To my students
206 points by kngl
206 points by kngl
It's a nice post but advice like "don't take the ethically-grey job" is a lot easier to follow when you already have a safety net. The student with loans and one job offer doesn't have much leverage.
What I've seen is that many people get a job for a morally-gray company and say they'll only stay for a year or two but end up staying much longer with all kinds of justifications. Once you're in there, there are a lot of systemic things (prestige, money, colleagues etc.) keeping you from leaving.
When I was in that situation (my first job wasn't for the greatest company) I was well aware that it might happen, so I made a deal with my future self that I would quit no matter what after 2 years. That's what I did too, and even passed on a pretty good promotion in the process.
I much prefer that kind of advice. I would tell students outright that taking the only job they got is not a moral failure. Compromises made from necessity are different from compromises made from comfort.
Survival comes first, of course. I don't read this letter as saying you should never compromise, but rather that deciding your boundaries up front lets you make compromises without losing your moral center.
I would have agreed about that some time ago but the I am not so sure anymore. While I agree in general I think there is a hidden cost if you have any kind of values. It will slowly eat on you to either end up in your own made up world of ethical stances conflicting with each other giving you something hard to describe that manifeste in strange ways drawing you into bad habits. Or you can't look yourself in the mirror anymore. The usual response seems to be drugs, consumerism and bubble building.
Evidently that's somewhat common for people working in certain parts of the financial sector that makes it hard to deal with the real world as well.
But then there's that unsinkable need of food, roof over head but when there's no point and you end up with self hatred when you look over your past decade of work that might not be worth it.
And even today (still?) in IT it's not usually a question about killing acting against your ethics and starving. It's more about whether you want to spend your money on luxury and psychologist or want to like yourself.
So maybe the way to go is to not get scared of quitting once you can get another job? Or actually try looking for alternatives.
But if your choice is enough for a somewhat comfortable life (let's define that as being able to afford unforseen events and eg. a video game console or concert/theater tickets) or earning more than that then it's purely about morale.
Personally I don't think that earning good money, but feeling bag about it and voting the right party is good enough. I made significant step downs in my standard of living twice for ethical reasons. I really dislike the idea of morally questionable choices being alright if they are because of your job yet somehow that seems to be the default for menu people in comfortable situations. And then they upvote a video or comment and feel good about that. I've been there. But even egotistically thinking that's a bad idea because it will make yourself feel worse and the world around you worse, which has negative side effects on you as well.
But all of that is just my view, not something I'd ever dictate on to others - not that I could. Just a thought about how "needing enough money to live" gradually can turn into mental health issues and making the world worse for everyone including yourself and all that extra money having to be spent on mitigating these things in one way or another.
So I completely agree on it being easier said than done. But I don't think you should set yourself up for staying in an ethically grey area for your whole career and it's easy to get addicted. And addictions can ruin things.
As someone who's just entered CS I've heard countless times from people more advanced in their careers (and usually they have more of a safety net than I do) that it's very hard to avoid taking unethical positions to survive and I shouldn't worry worry about it. I find this infantalizing: my friends who make way less than me quit their jobs for ethical reasons, what makes me any different?
I'm certain I'm worse off for having made ethical choices about where I work. I'm still here. I far prefer where I'm at over the other world where I didn't make those choices and convinced myself I couldn't have lived any differently.
Young people need to know that this is their world too. I'm very thankful for this article.
Agreed. What upsets me most about this is seeing my younger peers in offensive security feel like they must work for weapons contractors or national labs. Weaponisation and exploitation is fun, but that doesn't mean you have to build anything greater than demos with it, or even have to make a career out of it. Anyone capable of this is capable of programming, testing, and administration. Just because it is the specific thing that you find the most intellectual gratification in does not mean that it is the thing you should pursue. And I hated even more to hear the regret years later.
Absolutely. I mean I laud people who are that principled, however having been in a position where I nearly had to stick with an ethically shady job until I got another offer, I absolutely would have rather gone with that if it were all I had, than be destitute with my morals intact… maybe that makes me a bad person.
