It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this. I quit my job at Microsoft due to their complicity with Israeli war crimes and oppression (and certainly the US government was involved too). It's tough to leave a high paying job, but I feel good about it every single day. We don't have to be cogs in the MIC machine and we don't have to build systems that terrorize people.
There are allegation that Microsoft changed Skype architecture (after buying Skype for $8.5 billion) to make wiretapping easier.
"
In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;
"
It’s genuinely amusing to see how and why people posture, as though working for MS prior to 2023 was somehow ethical. Your post arguably only scratches the surface too.
I’ve concluded that most people care far more about appealing to the crowd than actually thinking by anything through.
If you shame people for acting now rather than earlier, you discourage them from acting at all.
Sometimes people aren't in a position to be secure enough to act. Sometimes different issues are more effective at resonating enough to break through previously cached unconsidered patterns of thought. Sometimes people don't know all the things that are going on, and act once they've learned about them. Whatever the reason, if your reaction is "took you long enough" rather than "welcome", you discourage people from acting.
Don't punish the behavior you want to see more of.
I’m not interested in shaming people or crediting them for superficial performances. The entire premise is ridiculous, as if the companies people are working for are somehow ethical.
You’re making money from venture capitalists and tech firms, MS, Meta, X, Google, etc… which of them is any better than MS? They’re all awful in different ways.
You are dismissing people as superficial or performative when they are taking action according to their ethics. Have you considered the possibility that people are not, in fact, performing, and are just trying to be ethical?
I can't tell if your actual goal here is to be dismissive of the entire concept of people caring about ethics, or if you don't think that quitting is an effective means of acting in concert with those ethics. If it's the latter, then I'd suggest that it's a start, not everyone is in the position to do even that much, and some people who do so will be able to go further. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, particularly if someone is taking a step in the right direction.
A lesson I've had to learn is that, for some people, ethics is a paycheck. It can be incomprehensible to imagine someone acting against their own paycheck as a result.
You don’t have to repeat yourself, I understood your point originally, I simply disagree with both your premise and conclusions. I don’t have the same respect for people who preach “anti-Zionism” at every turn online, I’m not that gullible.
Good on you. I left my post-university defense job after a year and a half. Of all career decisions, that's one I don't regret, and rather the regret I harbor was for joining in the first place (albeit did so under a combination of limited information & naivete).
Well it's good you just left on your own accord, basically you fired yourself rather than wasting their time having to do it. There's an interesting dynamic with this in that the Chinese and Indian (and other foreign born/first gen immigrant) workers at big tech companies don't care about these things at all. There are some very intense ideological dynamics within big tech companies among the employee base but I always found it interesting that the foreign born employees did not care at all, they were just there to work.
whatever the motherland's ideology/propaganda had been telling, the first gen gets to firsthand witness/experience that it were lies. After that you become were critical/unbelieving to whatever propaganda and ideology, even if it is the right ideology and propaganda this time, is being fed to you.
>There's an interesting dynamic with this in that the Chinese and Indian (and other foreign born/first gen immigrant) workers at big tech companies don't care about these things at all.
Why do you think the elite business owning class wants to replace you with desperate and malleable foreign workers from countries where morals and human rights are suggestions at best?
The other thing is, you built your nest egg taking Microsoft's "blood money" for a few years giving you the luxury to quit on a dime, but there's a lot of people on the planet or even in your country, wishing to do as you did.
You can't just pull the ladder after you and expect everyone make the same sacrifice as you except without their own nest egg. If you want to start a moral and egalitarian society then what about a higher tax on the wealth of tech bros, to finance the lives of the non-tech bros to accept humane jobs?
Putting energy into your family is generally the opposite of psychopathy, it's actually a good thing to do. On the other hand you can actually find a lot of psychopaths who find their outlet in political activism
"The Dark Triad traits predict authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes"
The psychopathic tell is dismissing political activism as "trying to derive meaning." It's right up there with the idea that moral or ethical claims are "performative".
These kinds of claims generally come from people who don't feel any moral or ethical impulses. These people are most commonly malignant narcissists and psychopaths. A great example is Elon Musk who described empathy as a "bug".
Morality is a fundamental feature for most humans. The people who make the kinds of claims above constitute a small, single digit percentage of the population. They tend to have an outsize influence though, because they exploit the trust of others to rise to positions of power, where their lack of compunction can be an advantage.
