gas, oil, electricity, fertilizer, aluminium and titanium.
Clearly, the west did not care about things like that and it would be business like normal.
Except that this time it was found out there's a limit.
> There is a great reason that companies are freed from the requirement to be morally good - because human instincts are not calibrated to run an 8-billion-strong postindustrial globe.
Yet they are bound by many laws and regulations, beyond contract law and non-aggression, born of these instincts you malign, that (try to) prevent the worst of their greed. Laws covering worker safety, union-busting, antitrust and fair competition, child labor, truth in advertising, environmental protection, even requirements on the length and validity of warranties.
You have to ignore all of these constraints to arrive at the simplistic "greed is good" conclusion. A conclusion that implies not only that we should not add further prohibitions against newly-recognized "evil" behavior (e.g. web spying, devices locked against their owner, etc..), but also that we should remove the prohibitions currently in place.
>Yet they are bound by many laws and regulations, beyond contract law and non-aggression, born of these instincts you malign, that (try to) prevent the worst of their greed
We don't regulate companies to prevent "the worst of the greed" except by some naive definition. We regulate them so they mop up or don't leave messes in their wake, be these messes social or environmental.
Companies don't poison the water or use bad labor practices because they want to. Large organizations (Boeing, the Catholic church, the FBI, etc) don't "want". They respond to incentives. Companies do it because it's less un-profitable than the next best option and to not do that while their competitors do puts them at a disadvantage. Regulation only adjusts the incentive scale.
>You have to ignore all of these constraints to arrive at the simplistic "greed is good" conclusion
You have to ignore the difference between "good" and "can be harnessed for good" to come to that conclusion. You're implying meaning he didn't write because it makes a more easily defeated position.
> We don't regulate companies to prevent "the worst of the greed" except by some naive definition. We regulate them so they mop up or don't leave messes in their wake, be these messes social or environmental.
Those messes are the worst of their greed that I was referring to. I have no idea what your objection is - that those laws didn't "mandate companies behave good", but merely "readjusted incentives to avoid undesirable outcomes"??
Of course laws are not as simplistic as "try to do good, avoid doing evil", but that doesn't mean that is not their aim.
"but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil"
That experiment is basically switching one horrible regime with another (e.g. Aserbaidschan and Qatar), so I would argue that it was never really about morals at all, but rather geopolitics and power all along.
Continue doing more buisness with russia would simply be more expensive, as it would increase the cost of doing buisness with closer trading partners/allies.
"morals don't cope with the scale that humans need to operate on now."
So when was a time, when morals could and should have an influence on human operations? Slavery just ended recently (in most parts of the world) and your argument means for example continuing buisness with Nazi germany during the war (and holocaust). There is no line, when you say morals are not the right tool. So this means profiting of slave labour camps. The more and brutal exploitation, the more profit, the better?
I don't think so.
My stance is, that there is just no general solution and everything is case by case. By doing buisness with a random chinese company(e.g. buying something made in china), I do not endorse chinese politic. But if that specific company is involved with slave labour, then yes, I would support that slave system by buying from them and I would try to find a alternative.
I feel like Candide is a pretty good antidote to this sort of thinking, which is a form of Panglossianism.
<sarcasm>
Supporting brutal regimes because not supporting them means you might not have enough oil or gas? Of course, it works out for the best. A few sacrificed in war and oppression while the many live well. Nazis were bad for the Jews? There are more Jews now than ever, and they have control of their ancestral lands. COVID wasn't being taken seriously enough by some countries/states? They've successfully culled their elderly population and are probably saving tons of long-run suffering.
</sarcasm>
Obviously, that is all sarcastic, but there is something weird about teleological thinking. The same sort of thinking that the events that led to my birth were ipso-facto moral, because otherwise I would be wishing for my own nonexistence, and as a moral person how could I do that? An immoral person could take my place.
I just read Candide this week, I liked it. The world is pretty miserable - but you need a plan to make it better. "Avoid doing Evil" is a plan that:
1. We have tried.
2. Doesn't work.
The plan "give greedy people incentives to make people materially better off" not only works, but works better than everything else we've tried. Ergo, we want more greed, not less evil.
I wouldn’t call that a plan, just a principle. Same for “all about the Benjamins”. The plan is anything from “Think and Grow Rich” to dealing drugs.
But if your plan is to try to set up a bunch of moral slides that cause your desired outcome as the end of a chain of dominoes, well, best of luck but I am not signing on.
Most companies exist to make a living, and have a clear concept of "well enough".
Unfortunately, due to scale issues, most software development jobs isn't on those companies. But each innovation that reduces the cost of development moves this relation into a better position.
> There are many industries beside software where good software engineers are needed and you can do good, challenging, and very innovative work "to make the world a better place".
Honestly, such as and how?
I worked for one company I thought had a good mission, and a good product (it wasn't ads!), ahead of its competitors. Lackluster marketing, then we got acquired and inept management sunk it, and ended up with those of us who worked on it laid off and it's all gone, now.
I'm in healthcare now, but it is really hard to move the needle. There's no way around integrating with providers, and they're driving a lot of absolutely bonkers technical decisions. I spent a lot of time building out brand new, but completely broken, things, because there's nobody designing the system.
Meanwhile recruiters routinely hit my inbox with information-free cold pitches. I'd kill for a lure that had bait attached to it. The last email that had a salary attached wanted a Senior Software Engineer but was offering less than what I started at in the industry as an entry-level engineer.
