I work for McKinsey. In my opinion, the ethical costs of working for Facebook are far worse. In some way, if you work for facebook, you are supporting the product Facebook, which I find unethical. If you work for McKinsey, it's a decentralized org. You might not like that there's a team serving oil or cigarette or saudi clients, but the work you do won't have any bearing on them. You can work on helping clients in spaces that you think are good to serve and refuse to serve clients in spaces you don't. There's an element in that money goes to the top, enriching partners whose work you may disagreement. But... eh, I would say the flow of money is much less interesting than the individual impacts of my work. Am I enabling more work to be done in oil and cigarettes? In my opinion, not really.
It's pretty cool to be able to turn down projects because you disagree with them ethically. I can't say I agree with the other doom and gloom posts that say everyone leaving hates the company. I would say the average employee leaves on positive terms.
If you don't care about the money, couldn't you do the same work for an organization that doesn't work for Saudi Arabia? Job market is pretty good right now, and it's not like it's difficult to find a company that doesn't have seven chapters in its Wikipedia Controversies section.
Money is pretty good. Probably less than tech equivalent. When I said I don't care about the money flow I meant I don't care if the work ultimately enriches people whose ethics I don't agree with in part.
Short answer is I like my job. I like the work that I do. I think it directly helps the world be better. I get to operate at a very high level working with CEOs of important companies. The company is genuinely interested in advancing my career. It's a rare mix of tech and business. Coworkers are pleasant. Leadership is good and listens to its people.
The controversies don't bother me that much. the firm is decentralized. It bothers me about as much being associated with American problems. On a whole I think the firm helps things more than it hurts. The same confidentiality rules prevent us from sharing our successes. ymmv
I cannot share specifics of my work, which is unlikely to result in a satisfactory answer. So, sorry. I'll be blunt that most of it is tackling banal issues. Scrolling through our social impact report which includes the public stuff I found the highlights I thought were interesting. You can take this with a grain of salt and I don't tend to find these things super convincing for any company, but here:
* Founded a non profit which has upskilled hundreds of thousands of medical workers
* Did a lot of pro bono work (meaning "valuable" consulting work, but also the usual humble volunteer stuff) to keep food banks alive during covid
* About $200M in pro bono work dedicated to improving racial equity and hosting a leadership program for black leaders
* $2B in cash and support dedicated to social responsibility (I think this is mostly climate?) over the decade
* Around 220,000 hours of pro bono consultant time over the year
* Apparently we helped Khan Academy reach kids as things were going remote and TeachForIndia
_____
And of course there's the not totally pro bono stuff which is just "nice problems to work on". Some people scoff at this because its paid for, and it is typically very expensive. But I'll list it it anyway:
* COVID response for 35+ national governments and many smaller governments
* Public Health
* Economic and Social Development
* Racial equity and diversity
* Upskilling or reskilling workers who lost jobs
* Lots of decarbonization and renewable energy stuff
And again, many companies have stuff like this. I tend to think this is a bit better than average big co., but whatever, it doesn't hit my day to day. In my opinion the more down to earth impact that you might enjoy is just helping companies you like do better. If you like to help pharma, or renewables, or videogames, or... banks, you can do that. Which is just kind of good enough on its own. Unlike a job where you work within your little sphere within a big company, consulting lets you just tackle big problems with the big decision makers. idk, my experience has been largely positive. I'm happy to speak on its behalf. I know I could go work for Facebook and earn probably another $100k, but I feel pretty strongly that would be a lot less fulfilling. My view of the firm has maybe 50 people in it. It's a pretty flat org. And you have a clear line of what partners oversee your stuff. It was legit upsetting to hear about the ICE work during the trump admin for myself and many others, but at the same time it feels more like a separate subsidiary. Less like facebook where all rolls up to zuck. Like if you worked for ben and jerry's and something bad happened at dove. Both are owned by unilever. Is dove thus representative of all of unilever? Ehhh I don't think so. Example companies chose at random.
tl;dr solving business problems you're interested in is simply a good business.
Depends wildly on geography and group. For me
Pre-covid, traveling to client sites sunday evening through thursday on about 80% of weeks. Avg day 10-12 hours with periods of harder hours, which can be a lot but is easier to do when you're going to a hotel with all of your food taken care of (compared to living at home and having responsibilities and a commute). Never worked weekends though. Most work happens in a group of ~3-7 people over months. New manager every time, but it's cool if you ask their previous teammembers if they were nice to work with before you commit to a new project. Things move fast. You usually come in with a mandate from the top to peel back red tape. A ton of meetings listening to people, synthesizing their inputs, and coming up with a plan on what to do about it.
If you're on the tech / data analytics side, it'll be more of listening to how they accomplish X today, thinking about how it could be done smarter, and working with the client to come up with a basic model that does X better.
Feedback culture is strong. It's very hard to do well if you're not actively part of the team. Maybe like... a bougy hackathon vibe.
The organizations where you can do the same work that aren't McKinsey (assuming you're in the strategic management consulting side) tend to not be much better than McKinsey on that front. You could go niche, but you might end up making half the money (or double, or both depending on the year).
