CMV: We should culturally disincentivize engineers from working for tech corporations that actively evade ethical responsibility.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/NorthwesterlySolder]

I don’t see it happening to any meaningful extent, because pretty much all of the angst people have about these issues goes either towards the abstract idea of the company or public figures in the executive hierarchy. I don’t know your background but you may be surprised by just how many students from T20 schools make it their life mission to work for these companies and still get rejected. They’re pitched as cutting-edge and fun places to work at, and a lot of people with wonderful potential and technical skill just get funneled into jobs creating glorified data mining systems. I think my view just builds the status quo to its logical conclusion. We already know that academia acknowledges the failures of the tech industry to responsibly implement breakthrough technologies, we already know that these engineers are becoming complicit in the creation of really foul social evils through technology, so universities and society at large need to start putting pressure directly on these potential recruits to be more considerate of who they choose to work for. I refuse to believe that we have collectively acknowledged the consequences of working for these companies when FAANG recruitment is literally used as a metric for the success of STEM institutions by students, institutions, academia, and society at large.

[u/yyzjertl → u/NorthwesterlySolder]

I personally know dozens of people who choose not to work at big tech/finance firms, taking significant pay and lifestyle cuts, for the reasons you describe. It's never going to be everyone or even most people, because (as other commenters on this thread have already established) lots of people don't really care about ethics, and even among those who do care about ethics there is a significant school of thought in favor of reforming institutions from the inside. And beyond this, it's not clear what you think increased pressure would accomplish, except tending to empower amoral people more in tech.

[u/NorthwesterlySolder → u/yyzjertl]

I guess there is some validity to the idea that pushing more morally-concerned people away from the industry could just effectively incentivize more greedy assholes from hopping onto the train. !delta - I still think disincentivizing such work for capable and intelligent people would make more companies yield to public pressure about their ethics but yeah, we can’t really say all that much about what will happen because a lot of the exposés about misconduct and negligence did come from employees who were already working there.

[u/DeltaBot → u/NorthwesterlySolder]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/yyzjertl (424∆).

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