Last summer, I visited my friend who worked in the Palantir office. Palantir is known for its controversial security technology as well as its previous affiliation with ICE. He offered to refer me to the company, and my immediate thought was to reject the referral, having known Palantir’s past affiliations. However, after discussing it with my friend a bit, we came to an interesting discussion. One point was about effective altruism, and how we both had a genuine passion to direct our wealth towards bettering our community and the people close to us. Another thing we realized was that both of us come from diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and while our ability to create change within the company wouldn’t be easy, we would still have a lot of different and valuable output to contribute
As someone whose intention in pursuing a well-paid professional career is to make enough money to support my parents’ retirement and use wealth to make sure they stay healthy, I think I’d have a difficult time rejecting any difficult job if I was desperate. I do think that working somewhere like Palantir, for example, would be an absolute last resort and not a sustainable job for me. However, I think somewhere like Facebook crosses fewer tangible ethical lines (given only my current knowledge).
One idea that stuck with me from the article “Working for Ethically Complicated Organizations” is that ethically conscientious individuals tend to not have a difficult time finding a job that conflicts with their morals in some way. For me, something like an affiliation with ICE draws the line given that I’m not in an extremely desperate situation. However, I think that unless I was aware of a company having a similar incident, I think I’d have a difficult time rejecting a big tech job like Facebook given my goals to help my family and friends.
