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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to avoid working for a company that is in some way evil because in general, companies have no morality. They are amoral money-generating machines. Even if individual people inside them have good intentions, the system is set up to incentivise people to do the bad thing anyway, or to abstract over the bad thing so you won't realise what you're doing.

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This isn’t really correct. Companies usually follow some high level morals, but it’s very rare they align with yours. The same is true working for a university as a researcher (what the IRB allows and what research is supported varies by institution) or even just working for a non-profit (think of some pro-lifer’s views on planned parenthood).

I would say that reputable corporations try to have good business ethics, but that's not really the same as being moral.

>They are amoral money-generating machines

And it's a breath of fresh air compared to government or organized religion.

Why is federal law enforcement doing something evil? Why is the church doing something evil? God only knows. They have a dozen subjective competing goals in their mandate. Companies are easy. Follow the money.

Perhaps it's interesting to consider who the bad thing is being done to. Consider, for example, working for outlandishly impractical VC-funded ideas, where the main "evil" that's being done is conning venture capitalists into paying for the expenses of a company that will never produce anything of value.

I had a friend who said he wanted 'He did little harm' on his gravestone. At the time I was irritated by how defeatist that attitude seemed, but these days it seems like a surprisingly high bar.

Defining which companies are evil is difficult because different people have different morals. From your example, I'd see it as the VCs who are conning small companies into taking VC money and driving for growth over sustainability in order to be one of many lottery tickets for that VC as the evil aspect of such scenarios.

Or maybe both sides are evil because they ultimately are seeking money, not positive change in the world.

You have a point. A related question is, is being useless at being evil equivalent to being neutral? And is profiting of such useless evil, in turn, also neutral?

That is, if the VCs are intending to do something evil by turning a company into a growth lottery ticket, but they're so useless at picking potential lottery tickets that they might as well be setting their money on fire.

Then what is the moral standing of someone who collects a paycheck from that company, grabs some popcorn, and sits in the sidelines to watch bad decisions unfold?

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