People like Trump, Musk, and Thiel are canonical examples of this. Eventually, when their actions make things bad enough for everyone else, people tend to take action. We may be approaching a time like that. You acknowledged this yourself in earlier comments.
Most of what people call morality is just their own feelings or interest or some attempt to protect their ego, it's basically just an expression of narcissism.
The cultivation of a sense of actual morality requires a lot of study and humility and quieting your own feelings and ego. This is very difficult and most people can't do it, ideally in a healthy society the elites you have are people who can and do do this.
Ironically Thiel in particular is precisely one of these people. He's very thoughtful and well read and displays a lot of humility in his speech and conduct.
People with morals are moral. People often confuse morality with just their own feelings, interests, ego. If you don't understand this then likely you are not actually moral.
This is a very childlike understanding of how people engage with politics across the US. Fitting that immigrant tech workers wouldn't understand the culture then cry foul when rightfully called out on it.
This is exactly how most people engage with politics across the US (and all over the world) and I am not an immigrant tech worker. Both of my grandfathers served in WW2 in the US military.
> Most of what people call morality is just their own feelings or interest or some attempt to protect their ego, it's basically just an expression of narcissism.
Oh good grief. Hot take of the month right there. All you're doing is demonstrating how uninformed you are on the subject. Can you name anything you've ever read about this?
> [Thiel] displays a lot of humility in his speech and conduct.
You can't be serious. Where in this does the talk of the "Antichrist" fit?
What kind of humility are you talking about? Because if it means intellectual modesty, willingness to acknowledge one's own fallibility, or reluctance to cast one's own political/intellectual beliefs as uniquely farsighted, Thiel's public record is not consist with "displaying a lot of humility."
The reason you call Thiel immoral or psychopathic is because he's wealthy and this evokes jealousy in you, it's a threat to your ego and your own sense of self worth.
It's really that simple and this is a good illustration of what I'm talking about.
>Because they're intelligent, work hard and have strong family ties.
So when imported workers are having strong conservative values prioritizing their family over progressive values = good, but when western locals are having strong conservative values prioritizing their family over progressive values = bad?
>But these things dissipate within a few generations of living in the US
Have you heard of the amish? Or the ultra orthodox jews? Or other such groups with strong conservative values. You underestimate the stubbornness of certain cultures to adopt american/western progressive liberal values. They can stay conservative longer than you can stay alive.
And also, given their significantly higher birth rates of their culture and religion, they'll also be able to outvote liberals who have catastrophically low birth rates, within a few generations. What do you think happens then with liberals and their values in a democracy?
>hence the need for more and more foreign workers.
The elites in the West don't actually have an understanding of what they're doing. If your point is that it would be better if they promoted traditional values and invested in the native population, yes it would be, but that requires a whole metaphysical framework which elites in the West don't have.
> Have you heard of the amish? Or the ultra orthodox jews?
Yes and Western elites do not think like the Amish or like Orthodox Jews, they do not spend their time studying the Bible or care about that at all (they don't even study the Western classics).
> Even when the locals are struggling to find jobs?
They don't care about this, again this requires a whole metaphysical framework, at most they care about their own families and you'd probably be surprised at how dysfunctional these people are in their own private lives
> the foreign born employees did not care at all, they were just there to work.
There's survivor bias in that observation. There are plenty of "foreign born employees" who choose not to work for companies that explicitly violate their values by choice. (I phrase it that way because of the whole "no ethical consumption under capitalism" issue.) I know because I'm one, and I have friends with the same mindset.
I just want to say that I don't think I was brave at all. I actually feel a lot of shame because I knew that Microsoft wasn't compatible with my values when I joined. I didn't know the exact details that came out later, but I took a very high paying job for a company that I thought at best didn't align with my values. I had to live with a growing cognitive dissonance about the choices I made. I also didn't exit tech fully, I still work for a company that seems ethical and nice, but has VCs that are probably involved in the MIC post we're discussing.
I've debated exiting tech fully but I do have people to support. I think that's kind of an excuse though. I also tell myself that anywhere I go, if you follow the money far enough up the chain, it will be unethical. That's also kind of an excuse.
I'm not brave, but I do feel trapped. I think we need some sort of reckoning as an industry, a country and possibly a planet. I don't know what will happen but I'm trying to balance living in 2026 with making choices that I can live with in the future.
