Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.
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- Am an employee of a large company whose practices would probably also not stand up to public scrutiny
First question is has this been verified beyond "someone said so"? Perhaps it has - but any search I do ultimately leads back to the same comment.
Second, google is hardly the only company to occasionally kowtow the the PRC. I don't think any large company wants to a face-off with them. Are there more ethical employers? Probably, but they're probably small and not everyone wants to work at a small company pace. Also, if the company got larger and push came to shove, I suspect they'd do what they needed to do to stay on China's good side. It's a better option than going under.
Really a lot of employers are ethically shaky.
- Is it better to work for the DoD? Some people say no.
- Is it better to work for a Big Bank? Some people say no.
- Is it better to work for Big Pharm? Some people say no.
- Is it better to work for a place that frankly abuses their warehouse workers? I think we've had that discussion.
I'm not sure where that leaves anyone who likes gainful employment, particularly outside the Silicon Valley startup culture.
That doesn't necessarily translate to 'throw up our hands' but it does meant a more nuanced approach to where we work, how we feel about our employer, and how we measure that against all the other places we do business with that also have their dark sides.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042618
Of the first 12 posts, one is the FBI, one is questionable (using proxies to circumvent rate limits, anti-scraping tech, etc), and the other 10 seem anywhere from boring to laudable.
Most tech jobs do not require you to make broad ethical compromises to work there.