Tech Workers Are Still Willing To Work For Scandal-Ridden Companies

Most big tech companies carry the taint of some scandal.

Some of the more egregious recent examples include IBM’s alleged age discrimination for which they now face a class action lawsuit for firing 20,000 employees older than 40 over the last six years, Google’s search manipulations and sexual harassment allegations that led to an employee walk-out in 2018, and Microsoft’s involvement in creating military technology that workers are now protesting.

And then there’s Facebook. Do we even need to list the scandals there? Maybe we do. Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s recent interview in which he does, admittedly, come off as a guy trying to do right by users, we still can’t deny that the higher-ups in that company played a role in manipulating elections, mishandling the platform’s role in the Myanmar genocide, and dozens of privacy violations affecting just about every user on the platform, including children.

The employment site Indeed recently conducted a survey on how scandals affect tech workers’ willingness to continue in and apply for jobs at companies that have been at the center of scandals such as data breaches, sexual harassment allegations, and deceitful privacy practices. The results may surprise you.

Indeed asked 1000 tech workers questions about their attitudes towards the field in general, their desire to work for companies caught up in scandals, whether those employed at scandal-ridden companies had considered finding work elsewhere, the types of scandals that might cause workers to leave their companies, whether or not scandals would make them more willing to report misbehavior in the future, how they hoped their company would respond to scandals, and what truly informs their opinion about the company they work for and the industry in general.

While the “sentiment report” was formerly posted on Indeed’s website, it appears to have been removed, perhaps temporarily. However, the company’s PR manager provided me with the original report as well as the questionnaire they used and the data gathered.

First, the results showed that the majority of tech workers (59%) do not think the tech industry’s scandals are enough to discourage them from working in the industry. This is not terribly surprising since trained workers invest both time and money training to enter a field and some may often think they can help change it from the inside; in fact, only 6% of those surveyed say that scandals make them less interested in working in the tech sector. But it’s still curious that 34% of tech workers say scandals actually make them more interested in the field.

According to Indeed’s survey:

This answer is more common among men (41%) than women (26%), and more common among millennials (41%; defined as ages 25-34) than those closer to retirement (16%; ages 55 and over).

When it came to working for specific scandal-ridden companies, 33% of respondents said that they would be less interested in working for such a company. But while caution is more common among women (with 40% being more wary of signing on, compared to 27% of men), in practice, more men said they had actually quit their jobs at tech firms as a result of scandals (68% vs. 50% of women). However, it’s unclear what role employees who quit played in the scandals (for example, it’s less noble if one was the perpetrator).

According to the survey, the type of scandal a company is involved in makes a difference in an employee’s willingness to stay.

Technology-based scandals, such as data breaches or product failures, are the type of controversy most likely to cause employees to leave their current job, with 37% of respondents saying they would be “highly” or “somewhat likely” to do so.

Gender-based scandals, such as sexual harassment and bias in hiring were also likely to make an employee leave, but less likely than tech scandals; only 35% of respondents said these scandals would influence their decision.

Among those who worked for companies involved in scandals, almost three-quarters (74%) of workers said they did not consider leaving their job at the company. So the good intentions in the data above do not always bear out in reality.

Curiously, 65% of tech workers surveyed still think that tech companies are ethical, though over half (53%) believe they need more regulation. Again, this breaks down by gender, with 57% of women vs. 71% of men believing that companies are “ethical.”

It’s not clear what counts as “ethical” in this sense, but one might wonder if the lip service done by companies in calling their practices ethical despite evidence to the contrary affects people’s perceptions.

Ironically, those willing to leave the field are most interested in entering the financial sector, despite the ethical lapses reported in that field.

For employees working for scandal-ridden companies, quick response times and transparency made the vast majority of workers more willing to stay at their jobs. In addition, most respondents (56%) relied on internal communications to form their opinions of how a company was handling the scandal, versus only 41% relying on media coverage. 

In summary, here are some key takeaways from the Indeed survey:

• 34% of respondents say they are more interested in working in the tech industry as a result of scandals.
• 32% of respondents said they would be more interested in applying to jobs at a company that had been involved in a scandal.
• 31% of respondents said they are more eager to work in the tech industry as a whole as a result of public scandals.
• 15% of respondents said they worked at a company that had been part of a public scandal in 2018. 62% of them left their jobs after the scandal, while 26% considered leaving. (This is interesting because only 21% of those surveyed said they would leave their company if it was part of a public scandal.)
• 38% of workers said they would be likely to leave their company after a technology-based scandal. This is compared to 35% willing to leave after a gender-based scandal, and 30% willing to leave after a politics-based scandal such as an executive expressing political views that contradicted their own.
• 48% of respondents say that they are now more willing to report misbehavior after 2018’s public scandals.
• 79% of workers are likely to stay in their positions if the company is transparent about the scandal and attempts to correct it.
• According to the survey, the most important factor when deciding whether to join a tech company was pay and benefits. Public reputation and image ranked at the bottom of the list with only 23% of respondents saying it was important.
• The top reason a tech employee would consider moving to another industry altogether was higher pay.

Despite these somewhat depressing results, we have seen tech employees step up and demand a more ethical and transparent workplace, especially over the last year. Employees at Google and Microsoft pressured executives to drop bids for a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense because they were unwilling to have their work weaponized. 450 Amazon employees signed a letter asking CEO Jeff Bezos to stop selling its facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies. Over 1,400 Google employees signed a letter demanding more transparency and accountability about a search engine designed for the Chinese government that would hide search results they wanted to suppress. And these are just a few examples – although, to be fair, these are just a few tech companies. 

One major problem the tech industry faces is that there’s no ethics training involved in the education of future employees. Even when computer scientists, for example, get ethics training in college, it’s typically one class among many. And when codes of ethics are put in place by companies or professional organizations, they appear to have little or no impact on actual behavior. For example, a study from North Carolina State University found that a code of ethics did not appear to make any difference in the decisions made by computer scientists once they entered the field.

As many of us work to develop some sort of ethical guidelines in the tech sector, it’s clear that we face challenges about whether people truly care about a company’s ethics. While it seems absurd to suggest that good behavior doesn’t matter to customers, there are still 1 billion Facebook users and counting, and boycotting companies because of their ethics scandals is pretty much a no-go as long as their services make our lives easier.

If we don’t care about our own privacy and safety, how can we expect companies to behave any better? If we continue to simply give lip service to ethics education and fail to enforce any penalties for bad behavior or even breaking the law, we may be implicitly sanctioning a more deceptive and dangerous future.

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