Ask Lemmy

I like having a roof over my head and not starving to death. It really is that simple a transaction.

Alt text: A screen grab of an early Simpsons episode where a sign which is understood to have read "don't forget: you're here forever" has selected letters and partial letters covered with photos of Maggie so that it now reads "Do it for her"

By doing the minimum required to not get fired.

Ability to afford food and rent is a pretty big incentive.

I have nothing. I need a paycheck. Finding a job in America is Hell.

Found a new job and took a 16% pay cut to escape an unethical situation. Last day in old job was today.

After college I worked a project management job for a while before going to grad school. I didn't find it morally questionable, but I definitely found myself feeling like I was just working to make some rich guy richer. It didn't help that the rich guy(s) (the owner and his son in law who was out CEO) worked in the same building. So I went back to school. Got my master's. Ended up doing some contract work for the same company afterwards. Never felt more stuck in my life. Hated it. Did more grad school and when the contract work dried up I got asked to come work for another company but I still hated the bs corporate vibe, so instead I went from billing $80/hr to making $15/hr as a 911 dispatcher. Graduated and stayed in that field. I'm an emergency management professional now and while it's not a lucrative field (thankfully I don't want kids) I get a lot of satisfaction out of the work and I feel like my job matters.

Long story short, you choose what to prioritize in life. For some people making sure you/your family is well cared for will matter more than what you're doing or who you're doing it for. For others, you'll take a pay cut to feel like the work itself matters or that you're making a positive impact. Everyone has to balance what's important to them.

OP, If morally aligning with your job matters to you, you'll ultimately land somewhere you can stomach at least, because you won't stop trying until you get there. Don't blame yourself for having to do other work along the way to keep yourself fed and able to enjoy the ride there.

because morals are nice.

but being able to eat, and not be rained on and assaulted in your sleep is nicerer.

I envy the folks here who can lay their morals out on the table without having to sacrifice a roof or food on the table. Must be nice.

As an adult the very first thing we try to feed ourselves are our morals and principles. And once we find out that they don't fill your stomach? Well. You'd be surprised what you'll do to not starve.

I like food and my basic needs covered.

But generally speaking, let's see what we've got: Military is obviously out. Working for governments? Mostly out except for education related posts and some other niche stuff here and there. Banking out. Energy companies: mostly out except niche ones into renewables. Big tech like Amazon Microsoft Apple Google etc is out of the question. Car companies out. Anything owned by billionaires, out. Any sector that contributes to global pollution like meat industry, fishing industry, logging, Monsanto, 3M, DuPont etc etc out! Any company that employs people under minimum wage, out. Surely I'm forgetting a lot of stuff, but even with this small list, what the fuck is left?

You don't. Stand up for your ethics and morals and leave.

One of the best paying jobs I ever had, directly asked me to perform work that would have have damaged a customers home. When I layed out exactly how and why this was wrong and why I wouldn't do it, they insisted I do as I was told or be fired.

I walked off the site and never looked back.

I ran into that old boss a while later and he told me he later realized I was right, but insisted I still should have done as I was told because he was above me and had given me direct instructions...

Sometimes you just can't work with people and have to move on.

You don't

Not at all. You run burnout territory. Get out quick.

My day job is purely transactional. I used to enjoy working for this company but they've changed. Unfortunately my work permit is tied to them.

The job allows me to spend a lot of time volunteering and doing good deeds on the side. I don’t think I could use the cheat code for just any company. My main problem is that I’m very anti-capitalist (don’t have a solution, just think we have proven thoroughly that this isn’t it). Getting a different job won’t fix my problem.

Either you unionize, you leave, or your ethics aren't worth shit.

By doing the absolute minimum or worse without getting fired. If you can get by as a -10x dev for Microsoft you're doing absolutely fantastic. I.e. sabotage.

You can also try to push for change, apply for other jobs.

The other alternative is to disassociate and sacrifice your morals or somehow justify to yourself.

Not going to tell you what to do, keeping a well paying job when your family depends on you is totally understandable.

I've never known any other way. Companies by definition exist to make profits, not to improve the lives of thier customers. Any business that truely has the interest of thier customers first doesn't last long.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism type shit.
There are no companies where I agree with their ethics, but I gotta work. From there it's just a matter of shades of gray, rather than a dichotomy; there is no clear line. You just gotta do the best you can. Make the best choices available to you.

Just a guess but I think it has something to do with people not wanting to be homeless

I worked with someone that switched careers because his work did not align with his ethics.

He was an electrical engineer that worked with high-frequency circuits. Niche field back around 2000. He worked for a "defense" company working on missile systems.

He could not accept it morally and changed professions. I met him doing IT desk-side support at a large company.

I know he took a pay cut.

I worked at a company that made software for multi-level marketing companies (legalized pyramid schemes). Some of our clients sold snake oil remedies and were always getting in trouble for claiming they could cure cancer. I liked my coworkers and the job itself, but I hated the nature of what we were supporting.

I don’t think you can separate one from the other.

The company was always getting screwed over by dishonest clients, but we never sued because it would be bad for our reputation. The financial pressure grew until we started acting like a much dumber business: taking bad deals, outsourcing to cheap overseas teams, forcing everyone to work crazy hours, doubling up on the “we all have to make sacrifices” kool-aid, the list goes on. I didn’t stick around for long.

I’d do it again if I had to, to keep food on the table, but that experience taught me there’s no “right way” to operate in a bad industry. Eventually you either assimilate or go out of business.

