If you think about it enough, most industries are doing terrible things. Work for an auto company? Thanks for the CO2 emissions accelerating climate change. Work for a consumer manufacturer? Thanks for the plastic waste choking oceans and landfills. Defense contractors? Thanks for enabling wars and killing innocents. Banks? Thanks for enslaving folks to debt and perpetuating economic inequality. Tech giants? Thanks for surveilling billions and eroding privacy on a massive scale. Social media platforms? Thanks for amplifying misinformation and fueling mental health crises. Fast fashion? Thanks for exploiting sweatshop labor and polluting waterways with toxic dyes. Pharma companies? Thanks for price-gouging drugs and prioritizing profits over access. Oil and gas? Thanks for fracking communities into environmental ruin and lobbying against renewables.
Almost everyone is contributing to terrible activities. Just different degrees of bad.
What is your point, besides potentially making yourself feel better about your industry? Those "different degrees" are what it's all about. They're the whole point.
Yes, voluntarily working in an industry where that "degree" is undeniably magnitudes higher than average just for personal gain, does make you quite the awful human. And "helping maximize the number of pills pushed to confirmed opioid addicts" is indeed a large number of standard deviations of "terrible" removed from the work the average person does.
Yup, working on recommender sysrems at places like Meta is
also quite high up there. Luckily the number of people who do this kind of work is minuscule when taken as part of the global population. Even more luckily, thousands of people on HN alone will forego such jobs even if it means earning less. I've done so myself.
The question was how GP felt about their particular unethical act, and it's consequences which likely includes multiple deaths. Since you are not GP, it seems unlikely that you can answer this question.
I fail to see the relevance of bringing up a different, and also unethical example, but I'll answer anyway. If GP said that they used to spend their time optimising software to be as addictive as possible in order to drive people into gambling addiction, destroying their lives and taking all their money while doing it, I would ask the same question.
It's a very smooth gradient from optimizing a sales funnel to writing gambling software. I don't know where the line is, but in both cases you're exploiting human psychology to make more money.
And its also why some of the anarchist folks I hang out with say there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. And definitely in areas, they're completely correct.
I tend to agree too. It’s incredibly hard to do much in the US without bumping into some ugly part of capitalism because the ugly parts constitute the majority.
It is not much different. I would not worked for gambling company either. In fact, gambling companies have to pay more (and do, there are open positions) because their pool of potential employees is smaller.
The exact same question can be asked to developers who help target gamblers with attempts to push them deeper into addiction.
It's probably slightly worse because opioids actually kill people whereas gambling just financially ruins them (which can lead to suicide, but still I know which I would pick).
But it's only a slight difference. I don't think people who work at predatory apps/gambling systems should be able to sleep at night either. Not all gambling though; I don't have any objection to occasional sports betting for example.
But if you work for one of those pay-to-win apps and find some customers are spending thousands of dollars on it (whales), you know you're being immoral.
> Not all gambling though; I don't have any objection to occasional sports betting for example.
The “occasional” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I associate sports betting with the much more dangerous side of gambling than any kind of P2W system.
How is it different from smuggling fentanyl or taking hostages for ransom?
There will always be someone willing to do the work if the pay is good enough.
The former almost certainly causes much less societal damage than working for a pharma company that strives to get the whole population addicted to opioids, due to the scale constraints that come with running an underground business vs. an "above board" one.
Why do you think that gambling companies pay above the industry average for the required skillset?
Because luckily there are many other people with me who won't work for them, so they have a smaller pool of candidates and need to pay more.
