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What's your opinion on balancing ethicality and salary for a CS job? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/cs_career_questions

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I know this is a really vague question, I'm hoping for some open discussion

For some background, I currently have 2.5 years of professional work experience, and I work for a large defense contractor doing devops.

My approach to ethicality so far was basically, I need to start somewhere before I can be picky. I got hired at a large defense contractor out of college, and now that I've hit the 2 year mark for work experience, I have some flexibility in my next job when I decide to do that.

If money wasn't a problem, I'd love to use my degree to do good for the world, or at least work for an industry I don't think is evil. And truthfully, even the lower end of CS jobs still pay better than the higher end of many other degrees.

But right now I'm looking at job offers, and it seems like if I move to a tech, medical, or financial company, I could likely see a salary increase of 30-50%, which would be huge for me as I'm young and have debts to pay off (though much less than others, I'm pretty privileged).

At the same time, if I took a tech job working for my city, I found a position that I am perfectly qualified for but it's a 10% cut from my current salary which I already believe to be a bit too low.

Just curious to see how everyone else has made these decisions. It's very tempting to follow the money and take the highest paying job, but I'd love to work somewhere I'm genuinely proud of.

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[–] somegeek 5 points 2 weeks ago

My take is, don't do explicitly bad stuff, like, don't create malicious software of work for military, or DARPA, cia, NSA, google, etc.

But also, your work shouldn't be necessarily divine. No work is. If you look Into it, even being a Linux kernel Dev isn't that divine. Just don't be a direct cause of bad things, and I think that is good enough.

And get payed good and use that money for good stuff. Kind of a robinhood job. If you can earn for example 200K from a not super evil company and give 30K to people who need it, is much better than earning 100K working in a open source startup or whatever and not help other people, and also be poorer.

Of course, it's really important how much you enjoy your job and if you are excited to go to work everyday.