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Comment by krageon | Hacker News Reader

Almost every corporation and startup is cartoonishly evil (in that it stupidly and persistently refuses to look at people, except as a vehicle to increase the high score - money). If I may ask, is there some sort of sector you've worked in that kept the corporations you worked for stricly neutral or better?

I must admit I'm a little skeptical that they were not strictly amoral (which given the right incentives always tends to an almost ridiculous amount of evil), but I would really like to believe it.

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At the end of the day it all comes down to personal politics and ethics. If you believe that providing grandma with some communication and networking tools while giving spooks access to her messages and letting marketers spew their stuff at her eyeballs is A-ok then facebook isn't evil.

I’ve worked for various network/telco equipment providers over the course of 20+ years, and there have only been a couple of cartoonishly evil moments that I can recall. Certainly not to the level of thinking that I needed to quit to save my soul. There were some soulless executives, but the business models weren’t morally bankrupt. I have been paid reasonably well (not Bay Area / FAANG well). Most of the companies don’t exist anymore, and I have been through my fair share of layoff cycles.

> Most of the companies don’t exist anymore

Do you think there could be a causal link between their lack of evil and the fact that they don’t exist anymore?

Mostly I think it was that the market moved and they didn't have the capital to make the leap. Combined with a not-so-great product/market fit to begin with, this is fatal for a capital-intensive startup.

> If I may ask, is there some sort of sector you've worked in that kept the corporations you worked for stricly neutral or better?

Education. Non-profits. Hospitals.

Not that the software vendors I worked for in those industries were perfect. Nor were the customers. Evil, greed, ambition, and power came into play and brought negativity to them all. But it tended to center around a handful of poor leaders, and did not prevent the overall impact of the work being "neutral or better".

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