It's a mistake to mention compromises while advocating for something. The morally-grey companies are not advocating for compromises; the only compromises they may mention will be lies and bait so they can hire as they want.
Don't talk about compromises before your opponents do it themselves and in good faith. If your opponents are big companies with dedicated lobbyists, this won't change any time soon.
there are many ethically-grey jobs that allow employees the latitude to avoid unethical behavior, to the point where i feel like the self-soothing that i see in the engineering industry these days has started to tick me off a little.
i think there are certainly situations where someone is only presented with a job offer that is ethically dubious, with the alternative being debt and medical disaster. in these circumstances i don’t know many people who would begrudge them the decision to work somewhere that isn’t in complete alignment with good ethics.
what i got from OP wasn’t this, though. anyone who gets a job at Palantir, Anduril, OpenAI, Facebook, Coinbase, Coreweave, etc. can find a significantly less ethically compromising job elsewhere.
i think the people who choose these jobs in the current climate are beneath contempt; spit on them and save your empathy for those who deserve it.
i think there are certainly situations where someone is only presented with a job offer that is ethically dubious, with the alternative being debt and medical disaster.
Says a lot about the country you live in, doesn't it?
I speak as a serious Christian, to any reading that happen to wish to follow Christ earnestly. Non-Christians are unlikely to find this satisfying.
When I was a child and a young adult, I struggled to understand Psalm 37:25. It seemed it couldn’t be literal. But in the last decade I’ve come to realise it is actually entirely literal—though one should not suppose it promises comfort.
My experience, and the experiences I have heard from several around me and from quite a few more (first- or second-hand) one to four generations ago (when actual poverty was more prevalent) is that, when you decide to walk by faith (see Habakkuk 2:4, and the several times it’s quoted in the New Testament), things work out. Not necessarily in the ways you anticipate; not always in comfortable ways; but they work out and you are the better for it. God provides, and God respects the honest attempt to live by faith.
Simple rules and principles are easier to keep than nuanced ones. Compromise begets compromise. Slippery slopes, paths paved with good intentions, &c. &c. I find the book of Daniel particularly helpful there: chapters 1, 3 and 6 each show a strong refusal to compromise, in the face of imminent danger. Perhaps the most helpful is chapter 3, where it’s framed as “you can try to kill us if you like; God can protect us if he wants, but even if he doesn’t, we’re not doing what you say”.
If you believe the Most High God rules over the kingdoms of men: step out in faith, and see where it takes you.
Unfortunately for my credibility, I’ve had a fairly comfortable life. Never had to worry where my next meal might come from, or really been short of money, though my decisions have definitely several times limited how much of it I get; and 9–5-style jobs have been readily available, so that any stand of conscience has comparatively little risk. It’s much easier for me to say these things than many others of my acquaintance, especially now that I live in India (I am a white Australian; this move, I may add, is a consequence of walking by faith). But I do firmly believe them, and think that my conviction is adequate to face great adversity. Though having a wife, and God willing soon a child, has added new complexity to it.
Even for non-Christians, I would say that there are more options than they may realise—different lines of work, different locations, and much more. Assess deliberately how highly you value a clear conscience, and which compromises you are willing to make.
Simple rules and principles are easier to keep than nuanced ones. Compromise begets compromise.
I used to take rules very seriously: not crossing the street with other pedestrians because the light was still red, driving exactly the speed limit, etc. It really hurt when I went to work at BigCo and I realized that my non-compete agreement meant I couldn't create anything of value in the open-source world: technically, everything competes with BigCo, and rules are rules. You're not supposed to disobey lawful authorities, right?
It took a few years and me talking to another Christian to realize I could chill out about my interpretations of rules. At least in my case, the world was more nuanced than I had believed, and "follow rules without compromise" was the opposite of what I needed to hear.
(Unfortunately, "obey rules by an appropriate amount" doesn't offer much guidance as an ethical framework!)
