Like I wouldn't work on this project, but I have US citizenship. In college I slept over at some of my Indian friends' apartments and often they had like 8-12 guys sleeping in one bedroom, it was just a bunch of mattresses all laid together with no specific sleeping arrangement. Generally they made a giant pot of stew/daal/whatever once a week and ate the same thing for every meal all week, some even long after graduating with PhD's and getting low-tier visa-mill jobs. This was not a T10 school, our international students rarely came from wealthy families. One of my Saudi classmates came from a poor family in a remote village near the Iraq border and brushed his teeth with a twig from the Salvadora persica tree.
I couldn't really blame them if they didn't have another good option readily available.
- Fertiliser ban decimates Sri Lankan crops as government popularity ebbs
> https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-d...
>> Maybe you're on H1B and if you get let go you have to go back to Sri Lanka...
I mean that's there too, but in this case, the guy who ran this spyware op was a former IDF turned chief of Facebook in Israel, later promoted to CISO for all of Meta.
Otherwise you'd be essentially saying "Hey look out, the guy who ran this op was an Israeli" (because nearly every male Israeli serves in the IDF).
Facebook hired and retained engineers over its entire company history by offering enormous amounts of stock. They successfully demonstrated there are a lot of engineers willing to build unethical products when offered 2-3x their previous salary.
imagine all of the times in history where this type of enabling of behavior reached an extreme, and now ask yourself where do you draw the line.
are you really asking me to enjoy the growing consequences of corporate overreach in the name of data, and all the sketchy ass, unethical, and invasive work all these foreign engineers are getting paid ridiculous salaries to propogate, and feel good about being held hostage because said engineers.. don't have a home.
so we are supposed to enable them to wreck mine (ours)?
No, we’re supposed to attack it from a different direction. Whether these people are H1B or outsourced overseas, U.S. corporations will always be able to find people in desperate enough situations (civil war-torn country with a literal famine going on). We can absolutely blame and shame the engineers who have other options for sustenance and medicine for their families, but if you want to solve this problem, it can only be solved through the legislative and executive branches.
I know people who have worked for adtech, gambling and HFT industries who now try to convince younger devs to avoid them. I personally worked briefly for a private prison corp, and I feel dirty and remorseful that I had anything to do with that industry.
But one of the worst things about the software was all the bugs. Silent failures so we couldn't tell what was happening, if it was a software problem or if our loved one was being prevented from communicating with us. The messaging and video call system failed us at some crucial moments and created a lot of emotional stress.
In fact I think this is part of the awful business model -- cut costs even if it hurts people.
Bad software can really make the lives of incarcerated people much worse. So if you were able to do a decent job on that software, whether it was prison telecom or internal tools for a prison contractor, you may have still had a more positive impact than you think, despite the broader business model being totally evil.
It's weird that such a data point was the final straw, but eventually these small details build up and the whole edifice comes crashing down.
It's especially tragic as the company seemed to be full of talented, intelligent and nice people. Such seems to be the typical makeup of faceless evil.
Anyone know the best way to pull an image off a locked-down Android tablet? I have a prison tablet here and I want to see what is inside the APKs.
Sounds like getting to feel good after grabbing the bag. Particularly the first three considering how much they pay (even moreso if the gambling was crypto related).
> everyone I personally know has quit and lived with the regret.
Quit for a significantly lower wage job? Or quit in 2021 when they could trivially get another job likely with a raise?
I sound aggressive but these are serious, not rhetorical, questions. I don't know your friends, maybe they're the real deal, in which case massive kudos to them, I'm very happy to see others doing the same and I wish more were like us. But "living with the regret" is empty words if meaningful sacrifices haven't been made to atone for those sins.
FWIF, I left a job that paid more than twice what I'm able to get anywhere else without moving across the globe, for ethics reasons. And the industry wasn't as bad as the ones you've named besides HFT, which is imo pretty average when it comes to societal negative externalities for a tech company.
It's certainly a complicated subject, but I think in general companies are really good, especially big ones, at getting people to work on things they might not be comfortable with otherwise. This thread has been talking the extremes like immigration status, but there are all kinds of subtle pressures as well. Some people might not believe they have the political capital to outright refuse a project (especially a pet project of the CEO) vs choose to accept and try to nudge the project onto more solid footing. And I suspect many engineers are terrified of being labelled as not a team player, which aids in the creation of group think, but makes it very difficult to foster a healthy culture of discussion that would bring forward the serious concerns of this work. And there is almost always some room of uncertainty as the last convincer... is it unethical to work on the project if the consumer is fully informed and offers consent to the invasion of privacy?
If there is an extreme where it's justifiable, for any reasonable engineer to accept the project, then it get's really muddy on where exactly the line is, and when it should be drawn.
I also suspect many of us envision ourselves having much more fortitude than we really do as well, imagining the heroic efforts we'd put in to changing a companies mind from a bad idea... where the more likely outcome for most of us is to fall silently into the background.
I can count on one hand though the number of devs I've worked with that saw coding as anything more than a 9-5 grind and would have spoken up if asked to do something shady.
I've only been in a similar situation once. I could barely sleep at night for a week before I finally told them that I couldn't do it. In my situation I would have taken a financial hit if they decided to let me go, but my wife works and I have savings and there was no immediate threat, and it still was a difficult decision.
The truth is that in the US we do have some very expensive social safety nets, and it always comes back to the morals of the individual. You can rationalize just about anything against all kinds situations, but in the end we are talking about someone morally corrupt, or morally steadfast.
Dont justify the injustifiable.
Instead Judge character in the hard times and use that opportunity elevate the heroes that do the right thing im the face of adversity.
Example: engineers blamed is the title in [1].
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/vw-scandal-top-u-s-ex...
