And many don't want these changes because they also want to make money before things change. This is one reason such change is not going to happen any sooner unless money stops mattering anymore.
I kinda think getting rid of the VC status is better than you can encourage investment in something unethical and risky without being on the hook because "we are just the advisors, it's the person with money who takes final shot with what they wanna do with their money"
I can see why it can help if the opportunities are shrinking in the legit space.
Not really as an engineer who had been in similar problem.
It's not that I am programmed to keep my head down and focus on technical stuff only and that I don't see the big picture and
externalities of our actions.
Having a technical degree instead of humanity or philosophy doesn't make you less ethical. I'd bet a broke and uneducated person can be more ethical than me despite not having the technical education I possess.
I can see the ethical problems but when I raised them to the management.
Management acted like my friend and told me, look pal, there are many people in the world and we can't just think for everyone. You need to care about yourself and your family and we care about you. This is our group and we only care how much our group prospers (read: makes money) and we don't care about outsiders.
It's ingroup and outgroup politics here and it's much easier to sympathize with the people who are in front of you acting desperate to make money than those who you'll never see.
Then they bring their legal team, who assure me that this plan is completely legal, so we will not run into any problems!
Have you ever seen Wolf of Wall Street? It's much similar to that, we live in bubble where it's okay to do those things and no one around us judges us for that, so we feel safe and secure.
There is no one telling me that I am doing something unethical.
If you want to study this problem then go back to history and see how much unfair the world was and people who had it easy were pretty okay with all that.
I can choose to leave this job but it basically means being stripped of your status, income and group (which took years of hard work) and even then someone else will right? And I can move up the chain, some day I might do ethical work, system can only be changed from the top, right? It's easy to justify your actions to yourself this way and stay at the place.