Well there's definitely a global reckoning happening, people are not having children in developed countries due to very serious social ills (every developed country except for Israel of course).
Do you support the status quo of millions of H1Bs? Those people I doubt can or will take such a principled stance, making collective action by tech workers impossible.
You can comfortably go back to your home country. It might feel that you wasted your time in the US, but it was hard to foresee Trump ruining the US so fast and there's little to do about it as an immigrant.
Yeah, relying on someone’s conscious won’t really cut it, greed and current economy will always win. The best solution imo is crowdsourcing, there should be a site or platform that aggregates all the people who works in these companies, categories the company as grey or black list based on how engaged in shady practices. If someone chose to do something morally questionable, it’s up to them, but it’s also transparent that other people know that, could be colleagues, employers, or investors. I think it’s fair that whoever is building surveillance systems and tracking to be surveilled, whoever is making weapons to be known, they can be a public danger given that they sell their morals to highest bidder.
You know, if enough tech workers at Microsoft felt strongly about these ethical issues, they could influence Microsoft's decisions internally which is probably the most effective position to be in to do so.
But all well, glad you can feel good about yourself by leaving so that someone with less concern about these ethical issues can fill the void and assert their own influence on the company instead.
Have you ever worked at a large company? This is simply not how things are done. Speaking up about something like this is almost a guaranteed fast track to getting laid off in the next round of reduction in force, and if you do somehow have the pull individually or collectively to make a meaningful difference here, coordinating all those levers in a way that satisfies the board/shareholders and effects meaningful change is pretty much an impossibility. And we're dealing with nation states who are going to have their own levers to push (and internally too). For an individual contributor or hell, someone who's not on the board/C suite, quitting and letting management know they're losing talent because of their stance on certain issues is probably the most effective thing someone can do in that spot.
Following your line of thinking, why don't you join microsoft and effect such change? I guess it's easier to leave a moralizing snarky comment and feel good about yourself.
At the risk of being downvoted to oblivion. Threads like this always have lots of people agreeing to people quitting the jobs, not even ones that are directly working on that but even ones just associated with the company at hand.
This is an honest question, how do you decide what is Ok? A job with a company that was involved in this is not Ok, fair enough. What about working with a company that does business with Microsoft or uses Microsoft products? What about owning Microsoft stock and benefiting off it? what about owning Microsoft stock via index funds? Don't mean to be pedantic, but can I use Microsoft products, can I use outlook? can I use an xbox? What are my other realistic options, considering it feels like every industry (not just tech) has big 2-3 realistic options and they all likely have something bad headlines, even if I don't know about it. How much time can I realistically invest digging and fact checking this? I want to be good, but these threads generally leave me feeling judged.
I understand everyone has their moral compass, and they act accordingly. But, I find it hard to not ask myself, if this is not OK, why is this other related thing Ok? how do I decide what's Ok and seems when you ask the question you get downvotes and lots of judgement instead of answers.
I agree that these are good questions to be asking and I asked myself many of them. It's a slippery slope imho, and it's easy to convince yourself that what you're doing is ok. At the end of the day, I was getting physically sick and I felt terrible about myself. I mentioned it up thread, I don't think I was brave, I was just forced to confront reality through increasingly difficult to dismiss cognitive dissonance.
I think you answered it. Everyone has their own moral compass and act accordingly.
The concept of “No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism” and the moral framing of later seasons of The Good Place give good representations of how.
Ultimately each person makes a mark of what they can and cannot care about, and caring about literally everything is a fast-track to total impotence.
Some situations are (relatively) easy:
* Harry Potter is a relatively isolated (though formative for many)
franchise.
Some situations are way harder.
* Nestle creates a HUGE amount of the food we eat.
* Amazon powers half the internet
* Microsoft is the backbone of a huge number of corporate sites.
Excel makes the world go round.
Unfortunately, this is all up to you, and there are individual scales of “harm to the world by participating” vs “harm to you by abstaining” you have to personally weigh. There is no global answer.
I was a 68 working on consumer products, but it was still too much for me. Especially the revelation that Satya worked with the IDF to capture all Palestinian phone conversations and host them on Azure. Every day I woke up to go to work after I found that out, I was sick to my stomach. I eventually couldn't take it any more. I took a pay cut and I'm still in the tech industry working for a startup, and still facing ethical dilemmas (with our investors) but at least I'm not on the front-lines of human rights abuse.
