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Comment by cbanek | Hacker News Reader

Is it money? I can't tell since I'm paywalled. But I feel like it's got to be money.

You have to pay people MORE to work in bad industries, since there are a lot of people who won't want to work there.

You can pay people less in fun industries, even if there is a lot of profit. Like video games. Look at Blizzard.

"The most basic reason for that is a classic free-market narrative. If you believe in freedom of choice, and companies having the licence of society to operate, that is justification enough to work there. This may not seem especially purposeful: many employees would regard operating legally and serving customer needs as a requirement rather than a source of pride. But it is a perfectly coherent position"

It's less about bad/good and more about whether the work is fulfilling I think. Gaming is a lootbox gambling hellhole now, yet people love working on games, so they keep flocking to it, despite the objectively negative impact of microtransactions, systems designed to maximize addictiveness [1], etc.

[1] https://www.destructoid.com/ea-filed-a-patent-in-2016-to-tin...

I've been approached a couple of times about working in the tobacco industry and money is definitely part of it, but there's also a feeling that there's less competition so the role will be more stable, and a lot of self justification from hiring managers to make you feel less guilty.

I mean, yeah sure there might be less competition but that's not the whole game. I think it's much more the moral question to be honest. The real way to figure it out is to look at the number of people applying to good and "bad" jobs, and the amount of money they make. So compare tobacco to say FANG, or whatever. Then compare Blizzard to FANG. Let me just say now, Blizzard will be the least, even though they have the most applicants. I know this because I worked there.

Let's look at another "bad" job I've been approached about and gave it a thought about the money but then didn't bother because of the moral question: hedge fund trader. This is something that you don't want to give any random person, a bad programmer could easily sublimate millions of dollars before you know what happened. On the other hand, there's probably a lot of people who would kill for a job that would pay that much. I didn't even call them back, and their emails got so desperate that they said they'd pay me out of the rest of my SpaceX stock vesting. Maybe should have taken that one. I'd be at least 4x richer. And they were offering $500k/year in cash salary, and I assume there was probably some kind of perk for performance, as is typical in hedge funds. But yikes. I hate that shit.

> I didn't even call them back, and their emails got so desperate that they said they'd pay me out of the rest of my SpaceX stock vesting.

FYI there are automated systems that do this drip campaign. You just click a button while browsing LinkedIn.

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