As a Stanford CS student, this is a question I have spent a long time considering. It’s also a question that I have gone back and forth about quite a bit. At this time, I would say it depends (but yes, there are circumstances where I would work for Facebook).
One point that was discussed in “Working for Ethically Complicated Organizations”, is that it would be almost impossible to live a perfectly ethical life. At the end of the day, you are buying groceries, clothes, furniture from organizations that likely exploit certain workers or have been involved in other ethical scandals (Amazon, Nike, Shein, etc). In ethics, there is no objective; it must be up to the individual to make ethical decisions for themselves. Similarly to living a completely ethical life, I think it is nearly impossible to find a perfectly ethical company. I believe that basically any, if not all, large companies have unethical components, missions, values, or people in them. Nowadays, it is very hard to find companies that are totally ethically pure from all angles. Therefore, it must be up to each individual to distinguish where they will draw the line and what types of ethically ambiguity they are willing to work for.
So why is my answer, “it depends”? Pulling from the “Finding Jobs to Want” article, I think everyone must lay out their own priorities for a job. While I don’t find it necessary to write out my specific priorities in this blog post, I will say that prestige and extremely high salaries are not very high. Therefore, I would not take a job at Facebook only for the prestige or high salaries, as I feel that these do not outweigh the negative ethical decisions that Facebook has made in the past and continues to make. I would likely take a job at Facebook if it was a job that I felt was challenging, would provide valuable experience, and was not directly having me work on something I deemed unethical. If there was a similar alternative for a more ethical company, I would probably take that.
There is one argument brought up in the “Working for Ethically Complicated Organizations” that I want to discuss and dispute for this specific example of employment at Facebook. One possible justification of working at an unethical company was to make a lot of money and have a strong name on your resume, so that you would then be able to get more ethical jobs in the future. I find it hard to believe that someone who is hired by Facebook would not be able to get another job at a more ethical company, as Facebook is an extremely selective and prestigious company. Therefore, I feel that this argument would rarely apply here.
