Engineers Say 'No Thanks' to Silicon Valley Recruiters, Citing Ethical Concerns

<Recruiter>: "wanna work for Evil Corp.?"

<Candidate>: (long, multi-paragraph rant; something something ethics.)

<Recruiter>: (reads first sentence) "I'll just put you down as a 'no'. Next..."

Not a quote from an Amazon or Google recruiter saying, "man, numbers are down, hiring has been hard." Nope, not a word. Just anecdata like "I rejected Uber so hard, so many times". Oh, yeah, I'm sure Uber is feeling so burned over there they are having discussions right now about what to do about it. Or maybe it went down like my first paragraph.

Don't get me wrong, I turn down my fair share of companies, too, and sometimes for ethical reasons. But let's not kid ourselves, there's someone right behind you eager to get to work on Evil Corp.'s "interesting problems". Hell, Intellectual Ventures (you know, the big-time patent troll?) here in Bellevue, WA is hiring. You and I might say "hell, no", but they're still in business, so you know someone is hiring on there. Say "no" so that you can sleep at night, not because you think someone gives a shit as to why.

Also, what does this even mean:

>It’s likely no accident that women, underrepresented minorities, LGBTQ people, and other underrepresented groups in the tech industry are among the more prominent voices speaking out through recruitment channels, Luo says.

Why is that no accident? Is there some different moral matrix people who belong to these groups judges the world by? Is there any evidence to support that claim (or whatever claim they're trying to make).

So glad I dropped my IEEE membership (I used to get this trash mailed to me).

And for the record, the claims could very well be true, but the article does nothing to prove it, other than using two people as an example. And I wouldn't be surprised to learn they were invented (or friends of the author).

Then I noticed every single person I met was involved with Advertising and tracking and tracking advertising. It was disgusting. I don't want to work on those kinds of "cool" problems.

In the end, what matters is money. Subordinating money to ethics works well for those who are reasonably well off financially; for others, it is a way to become reasonably well off financially.

Of course, that hasn't stopped me from getting hit up by at least 7 more recruiters from Amazon since, including one lovely person who decided cold calling me was a totally reasonable thing to do.

Google, Facebook and others are SV darlings and large employers and they have no shortage of fawning prospects who barely stop to think about niceties like ethics unless they need to posture, or expect it of others as if we live in a magical world where we can sellout but others have to behave ethically.

Articles like this and endless debate is not going to work. Regulations may - personalized advertising especially social or political is unethical and destructive. But these debates will happen in other places where the focus is more on ethics and society and not startups and making money.