Tell me how your argument is different than “deep sea oil rig welders make more money than their more ethical alternative of welding for a small local shop.”

Are we going to blame those people for “enabling the oil industry” as well? Or are we going to accept that they are working a pretty serious high pressure job for top pay to set themselves up financially? It’s not like being an engineer at Meta is easy. I couldn’t even pass the screening interview. They aren’t paying for candidates to drop their morals, they’re paying for top talent.

And I would also ask you, which lower paying companies can I work for if I’m a software or hardware engineer that:

1. Don’t collect user data in similar ways to Meta (no tracking cookies, no use of Meta analytics or advertising platforms, no Google analytics, etc.

2. Voluntarily follow more strict privacy rules than mandated by the United States or CCPA.

3. Have zero employee behavior tracking

4. Don’t use any AI for HR issues like hiring or performance.

5. They also have to have enough headcount to replace all the people who are going to quit working at Meta for moral reasons (e.g., if you tell me that Craigslist is a great place to work that’s cool and all but they have like 50 employees).

This idea that Meta is far more moral than anyone else and I can sacrifice pay to work for a more ethical company is a false choice.

This is an industry with almost no unionization or worker protections. IT workers are specifically exempted from overtime. Yes, it’s high paid, but that is not relevant to the issue of worker power and power distance.

When we get caught up in blaming the upper middle class we are fighting the wrong class war.