Whenever big tech employees protest their companies’ policies, there’s always a contingent of people who demand they leave their jobs. “Quit, you losers!,” one such critic said last month, speaking of whistleblowers at Facebook. “At this point working there shows you have no values.”
Whether it’s Facebook employees standing up for election integrity, or Amazon employees protesting warehouse conditions, some people will suggest these employees are ‘complicit’ in wrongdoing if they continue to draw a paycheck from the companies they decry.
But leaving in protest may actually do more harm than good. While quitting may feel comforting in today’s all-or-nothing world — and telling someone to quit especially so — the people most likely to bring about change are those who push diligently from the inside.
“You want good guys at bad companies,” Gigi Sohn, a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy, told me. “They can make it known that things are going awry, and that could lead to change.”
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