There was a recent Ask HN from someone who was concerned that maybe greed was the only reason people would work for places like Facebook or Google any more.
That thread was quickly killed before it could grow any legs, but I did have a knee-jerk response anyway:
I'm sure there are some other reasons for those employees having potential to do more noble work, but aspiring to become an "ad man" on an aggressive media platform has always had an appeal to a certain amount of selfishness at the expense of others.
Now when the entire process is geared to appeal more strongly to even more greedy individuals, that's what you're going to end up with more so than anyone else.
I'm certainly not the innocuous one, with the toxic petrochemicals and all, where the oil business has always appealed more strongly to the greedy get-rich-quick types in its own way.
Rather than add to the size of a growing behemoth, I chose to do my survival activities more as a parasite instead.
There's definitely less money for the taking when you have to earn every dollar by adding value to resources, as opposed to collecting pay from accounts where funds were accumulated wildly before you showed up.
But that's the kind of decision you've got to make.
Organizations that are trying to do something disreputable or shameful (or just something that could be construed that way by a nontrivial portion of the population) often come up with sweet little lies about their motives that help their employees sleep better at night.
It's not about making money by serving ads, it's about "organizing the world's data". It's not about winning defense contracts to put military hardware into space, it's about "colonizing mars to save humanity". It's not about printing money by getting poor people to sign up for 50,000% APR payday loans, it's about "providing liquidity to undeserved communities". Etc.
Hypothetically working on the security aspect doesn't seem so unethical. I mean, it is helping the evil empires in a sort of abstract way, but realistically people are going to use the services because they are ad-funded (and so, appear free). The direct harm to people who have their communications which they believe to be basically private (in the sense that they are only spied on by the service provider) broken into seems to be more significant.
That thread was quickly killed before it could grow any legs, but I did have a knee-jerk response anyway:
I'm sure there are some other reasons for those employees having potential to do more noble work, but aspiring to become an "ad man" on an aggressive media platform has always had an appeal to a certain amount of selfishness at the expense of others.
Now when the entire process is geared to appeal more strongly to even more greedy individuals, that's what you're going to end up with more so than anyone else.
I'm certainly not the innocuous one, with the toxic petrochemicals and all, where the oil business has always appealed more strongly to the greedy get-rich-quick types in its own way.
Rather than add to the size of a growing behemoth, I chose to do my survival activities more as a parasite instead.
There's definitely less money for the taking when you have to earn every dollar by adding value to resources, as opposed to collecting pay from accounts where funds were accumulated wildly before you showed up.
But that's the kind of decision you've got to make.