Quit Your Job At Facebook

Dear Employee of Facebook/Twitter/etc,

Quit your job.

The company that pays you makes the world a worse place. Stable countries across the world are being destabilized by the technology you help to create. Teenages are more depressed, people feel more alone, and we are more politically polarized than ever.

I don't care if you just write the unit tests, or if you just organize the Jira board. If you think that what your company does is wrong, you should quit.

Quit your job where you get paid because of user "engagement" or ad delivery. Quit your job if you believe the company violates your moral code, or is making the world a worse place. Similarly, refuse job offers or recruiter emails for the same reason. Critically: tell them why. Tell them what the problem is. Stop giving morally unrestrained organizations access to the smartest brains in the world (yours). Leverage your intelligence for your morals.

Google employees have protested to maintain and improve their company culture. What if all of those engineers just quit? What if they all went to work at better places? Places that respected the world? Respected diversity?

I believe you can do good work, at a good place, while still making an exceptional living.

Stop making these tools, and shame people that do.

But if all the people with morals leave, that'll leave only psychopathic programmers in charge!

Fine. So you're going to stay at Facebook. I won't argue with you, because you might be right. But what are you going to do change things? Is your argument for staying simply that if you didn't sit in that seat, a psychopath would?

What will nudge you out of this extremely comfortable, six figure salary life you lead? As Jon Stewart said: "If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies." If you go into work tomorrow and you didn't do anything to change things, you should have quit. Because someone who does nothing to help is just getting in the way.