TIL an intelligence agency spying on a foreign adversary is human rights abuse. I would be super upset if my country of residence did the same to a neighbor sending rockets my way, would make me sick to my stomach
Little slip of the mask here where we seamlessly transition from the perspective of an American working for an American tech company to someone living in a country neighbouring Palestine.
> TIL an intelligence agency spying on a foreign adversary is human rights abuse.
It is when it's an intelligence agency for a country that's actively committing genocide.
Answer a question for me: is the lesson you took from the Holocaust something like "if there are going to be holocausts anyway, I want to be the one committing them"?
I've always figured big tech workers were so compartmentalized that they wouldn't know their new analytic feature was also going to the defense skunks initiative, but that could be conspiratorial thinking.
Guess it doesn't matter now when they have full on defense orgs.
I feel like tech has lost its way recently. It's a huge, huge field, so there have always been people working on 'bad' things, but IDK, I just don't have the same feeling of optimism about things that I used to and I wish there was some kind of movement bringing that back.
I don’t know I think it’s really rich to see people who’ve spent a generation hooking the world on dopamine machines and making society full of hate suddenly act like those who work in the MIC are “going to far.”
People working at big tech are complicit in the destruction of communities and the mass depression and suicide of our youth, compared to that wanting your country to have the best military tech is altruistic. Military tech isn’t the problem foreign policy is, you can’t say the same about slop factory builders.
I think many people share this feeling. I sure do.
I don't see how it could have gone any other way. The internet became too pervasive, too embedded into too many people's lives, for it to not be weaponized by governments and large companies.
You spoke to my heart, comrade! Already sending Microsoft my resignation letter so I can join you on skid row fighting against the evil capitalist empire!
Also thank you for your bravery, it is not easy leaving well paid jobs. If you haven't already, I'd start donating some time with your local mutual aid groups. It's very therapeutic to spend time with people that believe similar things while helping others.
Nothing is ever enough, all the top tech companies, it's not enough that the conquered the global market, not enough that they dominated commerce, media, automotive, cloud, space ...
it's not enough that they have the largest headcounts on the planet (outside India / China).
they always need to do more and bigger the next quarter.
no morals, no core market, no other guideline, simply more, and I have to do it because else someone else will.
I really hope the Chinese keep killing everything that gets too big to fail.
endless growth is the same as cancer. unnatural destructive.
On the contrary, you will do exactly as you're told if you expect to cash those sweet MSFT paychecks, which I assume you did prior to this epiphany, otherwise you would have returned all the money.
Has this level of obtuseness infected the software industry because this is not the first time I've heard this; usually someone will take a job at a missile factory then later realize "Wait, we build war machines AND sell them to countries I don't like? I had no idea!"
This isn't an employee-owned grocery store where your opinions matter.
You're at the point in Goodfellas where he tells the babysitter "do you understand what we're involved in here?"
I bet your opinion of effective altruism is essentially the same as mine: the idea that you can do the worst things in the world to make enough money to solve all the worlds problems is a delusions on par with "prosperity gospel". Humans are just excellent as crafting a philosophy that suits what they've already chosen to do.
> It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this.
This appears to me to be unrealistic or performative, except if you mean pushing back in the sense that anyone could, as a voter for example. Boycott of defense work won't work; attempting to claim some special authority in debate won't work either.
The opposite of performative action is even worse: nihilism or even active support of atrocities.
Too many nihilists in the tech industry with the attitude “if I don’t do it someone else will”, and here we are as a professional class actively making the world an objectively shittier place. The VCs can’t do it without us.
This is exactly the problem: Software developers are not a professional class, we are hired goons with no professional organization nor a code of professional ethics.
This is one of my personal bugbears. I keep making this point on HN but devs want to LARP as professionals so they usually don't want to hear that they have more in common with retail workers than they do with carpenters, engineers, or accountants.
Yeah, and read the responses to your comments: "but, but, 'professional' is a state of mind, not just a piece of paper" and some crap, completely missing the point. Professionals push back with "I'll lose my license/certification/disbarred". Software developers push back with "yes, sir, how high, sir?" or "I quit".
I do think that for those of us who got into tech in the last couple of decades, the history can be rather obscured, but from the Fairchild semiconductor days, the military was a main customer, right?
