No. I would love to say that it is because my strong sense of morals won’t let me involve myself with a company that raises many ethical questions. What I can say is that my value judgment is a different beast altogether. It is not a toss up between the duty I have to be honest with myself (leading me to turn down a potentially unethical job) versus the duty I have to support a family (leading me to take it) as explored by the article, “Working for Ethically Complicated Organizations.” Rather it is the debate between the positive reasons for working at Facebook and my personal disinterest in the product itself. And my disinterest wins.
Of course, Facebook and its Metaverse is powerful in more ways than one, with real impact on every corner of society. There is no question whether working for Facebook can be meaningful. But as discussed in the section “Finding Jobs to Want,” the idea of “meaningful work” is one that is hard to define because it is a subjective evaluation of what one values. Different values of financial stability, happiness, impact on community, etc are hard to compare because one metric is not “better” than another– they are just different.
To me, my personal passion lies in the arts– fashion, interior design, singing. Yes, Facebook and social media at large plays a bigger and bigger role in the creative industries– be that in everything from gaining exposure to staying on top of trends. But I derive personal satisfaction from the actual act of creating– designing clothes, styling for magazines, producing shows. I am much more interested in technologies that are more directly related to this process. That is more meaningful to me. So, Facebook will just be a tool I use, not an employer that uses me.
