Do you consider your job evil/neutral/good ?

Question

Hi,

I'm wondering how much of us are working on a product or service which benefits to people : - Creating a service that is usually a good for the society. (eg: Skype, Scientific Computing...) - Increasing productivity of activities that themselves are "good" (eg: SAP...)

and those who are doing evil stuff taking brains and have them work on stuff beneficial almost only to your company and maybe its direct customers: - Dirty advertising related stuff... - Financial statistical arbitrage... - Product feeding the no-life. - etc...

Or neutral stuff... I personnally believe my job is rather neutral.

This is a pretty subjective question, but I think it's even more fun like that: How would YOU classify your own job?

Answer 1

Neutral - I work on eCommerce web apps for a travel company, so at best I allow people to book their vacation out of office hours (at worst I'm helping to oil the wheels of capitalism with the sweat of student vacation reps)!

Answer 2

I don't think a particular type of job can be considered one way or the other - it usually depends on the company you work for.

For example I used to work for the NHS (Health Service in the UK) and developed applications which helped doctors and nurses do their jobs better, or more quickly. One application I developed reduced the amount of time for patients to receive results from test by almost a month.

Other jobs I have had haven't had a similar impact on society as a whole.

Answer 3

@Mr Fusion I would have said your on the good side!

Answer 4

I think mine is evil because I have red minions.

Answer 5

Well, I work for a company that services the petroleum industry, so I guess I am going straight to hell ^_^

I think any software dev thats takes pride in their work and wants to improve their craft is a good guy (or girl).

Devs I think are evil? Those that do it just for the money, bitch about software because of the house it comes from, not what it does and generally just make us all look bad.

I think any good programming can't be considered evil per se.. Take advertising for example, there is nothing wrong with it provided its unobstrusive and relevant.. Some smart developers need to make that happen..

Answer 6

It's been a long time since I worked for or with anybody else but I'm entering the job market again and a consultant helping me get back into the wicked world of business asked what the most important thing a business needs to offer me was and I said "honesty and transparency"

I'm a pretty open and upfront guy and I can't ever see myself working with a company I don't like but some of the crap I did when I was younger because I was told to was pretty unethical and led to me suffering a great deal of internalised stress.

EDIT:

was this question a setup to get a badge? because it's strange how a question with no possible 'correct' answer managed to get a best answer marked in 2 mins :)

EDIT AGAIN: even odder now I'm marked as the 'correct' answer and was as soon as I finished my edit. Does this need reporting as a bug OP?

Answer 7

@sparkes No not really a badge question. I don't really got the badge thing. Is this site a RPG or something? Marking your answer as accepted was just a way to have it on top, and thank you for answering it.

The fast switch is not a bug, I read your answer and enjoyed reading it.

Answer 8

Great question! I work for a branding/identity firm that occasionally does work with traditionally "evil" companies (oil, pharmaceutical, etc.). People have asked me this in the past because I've been working with an oil company for the past few years and I'm also an environmentalist/conservationist.

I generally don't feel too dirty about working with them because we don't make the products, and we don't mislead people like marketing/ad firms do. All we do is make the company's branding more consistent, recognizable, and seamless. It is up to the company itself to better its products so that their brand gets associated with more positive aspects of themselves, instead of the negatives. So basically if a company that we work with continues doing "evil", they will be more recognizably "evil" by the consumer after working with us. So in a way, we're actually doing "good" by making "evil" more recognizable, right?

Another aspect, as a web application developer, is that we (our company's interactive division) take pride in using valid, standards compliant code in our products (W3C, ADA). We generally make people's lives easier, by making their jobs easier and more streamlined.

Answer 9

Neutral - I write database software. I like to think that the people who use it are all writing cancer-fighting applications. :-)

My previous job was writing software for law-enforcement agencies, so when police officers in Boston, Toronto, or Rochester arrested people, they used our software to enter the booking information into the database. In Boston, they also took digital fingerprints and pictures and stored those as well. We also had dealings with the FBI and Secret Service. That job certainly made me feel like I was helping society in some small way.

Answer 10

As far as i'm concerned it's relative to the cash sting you draw from them. "Bad" Coporations are always going to find programmers so if its not you it would be someone else, however to compensate working for "devils" I would significantly hike my rate so that it costs them more to achieve this. I'd do this to a company like NewsCorp for example.