> don't work in the bay
I left the Bay, and it's not really changed anything from a work/career perspective. But I don't think it's morally acceptable to tell people to "just leave"; what if they have a home there? family? connections? Perhaps giving it all up might be the most pragmatic thing, but it might crush a soul in the meantime.
That said, the political climate of the Bay was "head, firmly in sand" when I left. I left partly because I do not see the Bay, collectively, being capable of solving the problems they face. (There are a few people trying — including a friend of mine I left behind. But they're hopelessly outnumbered.)
> if it matters to you
Maslow's hierarchy. Real rent is up, nominal compensation is down. People are getting laid off left and right. Being a millionaire is practically a pre-req to home ownership near any city. (And companies include "geographic adjustment" in compensation these days.)
Pick any, I've worked in telecom, GIS, health, you need software everywhere. You have to weigh salary against the appeal of the mission and the work environment. You can't have everything, and you certainly can't have bay salaries. Personally I've never had trouble finding meaningful work with people I respect, but I have had to make sacrifices on the salary front.
You seem to have read my comment as saying snarkily "if you really cared you'd just leave", that's not what I intended to convey.
Of course I realize people have multi-faceted priorities, family, financial safety concerns, existing investments, and so on... I'm not telling people to leave as much as I'm saying if you care deeply about working for ethical companies, it seems like working in the bay area is not going to make it easy, and you'd probably have a easier time elsewhere.
There are plenty of cities where you don't need to be a millionaire to own a home, I have a friend who just bought a nice house in San Antonio for 200k. That's another advantage of working out of the bay.
I wouldn't take the message "just leave" necessarily as inconsiderate advice, or at least not always. It might be also meant to vote with your feet, because that's the only influence you can have in the process, and if enough people do it then it may tilt the needle a bit.
My experience is any company can be viewed as evil. I’ve done a ton of computational work for pharma companies. We were trying to discover cures for diseases, pretty much a good thing, right? Don’t have to look hard to find people giving reasons why pharma companies are evil.
> Don’t have to look hard to find people giving reasons why pharma companies are evil.
Case in point:
Imagine you find someone grasping a cliff edge by their fingertips. Pulling them back to safety is good! Pulling them back to safety only after they promise you all their worldly wealth forevermore is less good. Being in the business of offering people this deal is not better. Funding the effort to prevent people from restraining your exploitation of cliff danglers is still worse.
This isn't an insoluble moral puzzle. I don't think pharma is an ideal example for your larger point. Most businesses don't thrive on the desperation of their customers.
But I also don't think your point is correct. There are better and worse companies.
I understand one needs to make one's peace with one's choices. I've worked for companies that were doing evil (not exclusively, but at all). I've worked for companies that were mediocre at best. I'm currently working for a company that I would say is positively good. I got paid more by the evil companies. I have been happier working for the good companies though it's harder to support my family. But I understand people who choose to keep working for their evil company, particularly when others depend on their income. In one of the more egregious outbursts of evil at one of the companies I worked for I had friends who quit. They didn't want to be complicit. I stayed. I had kids and didn't want to throw my family into turmoil. But I saw the choice I was making.
> This isn't an insoluble moral puzzle. I don't think pharma is an ideal example for your larger point. Most businesses don't thrive on the desperation of their customers.
I mean, pharma as an industry also creates the ability to pull people back from the edge.
Medicine isn't created out of thin air, the universe doesn't just owe us a steady supply of new innovations that have kept so many people alive and in better comfort. Money needs to be invested, that money has to be paid by someone.
(I'm not talking about specifics of the US healthcare system or anything, where there are problems, just pharma in general.)
My point is that when a highwayman says "your money or your life" we call it a crime. He gets lots of money because those are the choices. But those are the choices which, in the USA, pharma and other medical professionals offer. They can charge enormous amounts because these are the conditions. Does it cost a lot to develop drugs? Sure. But the profits more than cover the costs. Obviously. This market sector is hugely profitable. Other people who solve difficult problems where their potential customer isn't desperate cannot achieve equivalent profits.
If you work in medicine you have lots of ways to wash your conscience. Medical school is hard and expensive! You are saving lives! But in the end you can charge the rates you charge because your customer is desperate (to say nothing of the information asymmetry, the cost and difficulty of seeking a second opinion, etc.). There is a huge market failure here and that is the source of your enormous profit.
There are many alternative ways to achieve the same end without the market failure fleecing the unfortunate in the middle. Offer bounties for medical breakthroughs. Finance healthcare as a public good. This will reduce the rate of improvement in medical science because the payoff for breakthroughs will be less. Maybe this is the wrong way to go about it. But I'd rather take my chances with a less broken medical system. I've been fleeced many times in my life by the US healthcare system. If I have to sacrifice my well being for some cause, there are others I'd prefer. Will innovations slow if the US stops being a patsy? Yes. But I'd just like access to the medicine we already have.
I don't think that's a great analogy, since giving someone a hand when they are dangling off a cliff is easy and anyone (who happened to be around) could do it at low cost. Developing new medical treatments is incredibly expensive and difficult, and only part of that is because of regulatory burdens. You aren't just playing to develop the treatment you are receiving, but also the dozens of potential treatments that the pharma companies invested huge amounts of money into that didn't end up working out.
This is all beside the point. It is incredibly difficult to carve a palace into a grain of rice inside a bottle. There is no great profit in it, though. Pharma is profitable not because it is difficult but because its customers are desperate, have limited choices, and are dependent on experts to make those choices; experts who also profit from the market failure inherent in medicine.
> So my conclusion from this post would be, if it matters to you, don't work in the bay?
