Do you know of anyone declining to work on a project For ethical in their view ( non military non killing) ?

I’ve led a sheltered life and never met one, people have told me they wouldn’t apply for a role with a company for ethical reasons maybe they even believed they would get the job

I know a lot of people who won't work for some companies for ethical reasons.

Though, sometimes the exact reason is muddied, since companies that are perceived as unethical in how they behave externally are often also perceived as unethical in how they behave towards employees. So you might object on pragmatic grounds of how you'd be treated, before you ever get to, say, altruistic grounds.

Also, sometimes fashion is involved. For example, many people wouldn't work for company X, because of popular ethical objections to what they do being in the news, but some of those people would probably work for an unknown company doing the same things, without thinking much about it.

But often it's just "I don't like what company Y is doing to people, and I wouldn't work on that, even if they treated employees really well, and it was really fashionable to work there".

(See, for example, the people who refused to work for Google after the end of Don't Be Evil honeymoon phase, even though they generally treated employees pretty well, and it was still fashionable to work there.)

I worked at LivingSocial back in 2012. I was 21 and didn’t know anything about marketing. The pitch was that daily deals helped small businesses get new customers who would then become recurring, which was good. I liked helping small businesses.

Over time I realized that the company knew this wasn’t really true. Daily deal customers weren’t likely to return. They went where the deals were. The influx of cash from daily deals was a marketing expense, almost always at a loss (most deals were 50%+ off and half of the remaining revenue went to LivingSocial), and buyers rarely returned so SMBs would never recoup their loses.

Once I figured this out, I decided to leave even though I would miss my equity cliff by a month. I ended up joining ZenPayroll (now Gusto) early on because they were helping SMBs with a real problem (payroll was a fking nightmare back then.)

Yes! I once met a highly paid contract tech lead who had walked out of a lucrative contract with a supermarket after he became aware the new credit card product he was working on was to be exclusively targeted at customers in poor areas.

The moral fortitude on that man!

I applaud his actions, but genuinely do not know if I would have the stones to leave my job if I was in a similar position!

>Do you know of anyone declining to work on a project For ethical in their view ( non military non killing) ?

o/

i was offered a high paying job, with relocation to a 1st world country (at the time, i was living in a 3rd world country with high murder rates), to a industry that i consider quite shady (and it's not military and not around killing -- i have no issues with both of those). i politely refused.

most of my friends, at the time, told me that they would've have accepted without even thinking, but for me, it's just not worth it.

I know lots of people who had the offer to work in gambling but chose not to take it for moral reasons

Well kinda trivially, asides from secular ethics, you'll find that typical Muslims decline a number of jobs/projects for ethical reasons.

This is a real long look in the mirror moment.