Maybe the best biblical advice I have for the student in debt and with one job offer is: judge not, lest ye be judged. Do the best work you can do under the constraints (making ends meet), and maybe it's not ideal if there's a side effect of making a selfish billionaire 0.1% richer—but I won't judge you for it, and you don't judge others in similar situations either. There will be other opportunities to make the world a better place.
This argument comes along all the time. I see it differently when you build up your moral standards and be strong with it - You don't go for petty short-term things for survival and go for the greater good for the society at large. I think that is what's communicated as a last point in the article - "Above all, be motivated by love instead of fear." If you find your path led by heart, you will eventually find your way to do things.
this is good advice, I have done my fair share of awful choices (ad-tech, gambling, etc...) and here is my three bullet point summary from my personal experience about it:
your mileage might vary, talking about my experience here
Really good comment, same type of thing happens almost anywhere.
Working at a place that makes the corporate ladder a thing? You'll start to value it and want to move up on it eventually even if you weren't caring as much when you started.
I feel like this is such timeless advice. I started my career in tech when the snowden revelations kicked off, and at the time, I was working in defense. I left and went private sector specifically because I felt morally and ethically wrong about working in defense after that. I was pretty young, but I’m happy I work on software I can stand behind now.
In any case, I think this advice works at any time and any crisis in our industry. Software is a means to an end, and choosing to accomplish meaningful things that make you happy and fulfilled is incredibly important.
Beautiful.
I am uncomfortable about "my camp" defending intellectual property now though. I very much understand where this is coming from and maybe it's our weapon against the newish evil mega corps of these days, OK. But "copying is not theft" and "property is theft" are still slogans that mean something to me.
I am uncomfortable about "my camp" defending intellectual property now though.
I think this is a manifestation of a second-order belief that a lot of people hold, even if they wouldn't articulate it as such: that the law should protect everyone equitably, not just equally. That is: they killed Aaron Swartz because he violated the copyright of a few big publishing houses, via the threat of a $1 million penalty and 35 years in prison. Even were the law applied equally to Anthropic, OpenAI, etc., a $1 million - or even $1.5 billion - would not have nearly such an effect on those companies. I think a lot of people see that as pretty screwed up.
I would rather live in a world where copyright doesn't exist and in which it's possible to make a living as an author, artist, etc. That's a world that could exist; we could simply decide to stop starving people and denying them medical care for not fitting into value extraction structures, but we haven't.
A world where nobody faces punishment for copying is preferable; one where massive companies face slaps on the wrist while we murder 26-year-olds for it is unacceptable. That seems like a pretty coherent view to me.
the guy killed himself. the state did not kill him.
unless you're making a "it was staged" claim, which i don't think you are. you're just flattening the two, to try to manipulate people
To be very clear, I blame the state for his suicide, but I don't dispute that it was suicide. I am not trying to promulgate a conspiracy theory, just an understanding of the violence inherent in disproportionate punishments levied against normal people.
The state effectively killed him by saying his life was over with the penalties and imprisonment they were going to effect.
plenty of people go to prison and don't kill themselves.
these are not the same thing. it's ludicrous to pretend they are.
(i agree with the point that people shouldn't be put in prison for decades for IP violation. my problem here is the moral flattening of charging someone with prison and a fine, and murder)
The only legal murder in society is state murder. You're being pedantic and arguing semantics to defend the state of the status quo.
no. i'm not.
if a cop shot him, or if he died in custody under sus circumastances, or something, that might be the case. but that's not what happened, so don't try to accuse me of defending state murder, about a guy that killed himself in his own apartment
to try to manipulate people
See it was fine until here. I think it is widely accepted that he committed suicide when faced with the fact that his life was effectively over. The state exercised an unreasonable penalty on someone and this is the result. Rhetoric is more than malice and manipulation, it emphasizes the effect of a government selectively and inequitably applying the law.
I am uncomfortable about "my camp" defending intellectual property now though.
I don't know what your camp is but assuming it overlaps with the free-culture movement, it's worth noting that copyleft licenses rely on copyright to enforce their "share alike" requirement. Richard Stallman wrote about this in How the Swedish Pirate Party Platform Backfires on Free Software for the curious.
