Is the man getting you down much?
I was asked this a few weeks ago by someone who had just learned that I work for a large, well-known multinational technology corporation. I told him that yes, the man was getting me down a bit. Today, the man is getting me down quite a lot.
I ended up working here because when I was looking for summer internships in my penultimate year of University I set out to avoid defence companies and investment banks. I thought that working in the defence sector would conflict with my morals, and that working in the finance sector would conflict with my beliefs about the fairness of the current free-market capitalist paradigm, and I still do. I hoped that in the technology sector I could find a place where I could do what I am good at and enjoy without contributing to a system I disagree with.
In retrospect I was probably being hopelessly naive. The company that I have ended up working for, whilst not an investment bank or a defence company, does have contracts with armed forces around the world and has an entire department that is effectively a bank that lends only to our customers. I don’t work in that department, and I don’t work on any of the products that we sell to the defence sector, but there is no escaping the fact that I work for a company that makes money from war. Not enough money for it to bother me all the time, but enough for me to feel bad about it whenever I am feeling bad about other things already.
Today the executive who is in charge of my entire office (and a few others besides) had a round-table meeting with myself and all of the other new hires. He’s clearly a smart man, and I have a lot of respect for him. I went in to the meeting hoping to gain some form of reassurance that the company is at least not all evil all the time, and I asked a question, albeit a clumsily phrased one, about whether our review process for accepting new business had any ethical aspect to it. I was only expecting a sound-bite about ethics being very important to the company, and honestly I would have been happy with that. Instead I was told that since we only make general purpose products we don’t think too much about what uses they are being put to, and our green initiatives are chosen based on whether the electricity bill savings will pay for the initial expenditure within five to ten years.
The man is getting me down. Unfortunately for my conscience the man also pays well enough that quitting would be colossally stupid. In essence what I am saying is that I have sold the fuck out, and it stings.
