Throwaway for anonymity reasons.
I learned to code. I am good enough to get a job at a Google/Amazon/Facebook. Should I do it? I feel like it would be working for the devil, but I also feel like almost every job is like that. $200k/yr sounds pretty nice.
Yes.
We live in brutal Capitalism, and instead of paying for it, we should brutally use it. The problem isn’t some idiot in power giving you money. Take the money! Take the money! But take it without moralistic feelings of guilt. The next day you kill him, and if he says “But I gave you money,” tell him, “You idiot, why did you give me the money?” Here there’s no room for moralism. Be brutal. If we live in Capitalism, then we live in Capitalism. Take the money wherever you can without any feeling of responsibility.
https://youtu.be/mGC3uJadXh0?t=281 :zizek-ok:
Yeah, just remember how based we are and how cringe every single other ideology you're going to encounter is (Truly, you can talk to people with an open mind and learn to be annoyed). If you do that and you find yourself with agency, you'll do the right thing.
You're either gonna be working for the devil for 200k per year or you're gonna be working for the devil for significantly less than that.
Make sure you have enough money saved up when you try to unionize your coworkers though, because they will try to fire you
You being poor isn't going to help the revolution. I'd rather you have it than most other people who are qualified. It's not like you not taking the job means it isn't going to be done. Take the money and the next day kill your boss.
But if you've got the credentials to pull a 200k+/yr starting wage tech job at a big 5 company your choice isn't between that and a backbreaking poverty.
It's between the 200k+/yr google job and a 120k/yr starting wage at somewhere significantly less problematic.
It depends where you are and what exactly you specialised in that could land you a big 5 tech job.
But the sorts of technical skills that get you those jobs (data science, machine learning, algorithms) can also get you a job at pretty much any company big enough to have a specialised logistics department or at a place that specializes in logistics/automation consulting, or even bespoke application development for a not horrible industry. Assuming you want to avoid finance, pharmaceuticals and anything involving the military that still leaves you with a whole lot. It depends a bit on where you are but there's almost always something in mining, shipping, manufacturing, power, agriculture or non-pharma med-tech that's going to be significantly less bad for everyone who's not you than a job at the big 5.
I don't want to doxx myself but if you open a jobseeker website, type in "software engineer" and set the pay at a 100k minimum you're going to find pages and pages of results 80% of which are better for the world than working at google, and if you can pull a 200k+ job at google you could probably get more than half of them.
Do it, and then donate earnings in excess of your needs to the DNC
Don't do work that directly assistants imperialism or punching-down violence. Some folks here are giving absurd generalizations that would justify working at Raytheon to build better bombs with which to starve Yemeni children to death. Don't do that.
But barring that, you're going to be hard-pressed to find modestly ethical work in general. It's all to build some dumbass widget at the expense of our future existence. It all ends up supporting the imperial machine. The owners will still take your surplus labor value and give it to the war machine and yachts and propaganda and cops.
There's one chance out of that in the context of capitalism, and it's creating your own co-op. But that will require existing clientele, expertise, and more than just you. There will be limited capital. You'll basically be doing a startup but without bourgeois cash thrown at you, which is how most startups ever succeed.
If you're in a position to do that, please do. Otherwise, you are stuck, just like everyone else, doing work for "the devil" so long as you (1) keep away from assisting capitalist violence directly and (2) stay true to socialism in your actions. Try to unionize the place. Talk to others who are trying to do so already. Donate your money in solidarity to your party, to international parties in solidarity.
Our only way to fully escape assisting capitalism is revolution. If your personal activities in what I assume is the imperial core are getting to you that badly, try to compare them to what you could do if you moved to a socialist, anti-imperialist country. Would your labor have a greater impact in China or Vietnam? Can you leverage your relative privilege (high income) more effectively from the imperial core? You could probably pay a socialist to spend all of their time doing organizing in another country and still be very well-off. And is it better to organize in the core or in the periphery? I personally don't know, but it's an important question.
All of this but
Try to unionize the place
Be really careful about attending unionization meetings and being vocally pro-union at Google. If you look like a troublemaker, they're really good at maneuvering your career into a dead end in a plausibly deniable way.
On the other hand, if you're willing to sacrifice yourself for the cause, wait for your first promotion, then immediately go hard on worker activism. Getting a few really good constructive dismissal cases into the courts would really help out at this stage.
A good point. I should have mentioned that they should also get some training on unionizing and agitating, since I think a lot of people think it means you just start telling everyone that you should unionize. You've generally gotta start with small asks that don't seem particularly combative and work your way up, e.g. Also, as you mention, workplace organizing is still (technically) legally protected, so there are two likely trajectories:
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You successfully organize and get that union.
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You get pretextually fired long before this but can take a case to the NLRB.
2 is more likely but will still immensely help the cause and if you were already doing a decent job organizing it won't just be you fighting that battle.
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Do it, we're not going to take down google by us all just refusing to work for them.
I saw a video a while ago about what to do with your life if you want to eventually help in a revolution. They made the point that every revolution always has plenty of poets, artist, theorist, historians, etc. What they need to tech and health professionals. The kind of people that immigrate to a capitalist country the second any sort of change starts.
So get the job, get the experience, do mutual aid, enjoy your life, and be there if we ever get the opportunity to challenge capitalism.
Revolutions need money from somewhere and Google has the most. If you're gonna be exploited might as well be paid well for it and you can give away money.
Get the bag and do mutual aid?
I’ve had a handful of friends with this dilema. At least one made solid on his promise to do aid. Dope as hell.
Do it but use your privileged position to build community structures (unionize lol) and give mutual aid a large spot in your budget. Past the money you need to continue living, just funnel Hella into local anarchist mutual aid groups that do resource distribution to unhoused folks, trust me they really need to funding and are largely run by gutter punks with lots of time and no money.
There’s very few jobs in tech to be proud of.
Make your money and take care of yourself, give generously to mutual aid, tip well, etc.
Always good to have another Engels.
All of us have to make compromises to survive in this awful world.
That being said, if I had a decent job right now, I would probably be much more of a lib than I already am. Material circumstances make us who we are.
On the other hand, the things you learn at Google might be of assistance to the revolution in the future.
If it were me, I would almost certainly go for it, while also doing my best to undermine capitalism as often as possible.
marxist sleeper agent :stalin-gun-1::stalin-gun-2:
If nothing else, having a few years of experience at one of those three will stand out on a resume and will help you get a job somewhere else. Changing jobs every few years is pretty normal among tech companies, working for one of those companies doesn't have to be a lifelong thing.
but there’s not much of a point in discussing leftist politics with other leftists who are actively undermining your position because it’ll inevitably default to you defending yourself.
I don't feel that's necessarily true. There was that heiress (disney?) who was basically mask-off socialist and giving away money to poors.
If OP can actually make 200k a year they can eventually start using some of that money to fund socialist things