I think we should be unapologetic about what we really care about: I use copyright for securing our "digital commons" against corporate appropriation and "curse" it when, for example, it's employed by those same corporations against us. I care about us, and copyright is just a legal tool to me.
I remember vividly that, back in 2023, anti-copyright “accelerationism” was definitely part of OpenAI’s PR campaigns. That caught some people off guard because if you don’t put too much thought into it, it seems much better to live in a hypothetical world where copyright laws protect individuals rather than the real one in which big tech gets away with copyright infringement.
In retrospect, I believe this was done on purpose to deflect the (much more appropriate) plagiarism accusations, but now the damage’s done, public opinion is apparently OK with plagiarism and those who are not will pick the side of authors which in their majority are, understandably, pro-copyright.
Edit: btw, this is not exactly the opinion I hold at the moment but I could only articulate the opinion I had ~ 2 months ago. I do think that the ship has sailed on plagiarism and becoming a cyberpunk is not only feasible in 2026 but also it looks like the most ethical choice.
Intellectual property isn't necessarily a black-and-white thing. Copyright was "bad" when Sony used it as justification to ship rootkits on their music CDs back in the day. But copyright was "good" when the GPL forced competitors to collaborate on projects like Linux and GCC. The law isn't a hero's tool or a villain's tool, it's just a tool.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, you don't have to feel good or bad about the tool when the tool changes hands.
Copyright law isn't a tool though, it's a set of specifically worded legal policies. I think it's perfectly fair to look at a set of policies and how they're enforced and say "the effect of this policy is bad" or to look at a law and say that it's unjust. A law that makes it a civil offense to email someone a PDF of a book like Brave New World (written 94 years ago by someone who has been dead longer than disco) is an unjust law in my opinion, and it leads to the consolidation of media rights under increasingly fewer and larger rightsholders like UMG and Disney and Penguin Random House. Even if the current copyright holder (Penguin Random House, I think?) were to use that law to badger the major AI companies into paying a training fee for their use of Aldous Huxley's writing, that would not make "copyright for life of the author plus 70 years" a good law and it would not put a single extra dollar in the pockets of any writer who sold their copyright to their publisher. I don't like that AI companies train their models on artists' works without compensation, but the answer to "who benefits from stricter copyright enforcement the most?" is "large media conglomerates", whose interests are often largely opposed to the artists they negotiate publishing deals with.
I find a lot of value in this kind of reminders. People may agree or not, but it's a clear position, it is important that it is stated clearly for people to understand, digest, and decide how they stand in relation to it. It is more opinionated, more risky and thus, in a sense, braver, than what we read in most of computer science academia these days, especially in the US (where academics seem explicitly discouraged from anything resembling political discourse, see yesterday's story of Diabetes researchers being expelled from a conference for criticizing the US administration). Well done.
(Brent Yorgey's website is built using Forester, a tool for hyperlinked notes that I haven't tried myself yet but see popping and more and more places. Interesting.)
I have no idea what to think of this.
Don't settle for the lie of compromising your principles "just for now"
I've been through a layoff. It's quite different to talk about what you'd do if you needed a job, and walking in those unfortunate shoes. My bank doesn't care about my morals, only my account balance.
The second week unemployed, I was feeling guilty at the grocery store for considering buying the hamburger buns which were fifty cents more expensive and thinking of picking up an application. My wife told me I had to wait another week before she'd let me work there or at Home Depot, and that week was when I actually started getting interviews. I had a couple open spots sent to me to work on gambling systems, but I kept those in my back pocket until I ran out of other places to apply. I was very lucky and blessed to get a job within a month, but many are not.
Care deeply about your craft.
I used to love to make software in my spare time, had lots of ideas, but that motivation is almost entirely gone and no ideas are left. I got into computing to learn how things work and to build great things. Now, few seem to care how anything works or about the quality or maintainability of anything.
