Would I Work at Facebook?
One of my strongest ethical commitments to myself is to always maximise learning and to push myself into environments where growth happens quickly and there is persistent personal development. In the Finding Jobs to Want article, we are reminded that amongst the value choices around a career, one of the core values it identifies is the pursuit of meaningfulness (amongst other characteristics like “leisure time, money, power, prestige, comfort and security”). For me personally, “meaningful” doesn’t just mean helping others directly but selfishly or not, it also means working in environments where my own knowledge is constantly expanding and being pushed. If I were to limit myself to jobs that are unquestionably ‘good’ but that stop me from growing, I would feel I was compromising my own ethics. As written in the article, “normally we think of ethics as providing guidelines for how to treat other people […] but ethics is also about how we treat ourselves and the responsibilities we have to ourselves.”.
Unfortunately, I have also found that the jobs that offer the steepest learning curves – examples for me being traditional banking, big tech and consulting jobs where there are special programs to maximise learning – tend to be the ones most tied to ethical debates. For example, last summer, I worked as an investment banker. Although I had many doubts about the type of work I would be doing, I kept being told about the immense learning opportunities that this would provide me during and after the internship. And although there were many times where I questioned the ethics behind the work we were doing as well as the way we were being staffed, that experience has allowed me to pursue many impactful and what I would consider ethically positive opportunities afterwards. For example, I was able to work on a project around EV-battery financing in central and southern Europe, allowing me to contribute to great industries and to where I am from, making the banking experience completely worth it (at least for me personally!). To me, the honest path is to acknowledge both the growth and the ethical doubts, and then weigh whether the balance results in more good than harm.
With that in mind, would I work at Facebook? My answer would probably be a cautious yes. As this article in Finding Jobs to Want shows, the question is often not whether something wrong is happening in a company, but “how close does the stink get to my office?. If one were to join a team at Meta, which is clearly now heavily investing billions of dollars into AI, that would probably give one unparalleled exposure to where technology and society are headed and that knowledge would position one self to be a more responsible actor in the long term, as well as being able to have access to those decisions and opportunities. At the same time, it is often very easy to normalise ethical breaches of corporations as one becomes more used to them and so, one would need to stay vigilant to ensure that the balance between self and outer-ethics is still being respected.
Overall, I think that ethical doubts are inevitable in ambitious careers and the real responsibility lies on whether we stay self-aware, questioning constantly, and ensuring that growth is not an excuse but a tool that will eventually help us contribute more positively over time. Thus, for me, that makes accepting a job at Facebook ethically justifiable, but only if paired with a commitment to remain critical and vigilant from within.
