Only semi-professional. There's no legal barrier to entry or licensing, no guild structure— no bar association, no medical board, no engineer licensing board, etc. It's privileged, high-wage work, but it's not a profession in the strict sense.
Professions have some kind of organization that tries to impose standards of discipline and ethics.
Anyone talking a job at Meta knows the entire point of their job is to make young men angry, and young women depressed. And they do it anyway, because they expressly agree with those outcomes as long as it pays them an exorbitant salary. Blaming it all on Zuckerberg is bullshit designed to make “you” feel better about what a complicit, worthless asshole “you” are when there are countless jobs doing things that aren’t expressly and intentionally evil.
There are no good people working at these companies.
Being clear, the you in my comment is the generic you - not directed at you the individual I’m replying to.
This is a standard cop-out that bears challenging every time it's used.
By refusing the job, you narrow the number of people who can do the job, making it more expensive, both because there are fewer candidates to do the job and because it makes the hunt for employees take longer. It also gives cover for others who aren't confident to stand against the job by themselves when they see others refuse it.
There's a non-zero chance that refusing such a job means it becomes too expensive to be feasible, especially if it requires expertise held by a limited set of individuals.
> By refusing the job, you narrow the number of people who can do the job
By refusing a job, I only narrow my employment opportunities.
The bank won't take my goodwill as payment before they take the house for not paying the mortgage. This is essentially where the discussion ends.
The world is cursed. I have to engage with systems that were not of my creation, and that will devour me if I am complacent. But we keep moving forward anyway.
I would like these companies to not exist. For the billionaires that direct them to create immeasurable damage to society to pay for their misdeeds. I even vote for whichever party that promises to limit the reach of those companies.
What I won't do is damage the lives of those that depend on me in an empty gesture of moral grandstanding.
Demand scruples from the common man while the billionaire overlords who are actually the major beneficiaries are off the hook.