It's hard to care about something that can be infinitely mimicked. Doing the hard work of learning something from scratch doesn't seem meaningful anymore when few care about what's underneath anyways.
At one of my local meetups, someone said, "We don't need software engineers anymore" and how systems programmers like myself have been called "pointer chasers" that we "don't really need any more." Most of my experience is in fixing and maintaining code that no one else wants to be bothered with. From what I see from mass AI usage is the proliferation of this sort of project with weak and conflicting conceptual integrity, leading to the future collapse of software quality as a whole. I see the industry gleefully driving off a cliff. Not that AI isn't useful, but that ignoring the underlying elements makes extremely fragile and expensive to maintain systems.
It feels like the world has lost its mind, but I'm not too egotistical to ignore that I could very likely be wrong. And that I'm probably wrong.
When it comes to job morality, I have wondered a few things:
First, does choosing a moral job (eg. in tech areas like the Bay Area or Seattle) price you out because you aren't making Big Tech money?
Second, if you are only interested in a more niche area of CS where jobs are limited to certain companies, then what? For example, you are dead set on doing FP but you don't want to work for Jane Street (this might be am ill-scoped example, but it hopefully exemplifies the point).
Also, with the hiring as bad as it is for people out of college (which is presumably the target audience of this article), how are people reasonably expected to sublimate beyond industry trends and moral devoidness when many (as I have seen) reasonably honest, hard-working students can't even get one job offer?
On the last point, there is some discussion to be had on how I have witnessed honest students lament how normalized dishonesty in CS hiring (eg. number inflation, interview coder, etc) has put truth and integrity at a severe disadvantage.
you are dead set on doing FP but you don't want to work for Jane Street
FP = functional programming? There are many more than just Jane Street.
I notice the "moral jobs" tend to be near politically important places, like NYC or DC. As such, they can also be well-funded by being tied to political movements rich people care about (one personal example, I interviewed for Donors Choose, a non-profit funding K12 teacher projects, and they were paying a competitive-to-me salary as a remote worker, maybe not HQ competitive, though).
But the "moral" jobs are not necessarily the easiest choice, either. I know a few people in my area (DC) that work for nonprofits that warned me that those orgs can guilt trip employees into working uncompensated extra hours by appealing to their mission.
The technology industry has had an uneasy stance toward intellectual property for my entire life. When I was a kid many of the computer games came on floppy disks with "copy protection" and then everyone had specialized tools (anyone remember copy ii pc?) for defeating the copy protection, which sometimes worked. Then there was Napster. And Pirate Bay. People printed DeCSS on t-shirts as a fuck you to heavy-handed copyright enforcement. And so on.
So it always rings weird to me when "lack of respect for intellectual property" is brought up as a hallmark of the current state of the industry, or something specific to the "generative AI era" or whatever. Like yes all the LLMs were trained on data that wasn't "licensed". (Maybe this is "fair use", maybe it isn't, I'm not a lawyer.) But also almost everyone you know of a certain age has somewhere a hard drive full of questionably obtained MP3 and DVD rips, possibly on a computer that was running a cracked version of Windows XP, and I don't remember CS profs wringing their hands about sending their students out into that world.
(I know this is not the main point of the post, but these essays always hit on this, and it always seems weird to me.)
As ever, it's down to the power imbalance, isn't it? Despite all the nonsense claims to the contrary, individual home copying of media bankrupted precisely zero big TV/movie/music companies. But AI can and already is driving lots of small creators to the wall.
You can't ignore scale when evaluating morality and ethics. Corporations pretty much by design concentrate power and capital and exercise it at best unethically and often downright illegally. The whole notions of limited liability companies and corporate personhood unbalance the playing field, and technology seems to be a multiplier which makes it worse by orders of magnitude.
Copyright as originally enacted was a very short term (14 years?) protection for individual creators basically to allow them to subsist and create. Modern copyright law (70 years after death) is purely the creation of capital in the form of transnational media corporations, which never had any interest into protecting the little guy - that was basically a vestigal accident, and now it's proven to be inconvenient for the latest attempts at enclosing the commons, it has been discarded.
