It depends on circumstances you haven’t provided.

• Do they know the company is evil?
• if so, do they agree with what the company is doing?
• if not, do they have any viable alternate options?
• if they don’t, do they have any undesirable options?
• if so, they are choosing known evil over inconvenience
• if not, then they are stuck

More so.

You’re not giving any context here, but a guy taking care of the building is usually not connected at all to the business. I’ve always seen them as contracted from a company that does exactly that. They don’t know what the business is doing and have no responsibility for it.

As a software developer, I once interviewed with a spam company. I guess it was pretty obvious what I thought of them, so I did not get the job. I would have gone for it, because I needed the job, but would not have been b happy and would have used my time to find work somewhere more acceptable

Most people are not free from the need to work and might have plenty of personal factors pushing them into compliance. Working for a company that gives good conditions and good salary should never be shamed. First because it alienates the people in question, reinforcing their disregard for any ethical or political discussion. Then because it sow division among the workers. The choice of the word “guilty” makes it worse.

Working for an evil company is not intrinsically an evil act: you might be trying to unionize it, you might sabotage it from within, for your own interest (taking naps) or political reasons, you might be salting it.

If you really want to run a purity test on people, you should try at least to assess the space of action they have to fight against the company evil practices, their knowledge of it, the risks they are taking if they went for action. If a person has a chance to act against the evil impact of the company, risks pretty much nothing, has all the knowledge and psychological strength to act, and then doesn’t act, then we can start talking about unethical behavior.

I work for shitty companies and just take like 8x longer to do tasks. That’s the only way I kinda justify it.

I’m pretty sure everyone I work with is doing it too, because our velocity has become normal/expected now.

Also for the ones constantly monitoring your “available” status, proper mouse jigglers are great for when you want to take a looooong lunch or watch TV.

I also got a cheap used phone for logging in to employer Teams or Slack so I can pretend to be at a computer even if I’m at the store grocery shopping or at the bar drinking.

edit: Similar to another comment, I use the money for my community. Donating to food banks, buying clothing to donate, I recently donated a couple of computers to people who needed them, a few monitors, a cellphone, I helped my friend pay off their medical debt, etc.

I couldn’t do that without the money these jobs pay. If I’m still meeting expectations but it isn’t detrimental to my mental health and I can take their money and do good, I call that a win.

Depends on if they are building a software to track clock-in/clock-out, or the software used on autonomous drones to conduct indiscriminate killings overseas.

Good people working for evil companies and occasionally sneaking in good things is better than evil people working for evil companies and never doing anything good.

Guilty? Why are you using criminal law language in context of wage slavery?

Who collects the surplus value of labour, rent seeks and directs the extraction racket? Start there.

You should really think about why you are framing these questions in such a manner.

What’s the context here? I know people say lawyers are evil, but I’ve never heard people say building maintenance technicians are evil just because of the job they do…lol

engineers have not only the option, but the duty to refuse unethical orders. if your company tries to get you to do something that is unethical, you refuse, and they kick you out, that’s a legal issue and the unions would descend on that company like vultures.

there’s also the option of malicious compliance; implement things wrong on purpose before blowing the whistle.

keeping both of these in mind: if you are in this situation, you know about these options, and you still do it, then yes you are liable as all hell. not as much as your employer because they do have power over you (thinking of dieselgate) but you definitely had the option of walking away.

the maintenance tech is probably not even employed there, it’s more efficient for one maintenance firm to do maintenance for multiple companies.

Neither are guilty of anything more than surviving.

What the fuck are you doing trying to create scenarios where you can blame the workers? This is exactly what the ownership class wants, for people to create bullshit purity tests that further divide the proletariat. There is no ethical job under capitalism, nothing that can be done without a drop of malice, because our system has been designed to maximize cruelty.

Just following orders!

I think a software dev can be pretty not guilty if they’re making positive change in the company. If everyone with a conscious quit Google, I think they’d get more evil.

are they doing a good job? if so are they pushing back on anything unethical in the software that they want?

More, but not much more. Presumably the developers have more capability to get another job elsewhere and are less constrained by economic neccessity. Even then though their amount of “guilt” is tiny compared to those in decision making roles.

Building maintenance techs are evil? What?