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.
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.
