Personally, I've never had a job where I didn't feel ethnically compromised in one way or another. If I'd quit all of my jobs to date, I wouldn't be a model of self-actualization. I'd just be unemployed and broke. I wouldn't even be ethically pure, as I'd be failing in my responsibility to people who depend on me financially.
I feel that your point of view makes more sense for someone who finds consumer capitalism and the tech industry ethical on a fundamental level, bar occasional aberrations. Not everyone sees it that way.
I really wanted to make a point only about the ethical issue. I think it's fair to say that most of your comment is fairly generic "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" advice. The efficacy of such advice has already been debated a thousand times over. In the midst of the present economic crisis it strikes me as less helpful and relevant than ever.
Thank you for this clarification, I appreciate understanding where you are coming from.
I'm wondering if the ethical compromises you feel/felt ever inspired you to try something to avoid them.
For example, one of the people I knew at Sun was pretty depressed about the sort of crap that went on in tech companies. Her response was to create a company that she felt aligned with her views of ethics. Took her a long time to get to "Raman profitability" but that work was offset by the benefit of knowing that the place where she worked didn't subscribe to the kinds of ethical compromises that make people uncomfortable.
I agree that this sort of advice is less actionable during a crisis, whether it is a pandemic or the Great Recession. Just like it is never helpful to tell someone in a car crash that if they had been wearing a seat belt they wouldn't currently be on the way to the emergency room. That said, large unlikely stresses to the system, like the pandemic, tend to "light up" areas of risk[1]. It is why in operations at a tech company you will stage mock outages (with real equipment failures) to be able to "see" whether or not your mitigation processes work and where they can be improved.
I still think it is always good advice to learn from adverse circumstances, regardless or origin, to create additional resiliency in your life. That's how I started figuring out what to put in my "go" back in my car[2]. Looking at disasters that hit the Bay Area and asking myself the question, "Okay, when this hits and I'm in my car somewhere, what will I want to have?"
[1] Using the pandemic as an example, the pathetic capacity for the US to manufacture PPE was not widely understood (visible) until the pandemic.
Your advice is well meaning, but unsolicited and rather obvious as far as it goes. Lots of people consider quitting their jobs and starting their own companies. Not everyone is in a position to do so, or indeed wants to do so. There's a fine line between offering advice and implicitly judging people for not making the choices that you think they ought to make.
I understand this point of view. From non-profit leaders who core activity is grooming relationships with rich or powerful people. To startup who's sales strategy is to lure one giant customer at a loss free to reel in other companies who purchase based on what others. To poker based companies who uses bots to fake engagement. To government entities who are funded on data points hiring teams of data specialists to crave up the raw data into misleading stats to be presented as fact. The little self funded startup finding creative ways of not paying staff or for services rendered.
I can't think of one business who has pure ideals and has successfully implement them without inventing something new.
I feel that your point of view makes more sense for someone who finds consumer capitalism and the tech industry ethical on a fundamental level, bar occasional aberrations. Not everyone sees it that way.
I really wanted to make a point only about the ethical issue. I think it's fair to say that most of your comment is fairly generic "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" advice. The efficacy of such advice has already been debated a thousand times over. In the midst of the present economic crisis it strikes me as less helpful and relevant than ever.