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We-are-complicit-in-our-employers-deeds.md (4079B)

    

  1. ---
  2. date: 2020-05-05
  3. title: We are complicit in our employer's deeds
  4. layout: post
  5. tags: [culture]
  6. ---
  8. Tim Bray's excellent "[Bye Amazon][bye amazon]" post inspired me to take this
  9. article off of my backlog, where it has been sitting for a few weeks. I applaud
  10. Tim for stepping down from a company that has demonstrated itself incompatible
  11. with his sense of right and wrong, and I want to take a moment to remind you
  12. that the rest of us in the tech industry have the same opportunity — no,
  13. the same *obligation* as Tim did.
  15. [bye amazon]: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon
  17. As software engineers, we enjoy high salaries and extremely good job security. A
  18. good software engineer with only a couple of years of experience under their
  19. belt can expect to have an offer within 1 or 2 months of starting their search.
  20. It can seem a little scary and stressful, but if you're a programmer already
  21. working at $company and you're looking for a change, you're better off than 99%
  22. of your non-technical friends. In tech, hardly anyone is "trapped" at a bad job;
  23. or at least we don't have a good excuse for not trying for something better.
  25. Tim calls out Amazon's terrible, unhealthy working conditions and retaliation
  26. against staff who speak up or try to organize.[^1] Google conducts mass
  27. surveillance, kowtows to oppressive regimes, and punishes workers who stand up
  28. to them. Less obvious stuff, too — Apple builds walled gardens and makes
  29. targeted attacks on open standards, Facebook is a giant surveillance tool which
  30. routinely disregards the law, the same behavior which made Uber and Airbnb into
  31. the giants they are today, all while fostering a "gig" culture in which the poor
  32. have no stability or security. Mass surveillance, contempt of the law, tax
  33. evasion, oppression of the poor, of minorities... this is what our industry is
  34. known for, and it's *our* fault.
  36. [^1]: [Here's a link](https://www.amazon.com/mc/pipelines/cancellation) to cancel Amazon Prime, by the way.
  38. This is why I hold my peers accountable for working at companies which are
  39. making a negative impact on the world around them. As a general rule, it costs a
  40. business your salary × 1.5 to employ you, given the overhead of benefits,
  41. HR, training, and so on. When you're making a cool half-million annual salary
  42. from $bigcorp, it's because they expect to make at least ¾ of a million that
  43. they wouldn't be making without you. It does not make economic sense for them to
  44. hire you if this weren't the case. Your contribution makes a big difference.
  46. If the best defense we have for working at these companies is the [Nuremberg
  47. defense][nuremberg], that doesn't reflect well on us. But, maybe you would
  48. object, maybe you would have the courage to say "no" when asked to do these
  49. things. Maybe you would, but someday, a cool project will come across your
  50. inbox - machine learning!  Big data! Cloud scale! It's everything you were
  51. promised when you took the job, and have more fun with it for a few months than
  52. you have had in a long time. Your superiors are thrilled - "it's perfect!", they
  53. say, and it's not until they take it and start feeding it real-world data that
  54. [you realize exactly what you have built][machine-learning]. Doublethink quickly
  55. steps in to protect your ego from the cognitive dissonance, and you take another
  56. little step towards becoming the person you once swore never to be.
  58. [nuremberg]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
  59. [machine-learning]: https://observer.com/2020/04/amazon-whole-foods-anti-union-technology-heat-map/
  61. The rapid computerization of society has decreased the time necessary to build
  62. novel machines one thousand-fold. This endows us with a great responsibility,
  63. because whatever we build with them, the changes they bring to society will be
  64. upon us much, much faster than any changes to come before. Every software
  65. developer possesses alone the potential of 50 engineers living just 100 years
  66. ago. We can apply this power for good or for ill, but it's up to each of us to
  67. make a deliberate choice on the matter.