Due to my inability to ignore bad processes and my wanting to get paid more, over the last couple years I've been moving from a 100% design role to a part-design, part staffing manager. I now assign fellow designers in my engineering sub-department to the projects our company is hired for. I have very little input in what projects we take on, but from my position I can read their budgets and expected hours for various client submissions, I then take this info and try to balance the work between my coworkers. In the past 6 months we've been completely overwhelmed with work, too many hours of work to do for our team. Thankfully, our project managers and clients have had project deadlines slip but the projections always show a ton of work upcoming and many coworkers are working unpaid overtime. I've been advocating for hiring more designers, and in the last month have become very explicit in voicing this need, but, I think, worry about economic recession has kept management from posting a job opportunity online.
Does anyone have an idea or opinion that can help me? Am I selling out by leaving my design only role?
I am considering looking for a new job, I'm very in demand as there are few electrical engineers in my field. I'm also considering applying to grad schools in Europe, cheaper and more relevant to my specific goals, but my undergrad GPA was pretty bad. I worry that I'm running from my life though, and I could have an opportunity here to positively change my firm's culture?
As someone who went from engineer-on-the-ground to some degree of management, my moral position is 'eh'. Just as there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism, so am I unsure if there's any ethical production within it either.
If you have some freedom and think you can do relative 'good' from your position for other workers, grand. This was the position I found myself in - Getting promoted to manager meant I could tell my team to take leave and do the jobs they want, while telling upper management to piss off.
If the job is soul-sucking, maybe you are a slave driver by any other name, and you think the world would be better by making that job one-person-worth harder to fill, then leave.
You're definitely mired in the nonsense already, given your first paragraph. I don't know about you, but I found getting stuck in that nonsense to be extremely stressful and why I eventually left because I very honestly would've become a drug addict to cope.
I think that means that there is no consumption without enabling labor exploitation. The moral right to eat food and live indoors is still there under capitalism. And there is a moral difference between making medicine and making bombs
Sure, but if we take Germany for example when there was high unemployment people without a job were forced to apply to weapon manufacturers, too, or get cut their unemployment/social money. Of course not all are in that situation and it wasn't done to all, but plenty I know were forced to work for super markets, fast food chains, clean up at night, do "security"/securitas/pinkerton night watch at air ports and company facilities, do janitorial work for business consultant companies, for coca cola or for evil property managing companies, or microsoft, google etc.
If you do open source software and contribute to the Kernel there is a good chance your stuff will be used by weapons manufacturers since some people defended the freedom to use "free" software for that goal.
I think that we ought to ensure that our comrades can stay afloat in capitalism first and foremost and try to not so much with sentiment try to shun and shame people from working for companies that pay well in positions that pay well (as even then most are still part of the working class if we are honest), but more try to have collective action and specific campaigns again specific jobs and companies. I know in my affinity groups most that did shame people I know for working for "bad orgs", like the military when they were drafted, were liberals and had family backing in terms of money.
That said middle managers can if they are organized with us be an asset, but their role and function often makes them opponents in terms of good working conditions or social and material gains.
I'm not saying that someone is immoral for choosing it as opposed to poverty or starvation I am saying that if given options making weapons is less moral than other options. There are degrees of morality
Sure, but I think degrees of morality often lead to problems and moral decision making overload. You don't have to make moral decisions to be my comrade, but we will have as organizations try to figure out what is important for us to work, to sustain and uplift each other.
The nonsense is exhausting. I like working the problem of project assignment, it's a fun puzzle, but it's ruined by the human toll each decision leads to.