I had a job at a publicly traded company with an office (my office) in Ohio - and not headquartered from the bay but another part of the Midwest - and one day during pride month the CEO emailed everyone to say that they would NOT put up a pride flag. They went on to explain that they couldn’t because it would be upsetting, and if inclusivity flags were normal to display at the office, black people may want a flag too, and where would it end?.
They were a very generic company, and not particularly evil in other aspects of their business.
I have also worked at large FAANG companies in the bay. They treat employees way better (google’s shuttles! Free food! Equity Refreshers!). I would much rather be a Bay Area FAANG employee than an Ohio Generic Co employee. The way FAANG treats their employees isn’t evil.
There’s evil everywhere, IMO I might as well be treated well for being complicit towards it.
I don't understand your point. Are you saying the Ohio company is evil for not putting up a pride flag? Are you saying the Bay-area company isn't evil because they treated their higher-ranked servants well ?
seriously, the other poster never stops to consider that the reason people like this CEO are drawing a line in the sand is BECAUSE of people like this poster are running around drawing such conclusions from something as lik a pride flag.
What next, is this poster going to take a flamethrower to the anthill in their backyard? Lets see how well that works.
It’s definitely not good for employees to reject calls for things like a pride flag in mass emails to employees.
The reasoning, other minorities, explicitly mentioning black minorities, may want attention isn’t a very “not-evil” thing to do. It’s a weird whataboutism that throws black employees under the bus as the ultimate problem they’re trying to avoid. This was in 2017, and not eg during the George Floyd protests, so it was really arbitrary to mention.
It’s a flag in an office park, for a month, it has no negative affect to the company except an hour of human effort to put up and take it down. It does have a positive affect for their employees, however. Even if it does “snowball” to other minority groups… really has minimal downsides.
What is particularly stunning was the action to email the company to say they wouldn’t put up a flag because black people may get ideas. That’s the action that is hard to understand because it draws attention to a decision that could be made quietly with less negative impact.
I would reach the opposite conclusion that you reached. Any company that allowed those flags I would consider to be intentionally bringing politics into the workplace and therefore manipulating their staff and therefore evil. A lack of political signaling is one of the things I look for in the category of non-evil.
Refusal to conform to fashionable trends isn't evil. It is just being honest, which is admittedly rare in the corporate world.
Most companies that hoist the pride flag probably do not care about gay rights any more than your previous employer. They just do it to mollify Western activist Twitter. Their Middle Eastern branches, if extant, will do the precise opposite in order to mollify Middle Eastern activist Twitter and not get kicked out of the conservative kingdoms/emirates.
Once you start consider most big companies as perfect psychopaths who know how to simulate deep feelings on the surface while having none inside, the world starts making a lot more sense.
This reminded me of a quote - "It is better to be at the right hand of the devil than in his path". So I looked it up and apparently it's from "The Mummy".
Given their incentives to profit financially, not being evil would take a concerted effort which could be avoidd simply with an appearance of good, so it seems quite statistically probable that evil is more common than not.
> So my conclusion from this post would be, if it matters to you, don't work in the bay?
I believe you can find "problematic" companies everywhere. If it matters to you, go look at the pay. If they're paying enormous sums, they believe they can make much more. "Good things" usually don't offer that kind of profit margin.
That's not to say that shitty pay = good company, there's plenty of terrible people who are evil AND offer low salaries.
Almost every corporation and startup is cartoonishly evil (in that it stupidly and persistently refuses to look at people, except as a vehicle to increase the high score - money). If I may ask, is there some sort of sector you've worked in that kept the corporations you worked for stricly neutral or better?
I must admit I'm a little skeptical that they were not strictly amoral (which given the right incentives always tends to an almost ridiculous amount of evil), but I would really like to believe it.
At the end of the day it all comes down to personal politics and ethics. If you believe that providing grandma with some communication and networking tools while giving spooks access to her messages and letting marketers spew their stuff at her eyeballs is A-ok then facebook isn't evil.
I’ve worked for various network/telco equipment providers over the course of 20+ years, and there have only been a couple of cartoonishly evil moments that I can recall. Certainly not to the level of thinking that I needed to quit to save my soul. There were some soulless executives, but the business models weren’t morally bankrupt. I have been paid reasonably well (not Bay Area / FAANG well). Most of the companies don’t exist anymore, and I have been through my fair share of layoff cycles.
Mostly I think it was that the market moved and they didn't have the capital to make the leap. Combined with a not-so-great product/market fit to begin with, this is fatal for a capital-intensive startup.
> If I may ask, is there some sort of sector you've worked in that kept the corporations you worked for stricly neutral or better?
Education. Non-profits. Hospitals.
Not that the software vendors I worked for in those industries were perfect. Nor were the customers. Evil, greed, ambition, and power came into play and brought negativity to them all. But it tended to center around a handful of poor leaders, and did not prevent the overall impact of the work being "neutral or better".
> My first thought was that there is a failure in the system if it inevitably leads companies to become evil as they grow (maybe a failure of government?
It is not a bug, it is feature. And it is not the government, it is capitalism which endorses greed.
After doing this about as long as Rachel has been, it seems to me that your choice for employer is usually (a) evil (for varying definitions of evil); (b) incompetent; or (c) an organization of competent paladins that also happen to hate money.
There are a very, very few organizations that don't fall into one of those categories.
Those that refuse to sell their soul will make ever so much less money than their colleagues. I've kept my soul, but I bet Rachel can keep the lights on.
