Find engineering teams that share your values
One thing that I&#x27;ve noticed about ethical or socially responsible investment firms is that they have a very specific list of ethical concerns that they offer to help investors use to make investment decisions (maybe the most commonly-expressed ones, maybe ones that are most similar to the founders&#x27; concerns, and maybe the ones that are easiest to measure). But of course there are lots of things that people feel passionate about, and some of them are more obscure and not the subject of major current divestment campaigns, and some of them are opposite of each other!<p>For example, some people find it very important not to invest in nuclear energy (often because of the risks of radioactive waste, among others), while other people find it very important to invest in nuclear energy (often because of the lack of greenhouse gas emissions) -- especially given the alternative of, say, hydroelectric power. Some people find it very important to divest from Israel, and other people find it very important to invest in Israel. Some people want to invest in developing countries, and other people want to promote employment in their home country. People might strongly disagree about which of {porn, alcohol, tobacco, marijuana} they don&#x27;t want to invest in.<p>So, this hiring-oriented service has a similar set of challenges -- although it&#x27;s easy to argue in both cases that the default is having would-be investors or employees be totally in the dark about <i>every</i> dimension, so it&#x27;s better to light a candle than curse the darkness.<p>To give a &quot;niche&quot; example, two of my own traditional concerns are animal rights and free software, both of which could be relevant to investment and employment but both of which can be seen as obscure or marginal concerns in particular settings. But it&#x27;s easy for me to notice that &quot;promotes software freedom&quot; isn&#x27;t on the values list here, even though it&#x27;s perhaps pretty relevant to technology jobs (maybe too few prospective employees or too few prospective employers have mentioned it?).<p>I was actually talking to someone a few years ago about the question of whether one could make a hyper-specific ethical investing firm that really gave people lots of fine-grained choices, and not just, say &quot;environmental-friendly&quot; (according to one single organization&#x27;s criteria) or &quot;good labor conditions&quot; (again according to one single organization&#x27;s criteria) or &quot;not invested in vices&quot; (is there a pattern here?). It might be courting far greater controversy to do that for employment and workplace culture, but it&#x27;s easy to see that there are lots more details and more attitudes than are yet represented here. And also there&#x27;s the straightforward question of who has assessed these things and whether different current and prospective employees employees would all agree.<p>Anyway, I don&#x27;t mean to be super-negative here. It&#x27;s a very interesting attempt at a very thorny, complex problem.