Answer 11

We do software support for a branch of NIH.

I'm not philosopher enough to know if it is more evil or good than working for a defense contractor, or oil company, but I personally feel better about it.

Answer 12

I have worked for a T-Comms company (neither good nor evil) on data products for Ambulance services (speeded up response times so ultimately good) then did general industrial monitoring stuff (good if it's preventing critical sites going critical) then Formula 1 trackside monitoring (evil depending on your viewpoint but having F1 cars around all the time was seriously cool) and now legal DB GUI stuff... (lawyers are inherrently evil...)

Answer 13

I've had two jobs over the last 28 years.

Good/Evil? - For 5 years I worked at SAC Headquarters near Omaha, NE. I worked on 3D mission planning software for B-52's and Cruise Missile's. I think the job was good because it's purpose was "deterrence". The people throwing blood all over the "Peace is our Profession" sign at the base entrance disagreed.

Good/Evil? - For the last 23 years I've worked at Seabrook Station nuclear power plant. I think this job is good also. The people that have protested over the years dressing up as skeletons and carrying coffins disagree.

So which is it?

Answer 14

I consider my job as "Not evil" nothing more nothing less.

Answer 15

I've wrestled with this a bit. I've been working in the lottery, racing, and casino industry for the past few years, so I don't know whether my work is good or evil. On the one hand, I hate to think that I'm helping poor people to gamble away what little they have. On the other hand, what people want to do with their money is their business, so if I make the experience a little better, maybe that is good.

I've concluded that my job is neutral. I've given up on the idea of saving the world through programming; I strive to do good outside of work.

Answer 16

Neutral - I work for a public education district (K-12) and focus on process improvement and software development for the classroom. Our group's primary goal is empowerment--providing tools, replacing "paper processes" with computers where appropriate, and making information available in real time to enable better instruction in the classroom.

Good, bad, neutral is a difficult call. When I was a student, I cursed the inventor of the paper assessment tests with bubbles to fill in ad nauseam--so I'm sure the students do the same to me now when they click the radio buttons. ;) As Rob Cooper mentioned, I think that our "jobs" tend to be more of what we make of it and how well we do our job for who we work for--at least in education, the civic side of us tends to keep us in line a bit more.

Answer 17

Pure good at least 90% of the time. Exploring the unknown, adding to Human knowledge of our world and others. Verifying the safety, reliability of car brakes with data good enough to feed back into the engineering process. Creating images that awe, inspire. Transforming an industry of cavemen using sticks, mud and chalk marks on stone to efficient sales professionals able to offer more, better solutions to customers, and putting necessary information online so they wouldn't burn gas driving across town.

I don't count myself among the "rock stars" or gurus of software development, but in job hunting i do look for, and normally accept, only those with a grander good purpose. (I suspect this limits my salary, but that's another topic.)

Answer 18

I think that every job has a little bit of all three in it. For instance, working for yourself requires you to be a little evil in terms of watching out for number one, while there's evil inherent in being a lackey for "the man" in any job-job.

In terms of an industry, I think that my job is a good example, though, of how pragmatism takes all three into account and allows a person to choose how to conduct themselves. I work for an search marketing firm, mostly around search optimization. SEO is an industry that has been very maligned because of all the snake oil salesmen in the business, out to smooth-talk their way into a lump sum for a minor consulting engagement. The results for SEO are a tricky long-term investment, meaning they don't have to make any kind of promises on immediate returns. It's a very easy field to sucker somebody.

It's one thing to ask for an exorbitant lump sum from a client in a clear swindle. It's another to have a regular relationship with a business whose web developers may not be experts in NLP, the semantic web, graph theory, or ranking algorithms. A great UI is a nice thing to have, but if the on-page content is not machine-readable, who's going to find it? I get to be the person who explains exactly why content that is properly annotated with markup will beat out plain text content each time, and show to clients in a programmatic fashion the way a search engine might understand the structure and meaning of their page. Unlike many of the fly-by-night consultants, I've got applicable experience in ranking algorithms and statistical natural language processing, so I had the opportunity to introduce that degree of expertise to this job.

I'm not too sure of the degree of computer science in the industry outside of my firm, but I think that the background that I have legitimizes the pursuit of improving search rankings in many ways. I guess the moral of the story is that even if your industry is reputed as evil, you can do what you can to make it good.