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.)
The problem is that "bad company" is such a nebulous concept as to be useless, as the JSON license showed with their "shall not use this software for evil" clause.
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.
I ask myself if my company is bad all the time. They don't get a perfect score, but I feel better about this one than any of the previous ones (that's why I'm here and not there). If the answer is ever a resounding yes, I'll leave this one too.
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.
It's not hard if you remove the self delusion. Removing the self delusion is maybe tricky for the individual, but it's easy for people around the individual to see. Societal tools like shame are generally used to encourage people in the right direction, but we don't do a great job of this in America, because money tends to override everything else and I don't think we have good structures around expressing non-monetary values like honor.
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.
Yup. I was just discussing this in another comment that Facebook's emotional manipulation of users without consent is ethical wrong. Some people are replying with eh, everybody does it and for 20,000 dollars people will jump to Facebook.
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.
Postmodernism has stripped away fulfillment with the promise of higher pay if you just grind harder.
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 won't try to define postmodernism, but I'm pretty sure a significant part of it has to do with abandoning traditional modes of operation and freestyling a bit with your worldview.
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.