I'd suggest that (d) exists: Companies that make a reasonable product, that solves a problem, and that people are willing to pay for. Those companies are out there, and can be good to work for. But yeah, you still have to keep an eye out because even these can turn slowly evil over time.
To me it seems like these people are more interested in power, and the prestige of being an "insider" than anything else. The moral dilemmas are secondary, like fun anecdotes and conversation topics they can interrupt with "well, actually..."
It's a culture of complacency and pretentious bragging that allows evil companies to keep going. This is the case for every bad company from Google, to Blizzard, to FTX.
Back when Blizzard was making great games, did they have a culture of "I work for Blizzard therefore I am a true insider"? No. That's their current culture though.
I've seen plenty of people saying they got hired by their "dream company" and now they're in "silicon valley" and all that, and invariably they're joining some predatory company that rides on a legacy from pre-2015, or some hype train like most crypto projects.
You want to work for a non-evil company? Just don't work primarily for bragging rights, it's not that hard.
Of course, some companies are not necessarily evil but have the prestige. I think what differentiates those from others is that people want to join those companies to be part of a mission rather than simply make money and gain bragging rights.
I work for an educational multimedia nonprofit. My job involves creating and maintaining educational websites.
The organization is not 100% 'not evil' by any means. There are a lot of issues, e.g. we take donations from unquestionably evil sources and prominently mention them (and/or run ads for them). But the mission is to educate, and I know for a fact that my work helps teachers and students every day, so all things considered I feel good about working here.
Many people who work here have taken salary/benefits cuts to do so. I'd say most of us are less motivated by money than we are by contributing to society. I was ludicrously underpaid for years, and only recently I got a raise that falls within the lower boundaries of what is average for my position and skills. I get recruiter emails almost daily offering tens of thousands of dollars more than I make now, but I'm not interested in contributing to spyware or optimizing landfill-junk production or any of the other evils that the vast majority of for-profit companies are rewarded for doing.
If I think about what it would take for me to work for a company like Facebook, it ends up being "enough to donate whatever it would take to negate the harm they do" - i.e. everything they have, and complete control over the direction of the company. I would turn down millions of dollars if taking it meant working for Facebook.
I worked for a few startups like that - we had a great team, we had great technology, we were making the world a better place without harming anyone… and we ran out of money while negotiating sales contracts. In one case I continued working there without pay for 9 months, just because everything-except-the-money was amazing (and the CEO chose to sell all of her personal assets in order to keep the employees being paid as long as possible).
But predictably, that wasn’t sustainable, and now I’m a generic FAANG engineer
As someone who co-ran a non-profit with a mission full time, I ended up deeply in personal debt as a result (of not being paid for years but still having living costs). Those running the non-profit ended up significantly worse off than other people working there. I'm still paying it off years later.
At mine, management were required to be volunteers (even full time), but other full time staff were paid salary and benefits.
Most people working there were also volunteers, but part time or occasional as they felt like it. They had time for day jobs.
The reason for this arrangement was because most members who co-owned it did not believe anyone should be paid, but we had a grant for premises and hired staff. Nobody wanted the hired staff to be in charge overall, as their incentives, skills and competencies were far more aligned with the premises owner and business angle, and not with the non-profit's mission. So it had to be run by motivated volunteers, and that included developing a type of non-profit business and manufacturing service, managing staff, as well as organising a large number of volunteers, events, teaching, safety, purchases, accounting, etc.
Boy did that combination take a lot of work for a long time. Like regular startups, we had a big idea and hoped it would grow to something we wanted to see in the world. It actually did really well for what it was.
The model broke for different reasons than the obvious one with sustainability, involving assholes and a commercial opportunist who offered the premises owner something better (which they then promptly failed to execute, destroying everything for everyone), just as ours was starting to flourish at a sustainable level and we were getting better at distributing the work and knowledge effectively.
On the other hand, if you establish basic norms, you shouldn't have issues like "X won't let me cheat on my expense report" or "Y won't let be a literal agent of foreign power" regardless of the size of the organization.
> Those running the non-profits may do better than the workers.
I know.
I was nearly violently assaulted by the CEO of my NGO when I pointed out they justified our patltry salaries by the fact we’d make approximately the same on the GS scale while the higher ups made multiples of what POTUS did (which iirc is towards the far end of the bell curve for government salaries).
(Hacker protip: Don’t stand in a doorway, raise your voice, then police the response.)
Sometimes, it's obvious a company is evil, because it's been in the news as evil, almost since it was founded. (Sometimes, they even get Hollywood's greatest speechwriter to make a movie about it, to re-spin the bad PR.)
Other times, it's less-obvious:
1. You don't have enough visibility into the company's operations, plans, or executives.
2. You don't know enough context of society and/or business, to understand how something innocuous-sounding is evil.
3. All's good on intentions and impact, but later the situation changes (company is pressured by market or investors, or someone falls into a bad influence yacht party scene, etc.),
Complicating this is that it's the norm (especially for startups) for a company to claim to be doing something positive for society:
1. Sometimes it's just marketing/brand convention that people go through, and don't think they have to take seriously (it'd be rude to say you just want to extract money).
2. Sometimes the founders/execs believe it, but with poor understanding of the problems and solutions (often by class sheltering, or simply not knowing the domain well enough).
3. Sometimes it's con artists and/or narcissists, who work the narrative to manipulate others, or to increase sense of personal glory.
I don't know a complete solution to this problem of detecting evil so you can avoid working for it.