It's actually pretty easy to compartmentalize your job if you're not directly confronted with what the company actually does.

If you're an elevator maintenance technician working for a defense contractor, your job is the elevators, and you and your peers probably only deal with elevators, and the job probably pays pretty well. There's a layer of abstraction between you and the "bad" things that your company may do.

Also, getting to make an employment decision based on "is this company evil" isn't a luxury most people have until they've built some experience. Most entry level professionals are just happy to get a job.

Most people actually do it according to this procedure:

Be young

Start to think only at a later age.

I studied physics in university. I didn't put any real thought into what I was going to do with it afterwards, I was just choosing something that seemed interesting and helped me make sense of the world. What I discovered afterwards is that the main use of physics in the economy is to find new and exciting ways of blowing people up. I had been drawn to science by the idea that I was going to work towards the benefit of all humanity. I'm ashamed to admit it, but there was a moment around when I graduated when a friend of mine joined the Navy, and I really considered it. Fortunately, I came to my senses and said no.

Instead, I wound up working the meat counter at a grocery store. This was before I went vegan but I still had negative feelings about it. From there, I wound up picking in an Amazon warehouse for a couple years, and I've kinda bounced around other warehouses, occasionally getting involved in some technical roles in them.

Amazon's a big evil corporation, but at least it's honest work and a peaceful life. I could never live with myself if I did something in service of the war machine. To me, stopping what you're doing to go move boxes at Amazon is kinda the baseline to me, like it's not perfectly ethical but if doing that is significantly better for the world than what you're doing, then like... the option exists for you. If you're doing something evil like working for the military industrial complex, then that's on you, sure it might be much less pleasant and less lucrative but burglary is lucrative too and that doesn't make it justified. It's far better to live a small, humble life making sure that you leave the world better than you found it than to have a big impact but it's negative.

I guess some people might be able to tune out the screams or twist their brain into knots justifying it, but idk. If you're walking down the street and you see someone screaming in pain, your instinct is to help them. You want to help them. You want to help them. That urge to help them is your own will. If you take that suffering and hide it away where you won't see it, all you're doing is decieving yourself into subverting your own, natural inclination towards empathy and compassion. That's not really the sort of thing healthy people do, is it? My dabbling in Buddhism is showing here, but that's what I'd call, "taking refuge in ignorance." That's no way to live your life, hiding from the ghosts of your victims.

My time working at a meat counter called my attention to my feelings about meat, and I didn't act on them until much later but it planted a seed in my mind that might not have been there otherwise, it brought my conflicted feelings to the forefront. Every time I ate meat, I had a little feeling of guilt in my heart that I pushed aside, but once I finally listened to it, a weight was lifted and I'm much happier for it. I might not have ever really noticed and examined that if I hadn't had that job.

There's a lot of edge cases no matter where you draw the line, and I say, do what you will, but never turn away from the truth. If you feel conflicted, face that conflict, if you feel uneasy, interrogate that feeling, figure out what your mind is telling you and how best to follow your feelings, judgement, and conscience. And if you wanna stomach something you feel is wrong so you can get that bag, you know, that's your decision, just know that you'll have to live with it the rest of your life.

I don't.

Money can't buy morals or ethics. If I hate the company, guarantee you I won't be there in six months, let alone five years.

Maybe other people can. I can't. Inevitably, I get into some kind of spat with a boss or a manager over morals, ethics, or how we're being treated. Or how I'm being treated. And they make up a reason to fire me, or I get so mad that I quit.

I did it for almost 10 years. Most of the work we did was fine, but some was utterly opposed to my personal values. I started making donations to my favorite charities (mostly Planned Parenthood and ACLU) every time I had a new work project that I felt was working against their goals.

When my husband and I were financially stable enough, I noped out of that job and found something that paid less but was affirming instead of soul-crushing.

Burnout my friend.

I hated a lot of Verizon's policies, but I wasn't about to leave a job without another one (that paid as good) lined up.

I had mouths to feed, but I tried to do good by my customers.

I work in gambling and have done for over 3 years. I do it for the paycheck.

Edit: My last job was in adtech doing web attribution online and I initially thought at least the gambling customers are willingly signing up instead of just being spied on without their consent in many cases... Then I read some of the comments on my company's subreddit and it made me wonder if certan customers were able to consent in a meaningful sense.

A friend of a friend worked at a petrochemical plant of some sort. They took the job reluctantly, because they had been struggling to find work for the kind of engineer that they were without it being somewhere deeply unethical. They reportedly ended up covertly feeding intel to climate action protesters and direct action groups.

Apparently it helped somewhat, but it was still pretty stressful

Having a bash prompt with the $ replaced with a hammer and sickle sure feels weird in a Bank, but... I'm pretty much trapped. Either I somehow find anything else to survive, with an employer that's as understanding for my problems as my current one is, and then pay back study fees, or I have to keep up with it. At least it's only a few months of being there. And avoiding the usual suspects (bankers) helps with not getting triggered in the office. Or just doing homeoffice.

The larger plan: Somehow be stable with just hosting + maintaining stuff, and get to a medium to good standard with extra freelancing.

Historically...I didn't. But I don't want to downplay the situation some people are in where they have bills to pay and need health insurance and such. I've been lucky to be able to just bail on something I don't like. It is a privilege.

I guess if I had to stay though, I'd do the bare minimum and scrape by. Making a game out of not being fired but producing very little.

I get another job obviously.

Money helps a surprising amount.