In short, yes, I’d work for Facebook, with one precondition — that I keep my moral compass and do my best within the boundaries of my job to prioritize a moral decision over the profit-seeking one.
I’m not a stranger to working for morally dubious organizations. When I first started military officer training, I had come in with a largely skeptical view of the military and its role in society, and left with similar skepticisms, but better informed ones.
Initially, I didn’t even like the military, as I thought it was the root of many of the evils in America. I wanted to be a diplomat — a Foreign Service Officer (FSO), to be exact. But I thought that the same attitude that I had towards the military was the exact same reason it was populated by people who felt the direct inverse, and that was why the military had such a dismal image.
So I joined to try and change things. I thought, naively perhaps, that the best way to change an organization I viewed as morally dubious was to change it from the inside. I wasn’t totally wrong, but the scope of my influence with regards to reform would have been very, very limited. Not so in tech.
Perhaps the military wasn’t the greatest organization to enact such reforms at the level I would be entering as — a newly minted Second Lieutenant (2LT) has little strategic latitude and mostly operates at the tactical (lowest) echelon. That’s not the case in tech, least of all in product management. While the 2LT nominally derives their authority from a commission and the military chain of command, the PM derives their authority from their ability to negotiate and weave together people, and is ultimately a respect-based position.
I won’t self-justify by saying that everything is imperfect under capitalism, and thus I should wash my hands of any responsibility to be an ethical PM, employee, or citizen. I would say I’d be willing to work for Facebook in a capacity where I would have a fair enough amount of autonomy to exercise a priority for ethical product design and execution.
Reading 5.2 states that there are two ways to accept a job at an ethically dubious org:
- The post allows me to maximize the use of my personal strengths.
- The post allows me to better equip myself to get an improved job further down the line.
I almost totally disagree with this binary, and would volunteer to add a third: accepting the job while trying your best to minimize the harms, the externalities.
Tech has an incredible outsize influence on society, on politics, on the world. I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least try to help shape a part of that in a way that tries to benefit society.
I always keep Kranzberg’s First Law in mind: Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. We shape tech as much as it shapes us, and a PM at Facebook is possibly one of the best positioned people to shape that tech.
