It’s not so hopeless though. Not sure about UX, but for devs there are plenty of jobs, so you are free to switch whenever you see people doing or worse, demand you to do, dark patterns.
I’ve literally quit a job out of protest, where I started reading user emails complaining about the service we were building.
Stuff like “put the unsubscribe button at the far end, gray on a gray background, so it will be harder to find”. People were actually closing their bank accounts as they couldn’t find a way to unsubscribe from the service…
We had a few hard talks about it and when the company kept up with it I just up and quit.
And I got a job for a lot more money almost immediately. Turned out people who would do that to users, were underpaying their employees quite a bit too, who would have thought…
Props to you for having some professional integrity in an industry where it's practically frowned upon.
I couldn't take it anymore, half my interviews were companies I think shouldn't even exist at all. Decided screw the industry, I'm gonna scrape together a living any way I can and spend the rest of the time working on whatever I want to.
I might be poor now but at least I can sleep at night and I've never been happier.
Realistically, not being so young anymore, I think it's a matter of picking my battles. I'm plenty vocal at work, and have resigned jobs in the past for serious human rights transgressions (such as one startup trying to sell their filtering technology to China to censor dissidents).
An annoying popup message would warrant a direct complaint from me. A pattern of bad UX might cause me to jump the ladder and try to get somebody to pay attention and change things. But quitting in protest isn't something I can always afford to do, and it isn't always the best strategy for change anyway. If you come across as unreasonable or explosively reactive, they'll just replace you with someone they deem more level-headed or compliant and do the thing they were going to do anyway. But if you have an opportunity to use persuasion/diplomacy instead of force, sometimes that can work.
Anecdotally: I don't typically work in "pure" tech, instead getting jobs in nonprofits and/or the energy sector. In these industries, concepts like UX aren't always familiar to management or marketing (it's not even 100% prevalent in tech proper either). Bad UX is just as often a result of ignorance, not malice, and a chance to discuss things and educate other stakeholders without hostility.
An example of the newsletter popup situation... we held a short meeting to discuss the pros and cons. It was important to the business to get these leads, but they also listened to the UX side of it. We arrived at a compromise: Instead of showing the popup front and center at page load, we would wait for some time (30 sec?) plus some scroll percentage (at least half the page length), then slide it up in a corner, make the close button highly visible (big and black instead of tiny and light gray), and set a cookie to not re-show the popup if they dismissed it once. Is it as good as not having a popup altogether? No, but it started a discussion and (hopefully) met both user and business needs halfway.
FWIW I was also the one who pushed for clearer organization-wide unsubscriptions (so you don't have to manually unsubscribe from every single dept's newsletter using a separate link), did a privacy audit (unfortunately to little effect), etc.
There is definitely a time to quit in protest, but there are still small changes one can effect from within an organization -- if they're open to listening and acting in good faith, which is thankfully the usual case in my fields. If you have an evil cult-of-personality CEO, on the other hand...
I’ve literally quit a job out of protest, where I started reading user emails complaining about the service we were building.
Stuff like “put the unsubscribe button at the far end, gray on a gray background, so it will be harder to find”. People were actually closing their bank accounts as they couldn’t find a way to unsubscribe from the service…
We had a few hard talks about it and when the company kept up with it I just up and quit.
And I got a job for a lot more money almost immediately. Turned out people who would do that to users, were underpaying their employees quite a bit too, who would have thought…