On the margins this really isn't true. I know a couple people working on Mckinsey's renewable energy team. They're directly responsible for billions of dollars of solar and wind farm build out that likely wouldn't have happened to anywhere near the same extent if the generators hadn't brought in consultants. I also know someone who was on the Tyson chicken team whose job was to remodel the slaughterhouse so they could fire everyone.
Mckinsey absolutely lets you choose the team you work on, there is zero expectation to work on teams that service immoral industries or companies.
I don't agree though. That's my point. A database engineer, accountant, and PM all enable the product they support. That is the ultimate goal of the work.
If I work on a project to help a pharma company set up its supply chain to produce rare disease treatments, does that enable some guy in Asia to work on oil projects? Vaguely, yes in the sense that there is more money in the system. But not much, and certainly far less than it does on building the local capability to support other pharma companies on similar supply chain problems.
Personally I feel the direct impact of my work is positive, and likely orders of magnitude more positive than I would see working in tech for "engagement" or spyware or whatever. If I decide to leave, I'll go to one of the companies working on these same sets of problems.
And on a wider spectrum, no I don't believe the firm is bad on a whole. I think it nets good, trending towards banal average.
edit: putting it another way Facebook could not run (or would run less effectively) if it had 0 database engineers or PMs. McKinsey's oil division could work just fine if it had 0 pharma consultants. And its not that much of an anathema for some people to work on oil clients.
> McKinsey's oil division could work just fine if it had 0 pharma consultants
Their oil division would be much smaller, or possibly insignificant without the other divisions because the of the total "power" the company has by having its tendrils in every industry and government all over the world.
If the COO of Ghana Oil needs a consultant, he will ask his friend the COO of Ghana Pharma, who is using McKinsey, and will get that recommendation.
McKinsey is the whole sum of its parts. If some parts didn't exist, the whole would be much less effective, just like engineers and product managers at FB who don't directly work on the "problematic" parts make the whole more effective.
Also, I was being sarcrastic to compare your statement about working at McKinsey to FB employees
In all cases, yes, the hypothetical employee contributes to FB-spread societal damage.
For example, if I design a boring mechanical part for a bomb my labor is integral to when that bomb kills civilians. So, if you are in the defense industry, believe in the net benefits of the missions that you support. And likewise for FB.
Claiming one is a meaningless cog in a machine, FB or otherwise, and one is therefore absolved of the responsibility of one's downstream impact is disgusting cowardice.
Component design sounds like a critical part. I find that take uninteresting and obvious.
What if you design t shirts for a fashion company that shares a parent with the the bomb company. You're not even in the defense industry. You might be able to argue that your t shirts generate revenue which may translate into capital that the parent company reallocates into the bomb company.
What if you're a voter who's elected representative, among a handful of liberal, pro-humanity policies, also supports bombing people in the middle east to support the defense industry?
When does it stop being disgusting cowardice and instead pragmatism to acknowledge systems are interlinked and complicated and you may be better focused on the local direct sphere of influence your choices make as the primary driver of your decisions?
The GP asked if Facebook database, accounting, etc are complicit. Yes.
You're asking if capital flows between 2 unrelated entities sharing ownership matter? No.
You're asking if diffuse responsibility via elected representation matters? Yes, even if you didn't vote for the representative, it does because they act on your behalf.
Obviously, one should focus on what one can change directly where possible.
There's no dichotomy--disgusting cowardice can be pragmatic. After all, FB has to pay someone to run its databases and to close its books and therefore someone is going to get paid. But it doesn't have to be you. You have a choice.
An increasingly interlinked system makes one increasingly responsible, not less. Unless you want to throw up your hands and to declare utter powerlessness. I can't live that way.
I was just making sure kids would go to school and had a sense of national pride. I helped them be involved in their communities.
Was I a nazi? Well, yes, but I don't see how my work helped gas the jews 1000kms over there. I was just doing community work as a nazi and helped a lot of kids stay in school. Are my actions may have made people higher up have a better control over the population and future soldiers, in my opinion, not really.
If you are implying that a primary school teacher in nazi germany is inherently accountable for the crimes of the nazi regime, then I fiercely disagree with you. I think that's an incredibly entitled opinion.
And yet, you might be a math teacher, who likes teaching kids math, and doesn't have the financial resources to move; or has familial constraints, or maybe just wants to live in their homeland. You might not like the nazi regime, and yet, you still need a job and are maybe in danger if you don't show some token support.
Fiction in the free world loves to say "You always have a choice", but the characters who learn this lesson tend to have much more power than others, be it physical strength, political power, or maybe just access to some important thing. Many people don't have a meaningful way to make a difference, and the cost is the livelihood of themselves and their families. And it ignores the local goodness of their action in favor the some vague affiliation with a bigger picture that they may not personally agree with.
I also think the whole analogy is entirely tangential.
I am not particularly well informed on the Hitler Youth. Most of my knowledge on them comes from the excellent but fictional comedy film, Jojo Rabbit. But I'd still reckon the average Hitler Youth counselor was not accountable for the crimes of the Nazi regime. Definitely less so than a facebook database engineer is for facebook being shit.
I can’t wait for the day when engineers from Facebook or Google are treated the same way after all the harm those companies have caused is revealed.