Ask HN: Have you not accepted or left a job because it was immoral?
19 dataviz1000 44 6/13/2025, 12:59:08 AM
“A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.” [0]
Not only is there no reward, nor can you ever expect a reward, for doing the right thing, it also often comes at a personal cost.
[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Civil_Disobedience_%28Thoreau%29
Only time this happened to me was one of my first jobs. I worked phone tech support for a consumer PC manufacturer in the mid to late 1990s.
The company decided their 3 year hardware warranty was suddenly now 1 year. They decided this retroactively... I thought it was wrong. I spoke up to my boss, they agreed and passed our thoughts up the chain, but after that it was all yes men so we never heard back.
I was just some on and off again college kid and figured, whatever, so despite the new rule change if I thought they should get hardware (I had access to their original warranty data), they got hardware. I mentioned it to other coworkers and they did the same.
Few years later the company relented after they were sued. Nothing ever came of my actions as far as anyone noticing, or at least not enough to care, pretty sure my boss knew.
Otherwise all my jobs are pretty run of the mill legal activity.
I guess it's better for both parties to be clear at the outset. We should all think about where we draw the line.
(Just yesterday, I paused, and then sent a recruiter notes on why I wasn't interested in a couple companies they'd selected for me. Not to be That Person, but because I wanted to help them find what's interesting to me, and also to invite them to push back if my initial assessment of a company was off.)
"Left a Job" -- This is much harder than not accepting/considering, but it also happens. A couple variations:
* I'm guessing the most common way might not be deciding that you have to leave because of something immoral, but you're forced out before then, because you don't play along with the immoral or whatever is leading up to it. (This reason could be coming across as goodie-two-shoes risk, or refusing to so some immoral thing, or actively working to reverse/prevent some immoral thing.)
* Something immoral might be going on, but there are additional reasons to leave. Such as (predictably) people behaving immorally wrt customers or society might also behave immorally wrt employees/colleagues. So you might leave because the work environment is hazardous, your coworkers are backstabby, or you were cheated out of a bonus... even before you decide that the business of kicking puppies is wrong.
No personal use (with incidental use exceptions for some items, and often exhaustive examples of what is and isn't incidental) of company property and zero tolerance for workplace violence of any kind policies are pretty common, IME.
No sunbathing on the roof.
No eating the office supplies.
I’m certainly going to create a
and hang it in the next office I visit.Felt like these guys had had an incident, and now every candidate then has to promise to sleep with their hands above the blanket.
This is a hidden riba (interest)
On a broader level, I've made a choice long ago to try and not work in domains I consider morally questionable.
That's too cynical. I take personal satisfaction in not taking such jobs, and that's no small award.
Three folks did get hired fairly quickly. The took a job in another NFT game startup. Ugh.
Left another job because it basically required me to lie to customers.
A huge black dude, who probably can deadlift 500lbs, comes up to us and asks if he could have a job. This place desperately needed workers...
The owner with no hesitation, "we dont hire ni..." and it didnt stop there. He listed a number of other slurs as well.
I walked off the job and quit without even telling them. 80% because i dont want to beaten up by a very fit black dude. 20% for 'doing the right thing.
Here's the weird thing... this is Windsor Ontario, Canada next to detroit(80% black). The Slave 'underground railroad's destination was mostly here. There's loads of black people and being a nazi or whatever is extremely rare and bizarre.
I was politically opposed to ACA/Obamacare in the early stages. When it launched, the website had big problems and crashed constantly. It was a huge embarrassment for the administration. I was working in a support/diagnostic role and was invited to participate in a multi-company tiger team that was on the problem. ( The only time my work efforts were covered in the nightly news! )
I dug into the task as well as I could and made a small contribution. I gave it my very best effort.
The fact that I opposed it at the time, but gave it my best effort is one of the proudest moments of my career.