I also haven't figured out a satisfying way to reconcile not wanting to work for evil, with wanting to have a comfortable life right now. Especially in "tech" right now, where a lot of bad practices have become so ordinary, we don't realize it. (And if someone called out the practices, we might get irritated like a 9th grade Economics fan, because that person who thinks that's a problem must be stupid, because we were told this is the way things are.)
It's hard to avoid working for a company that is in some way evil because in general, companies have no morality. They are amoral money-generating machines. Even if individual people inside them have good intentions, the system is set up to incentivise people to do the bad thing anyway, or to abstract over the bad thing so you won't realise what you're doing.
This isn’t really correct. Companies usually follow some high level morals, but it’s very rare they align with yours. The same is true working for a university as a researcher (what the IRB allows and what research is supported varies by institution) or even just working for a non-profit (think of some pro-lifer’s views on planned parenthood).
And it's a breath of fresh air compared to government or organized religion.
Why is federal law enforcement doing something evil? Why is the church doing something evil? God only knows. They have a dozen subjective competing goals in their mandate. Companies are easy. Follow the money.
Perhaps it's interesting to consider who the bad thing is being done to. Consider, for example, working for outlandishly impractical VC-funded ideas, where the main "evil" that's being done is conning venture capitalists into paying for the expenses of a company that will never produce anything of value.
I had a friend who said he wanted 'He did little harm' on his gravestone. At the time I was irritated by how defeatist that attitude seemed, but these days it seems like a surprisingly high bar.
Defining which companies are evil is difficult because different people have different morals. From your example, I'd see it as the VCs who are conning small companies into taking VC money and driving for growth over sustainability in order to be one of many lottery tickets for that VC as the evil aspect of such scenarios.
Or maybe both sides are evil because they ultimately are seeking money, not positive change in the world.
You have a point. A related question is, is being useless at being evil equivalent to being neutral? And is profiting of such useless evil, in turn, also neutral?
That is, if the VCs are intending to do something evil by turning a company into a growth lottery ticket, but they're so useless at picking potential lottery tickets that they might as well be setting their money on fire.
Then what is the moral standing of someone who collects a paycheck from that company, grabs some popcorn, and sits in the sidelines to watch bad decisions unfold?
I mentioned to my dad that my wife and I were boycotting a company due to evil / corruption, and he said, “If you’re going to boycott everything that is evil or corrupt, you’ll be very busy. You’d better start with me.”
There are degrees of evil and lines that shouldn’t be crossed, but for the most part, if you’re doing anything in this world, you’re going to be interacting with evil in some capacity.
I’m writing this on my Foxconn iPhone as I’m making ethically sourced coffee— but is the coffee really ethically sourced? It produced a lot of carbon being shipped to me and being roasted. I’m about to go write some software that I know is being used to teach things that I consider reprehensible and evil.
I’ve personally chosen to focus on one or two changes where I can make a difference, and for the most part, I’m letting the rest go.
That sort of nihilistic attitude is anesthetizing, though. If we shrug and mutter that everything is evil to some degree, we'll stop trying to address large problems on a societal scale.
In the words of John Oliver's character in Community, "the average person has a much harder time saying 'booyah' to moral relativism."
This is very similar to the position I've adopted, and I'd like to add on some of the thinking I've done about what I've come to call "weaponized mindfulness." In the balance of "good" and "evil", a lot of people will loudly proclaim e.g. how they drive a smaller car that isn't as wasteful as big American SUVs as if that's virtuous because less waste = good. In my accounting of the world, I totally agree and try my best to support things that waste less! But, inevitably, there's a thorny question left of why the small car is OK and the big car is Bad -- the line is totally arbitrary, both of them uphold a pretty wasteful driving system, and anybody can move the goalposts pretty much wherever they want. Relative to a private jet, the SUV isn't wasteful at all. Relative to a moped, the small hatchback is incredibly wasteful.
So, assuming that people are well-intentioned and aren't purely virtue signaling for social capital, what's the measure of a "virtue" like this? Most people try to hand wave it as "the smaller car does approximately X less damage to 'the environment'", but that's all but completely unmeasurable. How do you quantify damage to the environment? How do you weight that against needing to get the kids to school? I'm not convinced there's any meaningful way to do it since it's a global measure for a local action. It seems to me that absent any universal morality, then, a better measure of a virtue is against itself: what an individual is willing to give up to uphold their virtue. "I drive the smaller car into the ground over 20 years, forgoing the luxuries of heated seats in newer models" or "I don't shop on Amazon, preferring instead to take extra time to acquire items locally" sort of a thing. It's still far from a reliable, quantifiable measure, and any of these things can be weaponized in any number of directions against unfavorable people or ideas, but I think it at least scopes the idea of "more and less moral" a little better/more locally.
I highly recommend for anyone in tech to read Die Physiker at least once. Not only is it incredibly funny, but also very thoughtful and is timeless (as you point out)
the problem we have is fact almost ludicrus in its simplicity.
organizing social and economic life solely around money (as the only serious means of keeping count) has been extraordinary effective - due to the ease and universality of its application.
its also been a complete disaster because you can't reduce our multi-dimensional moral landscapes into a single scalar.
alas, being the simplest system means it is basically acts like a social virus or a weed: it drowns any competing more complex structure. one "must work for" in order "to pay the bills". you could solve any of humanity's grand challenges and it would still not help you to even feed or warm yourself if not somehow translated into money.
that crushing simplicity and its inadequacy is destroying our souls.
I fear I am indirectly responsible for a substantial body count just by helping to build a company that eventually placed itself solidly on the wrong side of the energy transition, but I do not yet have a meaningful number for the C02e -> human life conversion.
