> Although I guess if I got paid really well I would end up justifying it to myself somehow.
There is the answer!
I am starting to see this attitude quite a lot lately - it is easy sitting on the sidelines thinking "Why are these people doing this?! Dont they have morals?! They should quit immediately or be ashamed of themselves! If people refused to implement this then we'd not have this problem!" And people comparing people working at these companies to Nazi prison guards is frankly offensive.
Couple of things to consider:
- Your moral values are not necessarily the same as their moral values.
- Even if they are the same values, it is not always so easy to just walk out of a job. If you are young, living in a cheap house-share, single with no real responsibilities, then sure, yeah walk out and feel good about yourself if you want - I am sure you can sell an iPad or two to keep you in noodles and rent until your next gig. But if you have responsibilities outside of work (perhaps family & kids, mortgage etc - and if you are in the US you have crippling/potentially-bankrupting medical insurance/bills to consider too) then quitting on a whim like this will not be so viable. Do not underestimate the physiological value of a well-paid, steady job that you generally find acceptable (e.g. comp, perks, hours, commute, opportunities, prestige etc) - I wager most people would find it difficult to "throw away" an otherwise decent job when it is all said and done.
- If you do quit on moral grounds, where is the line? Is what we're seeing here today with Facebook "the line", or is what we're seeing with Google & the military AI "the line" (both targeting of a different sense...), or what about the next Facebook outrage that is even bigger and even worse than this one? Do you hold your quitting "in-reserve" for the next bigger and more-outragey outrage? Perhaps you've gone too early this time? Or too late?
- If you do quit on moral grounds, will you do it again at your next company? How many times can you burn your bridges before you've run out of employers?
This all assumes that everyone that had a hand in this had perfect knowledge of "the big picture". Not everything is as black-and-white as it seems from the outside. This will have evolved and grown from thousands of individuals' contributions, bit-by-bit over time. Did every single one of those individuals know the "big picture"? I doubt it. Where do you draw the line on who did know and where responsibility lies? The execs giving the orders? The engineer designing the algorithm? The junior engs implementing it? How about the people maintaining the servers, or the person who drew the original "like" button, or the people serving food or cleaning toilets at Facebook HQ - are they complicit too since they are all critical roles to play in making facebook work? Should we be calling for the cooks at Facebook to quit too, since if they didn't agree to serve food at Facebook, they'd not be able to recruit any staff and we'd not have this problem! The cooks should be ashamed! Why dont they just quit! The cooks are as bad as the nazi prison guards, just following orders. Right? Right? Of course not. You cant blame the cooks for doing the job they were employed to do any more than the people employed to write code (and obviously it goes without saying that there is zero comparison to Nazis possible here - this is not genocide).
What you can blame is the advertising industry, the lack of regulation, and people's naivety for signing up to this sort of thing. Perhaps if we all just shopped less we'd not be in this mess.
</rant>