The presentation of this article is also interesting: XML, turned into HTML using XSLT. It’s using Forester, which seems to be open source. Alas, this way of serving will stop working comparatively soon.
Alas, this way of serving will stop working comparatively soon.
Why? (tone: curious, not combative)
Mozilla proposed to remove XSLT from the web standard and got massive pushback for it as it is still a very well used technology. They decided to still go ahead with fully removing support on the grounds that the libraries currently used are aging and not worth using anymore due to vulnerabilities, and there were no libraries that could replace it quite yet. Their main stance is that projects can/should switch over to a "newer and better" technology, insert a polyfill that may or may not break compatibility with things or have users install a browser extension they made. Which makes their security argument extra questionable, and is just part of the reason people are questioning intentions.
Links below are some of the original propositions and issues:
Chromium is removing XSLT from the browser, citing security concerns with the current implementation and a desire to focus engineering resources on more modern APIs.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/deprecating-xslt
Developers who want to keep using XSLT can use server-side rendering or a Javascript polyfill.
Oh wow, I didn't realize that this was even available as a browser API! Slightly sad to learn that just as it's disappearing.
I want to mention: the security argument is a blatant lie. As part of proposing removing it, they created an extension which provides XSLT (and they refer to it in that same post). Before they can justly claim they want to remove XSLT with no replacement for the sake of security, they must explain why they don’t just replace the XSLT implementation with that browser extension, either shipped out of the box or installed on first XML stylesheet (which would keep the distribution size down). They’ve already done probably 96% of the work. (OK, I guess accessing XSLTProcessor would be a bit more fiddly if you wanted to install the extension on access.)
Browsers are all set on ripping out XSLT. Not sure on the timelines yet, but maybe as soon as next year oh yeah, Chromium said late this year.
Philosophically speaking, no technology is inevitable, and we all have a choice.
However, companies have a strong track record of gravitating towards more profitable technology over time in a way that feels inevitable. If the big companies don't adopt new technologies, there will be successful startups that will. This is baked into venture capitalism and capitalism in general.
There's a bit of a too big to fail element in certain technologies when the stock market has overinvested in them. They're inevitable in the sense that they have to succeed otherwise lots of people are going to lose a lot of money.
I agree, but technology can succeed even if companies goes bankrupt, ref. Kodak (digital camera sensors), Xerox (computers with a GUI) and Blockbuster (streaming video on demand).
On a similar note about setting boundaries with ourselves and the consequences of our employment: a talk from DeviantOllam called "When is Enough Enough? -or- When Enough is Enough".
When I was in that situation (my first job wasn't for the greatest company) I was well aware that it might happen, so I made a deal with my future self that I would quit no matter what after 2 years. That's what I did too, and even passed on a pretty good promotion in the process.
I recognize this name from their supremely interesting talk on "Elevator Hacking". Elevator Hacking: From The Pit To The Penthouse (YouTube). Super fun conference talk.
This is such a great message that I wish every computer science student could have the opportunity to read.
Unrelated to the post's content: I've noticed many personal sites under .edu domains follow this rough URL format:
department.example.edu/~username/page
Does anyone have insight on where this ~username format comes from? Could it have any relation to how ~ is aliased to the user's home folder on Linux? I've always been curious about this!
That URL pattern is very usual in older multiuser hosts. The tilde means ”home” and shows HTML files in the user’s ~/public_html directory.
It's a pretty old convention that combines Unix shell tilde expansion for usernames and early web servers that mapped requests for /~username/ to a subdirectory inside that user's home directory, usually public_html.
I'm familiar with this behavior being typical of httpd's mod_userdir. I looked through some Usenet threads from when the feature (User-Supported Directories) was newly added, and they directly connect *nix's ~username path expansion to their goal with mod_userdir.
I'm not too found of Miss Universe acceptance speech motos in the style of "can't we just stop all wars". So I will ignore those bits. But the rest is good stuff that I gladly read. The opening bullet point alone is strong advice.