The company I work for is easily 'evil'. It's hard to avoid in the industry they are in. Their products have killed people, caused birth defects, and ruined lives in many countries around the world.
Those fertilizers that hurt more than they helped? Those chemicals spread all over enemy lands during the war? That plant disaster that they tried to cover up?
Everything I do helps the company be more efficient at producing these products. The in-joke is "what kind of poison are we making today?", or "what country are we killing people in with this?"
On the other hand, the other 95% of the products produced here are making people's lives better.
* Can you imagine a better world where the goods and services this company provides aren't needed?
* Does it seem like the company is moving us closer to that world, or does it seem more like they would do everything in their power to prevent that world?
It may be a bit of both. For instance, you could be writing software that the company will desperately try to monopolize, but also in that capacity contribute to open source software that your company uses that others could use to compete with it.
I think it's almost impossible unless you start a business yourself and run it without hierarchies, and with everyone involved being treated as as an end in themselves and not just a means to increase the company value. If I ever make enough money (unlikely), it's a quiet fantasy of mine to start a small company in this model.
Personally I will never work in e.g. finance or "defence", but even where I work now could be seen as encouraging throw-away consumerism. It was a very serious consideration of mine when I was looking for a new job. I ruled myself out of some interviews halfway through because I could tell that their product would have rubbed against my morals eventually.
Sometimes I feel like a mug for following my convictions like this. I will never be a manager, I will never invest in the stock market, and I will never own more property than I can use myself.
That's interesting because one of my projects is a crypto trader, which I plan to one day extend to stocks.
Many people seem to see such a project in a negative light, particularly those who have never been into trading. However my aim is to help prevent people from losing money and thoroughly test strategies before trading any real money.
In such a case it's really about preconceived notions.
I don't know too much about crypto, it doesn't really interest me and I've never bothered to find out more about it. It does seem to be some right-wing libertarian thing so reflexively I'm suspicious, but some of the claimed ideals appeal to me as an anarchist.
I refuse to invest in stocks because that would mean (potentially) profiting from the exploitation of the workers in that company. I suppose if I were awarded stocks in the company I work for that might be different, I'd need to think about it more.
Crypto can also be viewed as assets to buy and sell for a profit, and nothing more. I know it can get more complicated, but it doesn't have to.
Regarding stocks, you can often be assured that public companies are held to a high standard, especially in western countries where the press reports on exploitation.
"viewed as assets to buy and sell for a profit, and nothing more."
I'm not sure this act in itself is morally neutral, imo. There's reasons ethical concerns about objectification (in the older 'treating something/one as an object' formulation of it) pop up not-infrequently through time.
Reducing something to a market view of itself is a choice. Similarly, seeing something as being more complicated but turning away because 'it doesn't have to be'.
Now, I'm not trying to suggest you should take up my concerns here. I'm not saying "you're terrible for this!" in any way. It's just an interesting springboard of a question, what do we see as 'morally neutral' and what has moral salience?
You can do many different things with crypto, it's up to you to decide what to do with it. Trading crypto is immediately useful, but you have to know the risks, which can be difficult.
But that's not my only view. E.g. Ethereum and what it can be used for is still interesting to me, but not immediately of any use to me either.
I have been opposed to working for defence as a general principle but the Pandemic has change my view.
My logic is that humans need to be safe to a certain degree (and I admit that the perception of safety is totally subjective)
I like safety from viral disease therefore I'm a fan of vaccines and masks.
I like personal safety in my day to day environment therefore I'm a fan of a well funded society with mental healthcare and appropriately funded social services and police.
I'm personally invested in the current system of sovereign countries/states and I believe that without controlling borders you can't really have a country. So I now believe that a well funded military is sadly still necessary. Talk about getting less left wing as you get older :-/
But I still 100% agree about not working for certain companies. Short term high interest consumer loans and any type of gambling are on my black list.
Your 'basic' premises are quite loaded, with an emphasis on personal freedom that's not actually inherent to either industry. Here's another (equally biased) framing:
Finance: increase abstract 'value' no matter the practical cost.
Defence: invent more efficient ways to cause harm.
Any industry permits both charitable and uncharitable readings. We shouldn't focus only on the best possible interpretation, nor the worst, but the most accurate one.
I'm an anarchist (think left-wing libertarian) so I see those two industries as particular offenders in furthering the aims of capital. It's a pretty easy decision to exclude those industries with that perspective, which I'm aware not everyone shares. I just couldn't justify working in those areas myself.
The initial problem is to define, quantify, and guard against evil. Imo this problem is basically ignored.
I have a simple definition I call the Grand Unified Theory of Evil:
Evil = delusion * conviction * power
Delusion = how factually incorrect your idea is compared with base reality
Conviction = how little you will try to find flaws with the idea, how little you will test it, how likely you are to implement the idea at 100% of the universe if you had total power
Power = Your ability to push your idea into the world
This model isn't a tool to calculate evil. It's a tool to reason about how to avoid evil. First you need to be not wrong. Secondly you need to be damn UNSURE about what you know and try it at small scale. And lastly you need to have just enough power to test the idea, and show that it works to others if it does, but not any more.
The delusion is that this is good for your country. That you missed this delusion and then were totally convinced of your own cleverness even though you missed such an enormous flaw.. well that's kindof the point.
> The initial problem is to define, quantify, and guard against evil.
Not really. I mean "guard against evil" loosely interpreted includes all of life so it's hard to say.
