After months of rueful avoidance, Adam* finally faced Sam* over dinner to tell him that his ethically questionable career was a friendship dealbreaker. “Our friendship was one of respect, where we could share what we thought,” Adam says. “It felt unnatural not to be honest about something like this.” They caught up like old times for a languid hour, before Adam told Sam he was “growing increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that [he] was friends with someone who worked where they worked.” Sam froze, unable to compute that the criticism was coming not from a self-righteous stranger, but a friend who cared about him. Then he said to Adam, “I can’t change how you feel about me, and I can’t change that this is what I do.”
The two had met in the sprightly stretch of early university, still eager to emerge and remake the world in their image. But as their friends struggled to land jobs, recruiters pursued Sam, and he joined a defence-tech company on the commercial side. Adam assumed it would be a phase. “You want to see your friends have a good start to their career, where they can work for a bad company for a bit [to gain financial footing] and then eventually go on the right path,” he says. But years later, Sam was still spending 50 hours a week at a company their friends once marched against. “That was really disappointing to me,” Adam says, although he felt a sense of hypocrisy, having gone into finance himself. When a second friend followed Sam into a similar job, and then a third, an ethical line began to take shape for Adam.
For those living in New York or London, mingling with morally grey professionals is hardly unusual. Pass the salad bowl down at a dinner party and it’ll greet the hands of many a finance bro or software engineer at a dodgy firm; after all, they are the people who can reliably afford to live in these cities. But at a time when our feeds show us exactly what else those salaries buy, from AI software sold to Israel for its genocide in Gaza to the private equity buyouts behind more than half of America’s costliest bankruptcies, what does it mean to keep inviting the people who earn them?
For some tech bros, broadcasting their employer has become a dating-pool liability. One viral TikTok highlights a Hinge prompt warning potential matches, “don’t work at Palantir,” stirring up a storm of comments from women recounting dates with “real-life supervillains.” One comment noted, “all of these tech bros are SO good at compartmentalising,” routinely relying on the same defence mechanism: Yeah, my company is evil, but I’m just here for the pay. But it’s difficult to draw the line when it’s a friend you care about using those same rationalisations to justify their paycheck.
“You want to see your friends have a good start to their career, where they can work for a bad company for a bit [to gain financial footing] and then eventually go on the right path”
Like the presenter of an onboarding video, Sam reeled off a list of talking points to Adam: that outsiders “might not understand what we actually do,” or that if he didn’t take the job, somebody worse would. At companies like Palantir, employees are primed to prize the excitement of technological innovation and to anticipate backlash. In response to criticism of Palantir’s work for ICE in 2025, Ted Mabrey, its global head of commercial, told new recruits to “expect to weather attacks like this all the time,” and that “the only way to counter these bullies is not to argue but to build.” So even though Adam’s own home country had been targeted with technology from his friend’s company, Sam skirted any implication that he was doing harm; he was only contributing to its commercial side, after all.
Professor Alan Morrison, who teaches business ethics at Oxford, calls this “moral dissonance” – the strain of doing things at work that you would condemn anywhere else. “People tell themselves stories and desperately want to believe them,” he says, “which is one reason why they need friends to interpret their situation and explain why the stories are wrong.”
Modern friendship is governed by an infrastructure of boundaries, driven by the waning but still popular idea that we don't owe our friends anything—not even an explanation for cutting them off. But Professor Morrison holds what he describes as a “classic liberal position” that engaging with people you disagree with is healthy, provided both sides take part in earnest. Cutting off a friend over a job, he argues, is “inevitably a way of not caring [about them] because they might need you to talk to them and to argue with them.” A friend who meets your suffering with indifference, however indirectly, is another matter. “That’s like they punched you,” Morrison says, and walking away would be understandable.
Paradoxically, sometimes taking a morally grey job is intended as an act of personal integrity. For some, it provides the salary that keeps extended indigent family afloat. Among Harvard’s class of 2026, for instance, more than 40 per cent of graduates from households earning under $40,000 went into tech. But more often, the pull is a product of environment: half the Harvard graduates who went straight into work chose finance, consulting, or tech, and most of those entering finance and consulting cited “salary and prestige.”
“People tell themselves stories and desperately want to believe them, which is one reason why they need friends to interpret their situation and explain why the stories are wrong”
Lina*, who studied at a prestigious university, watched her most curious, bookish friends splinter one by one into consulting and private equity – the channels into which ambitious young people without a fixed plan are so often herded. One friend sat further down on the evil spectrum, at a company similar to Sam’s. When his own circle of friends began to challenge him on his decision, he fell back on familiar talking points. “It isn’t black and white,” he told them. “You can’t get anywhere if you don’t shake hands with [bad people] to a certain extent.” He has since been frozen out so thoroughly that when he’s invited to dinner, half the group doesn’t go. This social exile has only caused him to dig his heels in deeper. “The more hate he gets, the more he’s like, ‘Well, I’m not gonna get invited to these things anymore, so I might as well play into the character’,” Lina says.
Do we owe such friends a place in the conversation, or does staying close sanction their choices? As long as you make your disapproval clear, Professor Morrison doesn’t think friendship amounts to endorsement. He even views dropping them as counterproductive to the causes we care about. Walk away, he warns, and “they’ll have fewer friends not doing that bad thing, whatever it is, and more friends doing the bad thing,” until the only people left around them are the ones who share the job.
We tend to hope that the people we love share our values all the way down. And when a gap in moral judgment shows up only in a friend’s work, it’s tempting to dismiss it as a thin, separate part of them. Marco*, a banker whose closest friend since the age of 12 abruptly cut him off as he turned towards investment banking, insists he can work in the industry and remain himself. “I have a very strong sense of self, and I’m a good person at the end of the day,” he says. But to Professor Morrison, no slice of a working week is thin. “If you spend 40 or 50 hours a week doing something, that is part of what you are,” he says. “People change because of the jobs they take on. I used to work in the financial services sector. Now I teach. That makes me a different version of myself.”
Friends are often the first to witness that change, and sometimes even the ones who turn it around. While I was reporting on this piece, Adam got in touch again. Another old friend of his, who worked at a different evil company, had decided to quit – in part because of ongoing months of conversation with Adam. Professor Morrison would consider that friendship doing its job. “We are not islands,” he says. “I don’t think I understand myself as well as some friends do… if my friends stop doing that, it becomes harder for me to interpret what I’m doing, and that might mean I make worse mistakes.” If that sort of conversation is impossible, he adds, “the relationship’s doomed anyway.”
*Names have been changed