This is my post for day 4 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.
Some people have jobs just so that they can make enough money to sustain themselves and whatever else they want to do with their lives. This is a perfectly reasonable choice to make. I’m also not writing this to anyone who’s struggling to meet sustenance level.
But many people also want their labor to be valuable to society overall. Your job is one of the biggest parts of your life, and it’s natural to want to be able to take pride in what you do.
I care a lot about my work being beneficial, and I’ve found that throughout my career, when I’ve actually sat down and thought about the particulars of my employer, it was often far from clear whether it was positive. It’s easy to assume companies wouldn’t spend so much money on you if it wasn’t valuable, surely someone must be making sure. But I believe this is sadly often not the case. I want to walk you through some more detail of how I think about this, in case it might help you improve your own career choices.
From some perspective, most actions are useless, and many others are harmful; how can you be sure your labor is having positive effects? Sometimes, it’s pretty obvious. If you’re a farmer, you can be pretty sure that the food your labor produces will help nourish and keep alive another person. If you’re providing routine medical care, then you can essentially witness the benefits in real time.
More generally, when people are willing to pay for stuff, that is a pretty strong signal that that thing is actually valuable to them. So it’s reasonable to assume that if there’s a salary, it’s valuable. And I think this is true for the most part. But there are numerous ways that this signal can get messed up.
For a couple years I worked at a software company whose product was helping people get better medical care. This is a good start! But, like many, many software companies in the Bay area, we were not yet profitable. It had been growing for several years, and was employing a couple hundred people. Not a casual endeavor. Even the revenue we were taking in was a muddled signal. Our product wasn’t paid for by the people receiving medical care. Instead, it was purchased by other companies, who in turn provided it as one of their employee benefits. So it was used by a small fraction of employees, and the feedback loop was long. a major incentive at play for the purchasing company is that providing our service as an employee benefit looked good, it made potential employees feel better about working for the company. Not a very reliable signal.
And how good was the product? In the beginning, the core product was a ranking of all the doctors in the US. The ranking was marketed as being based on some kind of advanced data analytics. Later, the main product was a system that let patients receive detailed opinions about their medical cases (from doctors high up in the ranking). While I worked there they continue to branch into other exploratory products. If you were a patient, then using our product probably felt good. You were paired with a real person who would walk you through the process, and help you understand the doctor’s opinion. Feeling good is a real thing, and has its own value. But was anybody checking whether the people who used our product had better medical outcomes?
From the perspective of the engineering team, this product is almost optimized to make you feel good about working on it. The database tables I interacted with contained rows and rows of real human names,1 getting help with their very real medical cases. In isolation, I think this part was absolutely positive. It’s not like we were selling snake oil.
But another key consideration in whether a choice is the right one is what the alternatives are. Running this software/healthcare company was costing, so, so much money. Not more than usual; it’s just that 200 professionals cost a lot. And those 200 skilled people could have been doing something else. It’s really hard to tell whether this company was worth the value it was producing given the tangled way that the incentives and signals were flowing.
Everyone was always very professional. The office was clean and crisp. People generally enjoyed working there and rarely spoke badly of the company. There was no sense of working for “the man”. The CEO was amicable and kinda goofy. It would be so, so easy to just let that overall atmosphere carry you through the day, and feel good about your work.
Over time I heard, though casual word of mouth, that the doctor ranking was a very basic statistics model based on only a handful of data points, like the doctor’s standardized test scores. I had not been updated since the very first iteration. The reason why seems to have been some kind of office politics that never leaked out to me in any detail. Honestly all of this is probably the norm and doesn’t necessarily change my estimate of the company’s value much. But what else are the signals failing to catch?
If the product of your labor has individual paying customers who make it profitable, then that significantly increases the probability that it is net positive.
Though even in that case, there are failure modes. People are often systematically wrong about what’s valuable to them. Or, a whole market sector is designed to squeeze money from people where they wouldn’t endorse it. This is the kind of thing where people could reasonably disagree with any given example, but I’m thinking of things like gambling, ads, or credit cards. There is a type of gambling that is fun, a type of advert that tells me about a useful product I didn’t know existed, and a type of finance that is indispensable for the economy to run efficiently. But there are also types of all these things that feed parasitically off the people who simply don’t have the wherewithal to make good choices. And I’m not sure how many of the zillions of people working in these sectors are checking which kind they are involved in.
Another big factor, especially in tech, is that lots of salaries are ultimately funded by very small groups of people, venture capitalists. Despite the incentives, VCs are human and can be systematically wrong about what is valuable to fund. If you find yourself to be the eventual recipient of a salary that only exists because some VCs took a risk, then you may be able to do your own thinking about the economics of the business and conclude that they were wrong, and that your job is not worth doing according to your own beliefs. They can also be funding things that work towards their values and against the values of society. During the several crypto-currency bubbles, it was a pretty straight-forward strategy to invest in a crypto company that was optimized for hype, sell when the bubble was high enough, and essentially be screwing over everyone else involved with the project.
Things just get really funny when the world contains high-leverage mechanisms. Sources of unprecedented energy are also bombs. Steel mills can be converted almost overnight to a supplier of weapons for an unjust war. Even farms can become subsidized by uncalibrated (if well-meaning) government programs, which destroys the main signal of whether the food is valuable. This leverage gets even more intense in the presence of existential risks like AI. My guess is that basically all current work in AI, outside of the tiny field of AI safety, is negative expected value for humanity.
Of course, you, personally are not always going to be able to think about it and make a better call. I’m certainly not advocating that you do an intensive private investigation into the details of your company’s finances. But I think it’s very common for people to just… not seriously consider that jobs might be net-negative for society? It’s a very uncomfortable thought. So I think most people don’t even start to ask the question.
As human society gets larger, things are getting weirder. The eddy currents being shed off from the turbulence of growth can be so big that you never know you’re inside one. And neither your salary, nor seeing the numbers on the dashboard go up, nor even the fulfilling satisfaction of sharing a victory with your coworkers are that strong of a signal. But I think things are still comprehensible enough that it’s worthwhile for you to spend some time asking the question.
- I mean, I personally didn’t have access to production data, but it was close enough. ↩︎
The Nameless Virtue 