Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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I haven't worked in finance but I have changed my mind about the morality of certain financial instruments enough times to understand that my formulation of "morality" isn't written in stone.
What if OP is wrong about the morality of what his company does? Does he understand the financial system as a whole good enough to guarantee his intuition? I mean Marxists think owning capital at all is some form of immoral let alone financializing it. What if OP changes his mind about what he considers moral or not in a year or two, I certainly did that many times in my short life. What gives OP such a strong reason to feel something that is legal and fills a need in the market is immoral, it's not like he is going to launder money for criminals who murder children with chainsaws.
If he finds his job truly immoral he can quit, but if he doesn't take it he is doing it at great opportunity cost and just might find himself holding the bag a few years down the line. What if AI ends up blowing up the world? Should the people who worked for PyTorch in 2017 take moral responsibility for what their creation has facilitated? How does he know he isn't already in a situation like that? How abstract do you really want to go? Should we consider Alan Turing and Dennis Ritchie to be evil?
"Feeling good about what I do" is such a hippie-goody two-shoes sentiment. You'd don't simply choose to say that you have to first be able to afford saying that. I'm not dissing OP but preemptively dissing anyone who tries to fool him into not getting richer*.
Yeah, if OP has moral issues with finance, they're certainly worth thinking over; from my perspective, I've never really understood the "finance is evil" position. Most finance jobs aren't making the world a better place, sure, but nor are they making it any worse; they're morally neutral, same as most tech jobs.
I have previously done (non-finance) work I disagreed with, and that really sucked, and I wouldn't want to go back. So if OP really doesn't want the work, it's their call. I do wonder if some of this isn't just nerves, though, or taking liberal platitudes a little too seriously.
Maybe as the OP, I can expand a bit more on my worldview concerning finance. I am not a "liberal" in the American sense nor anything to further left. Most of my understanding of the role of markets and finance in society comes from reading Polanyi, who doesn't take a very positive view on it but also has the common sense to credit these institutions with enormous amounts of economic development and peace between nations connected via international finance. But I also think that since 80s and especially since 2009 the finance class has evolved into some sort of grotesque aristocracy that warps most of real economy and state power into constantly feeding its members more resources while using those resources extremely anti-socially (i.e. conspicuous consumption and buying more influence).
I am not as naive as to literally reject the opportunity to become a minor member of a modern day aristocracy. That is why I applied and passed the gazillion difficult interview rounds after all. I still hope to be able to jump ship to a more product oriented company in the future if the tech sector manages to lift its nose and pay me a comparable salary
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