But spending a bunch of time defining, quantifying what is evil, arguing about the specifics on the internet, that is deep in the weeds exactly where they want you.
Most people have a good enough intuition for it when they see it up close. The menace is in how well we've obscured a lot of the true evil behind layers of misdirection and diffusion. Focus more on developing your innate sense of wrong so you can ably intuit what is actually happening. That is much more practically valuable than getting bogged down in constructing theories of what evil is and what is evil and how much.
> That is much more practically valuable than getting bogged down in constructing theories of what evil is and what is evil and how much.
I wrote "This model isn't a tool to calculate evil."
Spotting evil is all well and good, but what about when you CAN'T spot it? What then? You STILL need to guard against it. Say you're Mao, now you believe in your ideas. But you should not be convinced, because being doubtful is a guard against evil. You should not use your full power, because this is again a guard against evil.
If Mao had followed this, he would not have killed tens of millions of his own people.
I think you're missing good old corruption from your model but otherwise ya.
I worked for a company in their project management area and it was straightforward and not fraught with moral judgement.
Later I got promoted (Crying emoji) to a new role and suddenly everything I dealt with seemed filled with interests and corruption. This jump corresponded with the budgets of the projects and programs I dealt with.
Same org, different parts of the org. Bad promotion :(
Corruption is captured fairly well by this. It's a delusion in itself: by doing something for yourself short term you will in fact hurt yourself, your children and everyone you love in the long run.
I view profit after paying for externalities as the best indicator of good done by a company.
That is because for each voluntary trade, both the buyer and the seller at least SEE themselves as better off.
If you account for damage done to the commons (i.e. pollution
of the environment or involuntary pay (through artificial monopolization, misleading advertising, or corrupt government against people's wishes)), the profit margin is an indicator that what you are doing is needed, and that not enough suppliers compete in that area.
I like that. Elegant and obvious. Profitable companies have lots of people giving them money. Why do they do that? Because they need, want, or will benefit from what the company is selling.
The problem with "not working for evil" is that everyone is evil.
If you chose to apply the same standard to the people around you, you'd have no friends or family. Because you have friends who work for minimum wage (enabling evil), you have family members who use all of the worst social networks and have all of the voice assistants on, you have a racist uncle, you have whatever. The specific examples aren't relevant, literally everyone else does _something_ you don't like.
I think it's better to try to control what precisely _you_ are doing because otherwise you'll just silo yourself into a corner until you can't do anything.
It's fine to avoid working for a company whose explicit purpose is to do something you don't believe in, it's another thing to exclude basically everything because some nonzero component of what is happening isn't to your liking.
Not that I practice what I preach, I'm out of work because I think video calls are evil. Bugger.
Unfortunately our economic system ends up producing companies that do evil, and promoting people who are evil, just because of its own internal feedbacks.
Consider: if you start with 10 companies in a given field, 9 of which are run by decent people with strong ethics, and one which is run by an evil bastard with no scruples whatsoever, which one will have the highest profit margins? The evil one. And so the evil one will eat the other 9, and the employees of the other 9 will be put to work doing evil things, and if the company gets large enough, the political system of the country the evil company is in will be bribed to do evil things.
The counteracting force to that is organized popular movements, but those are on the defensive lately- witness congress intervening to undermine a strike when all the workers wanted was to be able to stay home when they were sick.
Last night I re-watched the "The Good Shepherd" (great cast; Damon, De
Niro, Jolie). It reminded me of the price we pay for trying to do the
right thing in a world of shit. The quest to "avoid evil" can often
drive us into its hands, and we're left only to choose the lesser. To
"do good" is not the same. It almost always requires
sacrifice. Everyone has capacity for how poor, alone, and frightened
they're prepared to be in pursuit of "the good". Duty and unwavering
firmness of purpose remain unpopular, and something few people have
the stomach for today. But there can also be comradeship and a sense
of being part of something historical if you choose the harder path.
>But there can also be comradeship and a sense of being part of something historical if you choose the harder path.
Meh, I've tried and all I got was hate for many years and very few staunch friends. Sheeple don't want truth, justice and the Amerikan way. After seeing 2020-2022 in action (the lies, the gaslighting, waving evidence in peoples faces until I'm hoarse), I've decided to join The Empire. Evil all the way. Abstergo, here I come.
I think there's two lessons I'd take from Rachel's history as it was given here. The first is that any company that relies on ad revenue is doomed. Selling ads in an ethical way requires you to say no to so many things that advertisers want.
The second is that in the Uber case, from the beginning their disregard for the law was apparent. That should be a good warning sign as well. It's one thing to ignore unjust laws as an individual; we can have moral agency for reasons other than profit. A corporation is solely a prodit seeking machine and if you build disregard for laws it disagrees with into its behavior, you're going to have a bad time.
Work for a privately owned company, any shareholder owned one will by definition kill its own staff and their families to make a profit.
does th company make an active effort lead by the owners or leadership team to cancel out the effects of other companies. (e.g. engange with local community, promote work life balance)?
if its a partnership or employee owned then its also probably good, but some partnerships (where there are 10 to 100s of partners) then it becomes like a publicly owned company again and no individuals feel their personal reputation is at stake.
personal reputation is about the only thing you can rely on when it comes to not being shitty, as it all comes down to trust really.
You might work for one that contributes directly to preventing the downfall of humanity. Sadly, that is non-profits / research mostly - and hilariously they will generally treat you like absolute garbage (which to me feels almost as bad as the knowledge that I'm basically working for Sauron) if you do IT work.
Work for a small company. Even if they're cartoonishly evil, the capability of being so is limited.
And so most aren't.
Also with a small company you'll know just about everything the company is "doing" whereas if you're working for (Rackspace, Google, Meta, etc) you have a very good chance of not knowing what the company is doing somewhere until it becomes a major news headline.
> Of course, while I toiled in the infra mines at this company, all kinds of truly evil shit was going on, including the installation of a fascist regime in my country
I guess "fascist regime" is a reference to Trump here? If so it's hard for me to take the author seriously. My grandparents survived actual fascist regime (Nazi Germany occupation during WW2), and my parents grew up in authoritarian puppet states of USSR. Trump doesn't get anywhere close to what my people went through in 20th century, and it's pretty insulting for me when people make this comparisons.
Get out of here. Are you seriously going to gate keep authoritarianism? So you are not allowed to complain before millions of people are dead? And the 'my people went through in 20th century', because only a few select people can claim to have been effected by a literal world war right? What you're gps went through doesn't automatically give you any special insight. Are you sure that rachelbythebay also doesn't have some gps whos suffering she can virtue signal with? Maybe they suffered even more than yours.
That caught my eye too, I guess she's an inmigrant from some country in Europe or whatever? But there aren't any European countries with fascist regimes currently. It makes no sense whatsoever. Probably hyperbole of the bad kind. Americans have the luxury of not having had to live under a fascist regime and it shows.
I think about this a lot and many times I feel it is impractical to expect your company to visibly demonstrate moral ground that you can be proud of as an employee.
I work at Netflix and I am happy here. Curious if any of you would consider it to be an evil company in the sense we are discussing in this post.
Netflix seems pretty neutral to me, but it's like an obese person's feeder, it enables self-harm to some extent (it seems all streaming services do). There are things that IMO could make it good, most involve encouraging users to use it less, ... now if Netflix's _goals_ include engaging viewers beyond what is healthy (rather than viewers using neutral features in that way), then that is evil.
Two quick things, as a user, I would change about Netflix:
1) More childrens' content with actual people in. It's all cartoons (cheaper) whilst I hypothesise children develop better viewing real human interactions.
2) At account level build in breaks. It used to be adverts would provide a break that would encourage at least some movement and offer a chance to go off and be distracted (for adults and children alike). I'd love to say "minimum 10 minute break between episodes"; the screen would go off and only restart if interacted with after 10 minutes ... some will say "just have some will power", but IMO tech should help us with such things.
Mind you, I'd also change copyright law to allow any service to stream content of one service does (no exclusives except for a limited time; forced syndication, effectively) in order to create competition and choice at the service level rather than the content level.
This reminded me of an epigram from Philip K. Dick:
> Another frame of reference which might help him would be the Doctrine of Original Sin. I wonder if he has ever heard of it. We are all doomed to commit acts of cruelty or violence or evil; that is our destiny, due to ancient factors. Our karma.
If you live in a democracy I can ask you the same question. Your government that derives its power and authority from you tolerates and collects tax from "evil" so how can you ask that question?
You can work handing out food to hungry people. If you're making money though, you'll owe taxes, and those taxes will go to wherever the corrupt politicians decide -- often, right into the coffers of weapons manufacturers.
Humanity is a brutish, barbaric species. Get used to it.
What happens when you feed someone who grows up to be "evil" and creates a corporation like Facebook?
It's anecdotal, I'm agreeing with your last point - humanity is brutish, it's easier to exit the Matrix and to see what humanity really is rather than to keep believing in the romantic image of it.
The jobs I've had which I've felt were net positive for the world were a few in educational technology and one writing crime scene analysis software.
Those are hard to find, though - so I've mostly worked for companies I think have a net neutral effect, news (though not right wing hatemongers) & entertainment.
I don't think you can make a lot of money without enabling evil at least a little bit. I suppose that's where "effective altruism" comes in; do evil but do more good later. Eventually. Maybe. I'm not totally convinced.
While fraud and deception is probably on the rise, it's very important to recognize that the "evil" they are referring to comes from people (not companies) and that it's always been this way. We all have the potential to violate our own ethical standards and the temptation rise and fall with circumstances beyond our control. Keep a cool head, expand your understanding of the relationship between your job and the supposed evil, and do your best to expose it without hurting your reputation. The idea that one can job hop their way to promised land is not helping the situation.
> This one came in a request from a reader. They want to know my feelings about trying to "... avoid a company contributing to the downfall of humanity". This one's tough, particularly given my own history.
> I worked for a web hosting company that had a dubious history of keeping spammers around far too long.
How quaint.
Which companies or industries are contributing to the downfall of humanity? This answer is hard to answer but I don't think it's ads, spam, or user tracking despite being vehemently against these things. Perspective is needed.
Raytheon or Lockheed Martin? They're certainly milking the taxpayer but they also fulfill an extremely important need. Fossil fuel industry? They are polluters but low energy costs contribute immensely to standards of living.
I can't think of any companies or industries that are legit evil, if there even are any. Tobacco industry? Building nukes for North Korea or Iran?
But then I realized looking back at my career, I have not worked for any evil companies to my knowledge, at least not cartoonishly evil. It seems most of the companies she mentions have one thing in common, they are by the bay, part of a local system that's one of the economic engines of the U.S and favours growth over any other considerations, including ethics.
So my conclusion from this post would be, if it matters to you, don't work in the bay? There are many industries beside software where good software engineers are needed and you can do good, challenging, and very innovative work "to make the world a better place".