I think there's a real question: would the world be a better place had Fairchild and peers e.g. refused to build ICs for missile systems (including the minuteman), for example? Would the same tech have been developed with purely civilian funding? Would missiles built with other tech have caused some awful disaster?
To the extent that the internet descended from ARPANET, and the internet is now both how we access a range of information and also hospitals get shut down by remote attackers, would the world have been better if researchers refused to build it b/c it was from military funding and motivations?
In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people. I don't know that the kinds of things listed in this research are likely to lead to broad other applications in the future like microchips and networks did. But neither do I think it's straight forward to just condemn this stuff as purely evil and say we shouldn't do it.
Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department? Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the US is uniquely evil?
I think it’s difficult to come up with hard and fast rules. But the fact that the US government (falsely) renamed their Department of Defense to Department of War is perhaps a useful signal.
Why isn't it? The change was clearly made to indicate the posture of the department. Either to US citizens or to powers abroad. Even though its "just" words it indicates intent.
It was originally entitled “Department of War” and was changed after World War II for better PR. Whether it is called “Department of War” or “Department of Defense”, it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget.
Personally, I view “Department of War” as more honest, because that’s always been its business.
Because the US has mostly been an imperial force of evil among the world, not a net benefit outsides of the elites that benefit from the deliberate colonialism + death.
War Is a Racket is almost a 100 years old and it's about one man's feelings towards his manipulation in the banana wars [1] + middle east interventions. You can go back every century and see what damage colonialism has done both abroad and at home.
There is an undeniable conflict between "Don't be evil." and "Evil pays.". A lot of what militaries do can be best described as the lesser of two evils. Murdering people is bad, but sometimes a little murder can prevent a lot of murder. However ethically or unethically a state uses force, there's usually a lot of money to be had in supplying that state with the means of force.
Is there room for ethics in military research and procurement? Absolutely. An AI company might say, "We will help you choose the best targets when under time pressure, but we won't provide an oracle that lets you justify indiscriminate killing of civilians." An explosives factory might say, "We'll build precision missile warheads for you, but not white phosphorous or cluster munitions, because these kill civilians indiscriminately.". People working for companies that do defence work have a moral obligation to observe how their labour is used and refuse to give it if the results are unethical. It's no different from soldiers having a moral duty to refuse illegal orders.
To answer your question, I'd say that participating in the defence industry can be justifiable if you remain guided by ethics, and unjustifiable if you abandon them for money. e.g. If you're currently doing anything to help develop the IDF's Lavender or "Where's Daddy" programs, it's pretty hard to argue that you have a functioning moral compass.
It's also completely fine to say, "I don't want to deal with moral grey zones" and refuse to work for companies that do military work. You might make less money, but you'll almost certainly sleep easier.
Other countries probably focus quite a bit more on the defense aspect. How many times has the US military countered a hostile attacking force? Instead, I can think of significantly more instances where the US was instigating the situation.
The US stopped countless wars from starting in the first place due to deterrence. Look at Ukraine to see what happens to a country that isn't part of an alliance like NATO.
That may be partly true, but in recent times, most western countries participated in wars like Afganistan and Iraq, and provided logistical or other support during the current Iran war.
The two major ongoing wars are due to US foreign policy and could be over tomorrow if US government fully stopped supporting their respective belligerents.
A good chunk of the human population has never known a "Pax Americana" and regions such as East Asia are clearly better off due to declining American hegemony.
If you’re referring to Ukraine as one of the two, we already heavily reduced our support under Trump and there is no chance in hell that removing the leftover support causes Ukraine to capitulate by tomorrows, especially after recent territory gains and destruction of Russian logistical supply lines with Wildberries and their refinery infrastructure.
Also if the other is Iran, lol at “stopped supporting respective belligerents” as if the US itself was not one of the major belligerents.
I think the other example is Israel which seems like the much more obviously belligerent, actively colonial nation state that the US is largely propping up (and wouldn't exist otherwise)
also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that
If your country's defense department is conducting itself ethically, and the contracts are for equipment or technology that is not inherently ethically fraught (like autonymous weapon systems), then one might consider that acceptable if you aren't a pacifist. An enormous amount of US military technology and weapons have been recently used to perpetuate a genocide, so the US is certainly an outlier in the global landscape.
There's a class of people in the West who have forgotten that wars happen and that defense is necessary. American especially benefit from two oceans separating them from the rest of the world and having never seen a war except on CNN.
Some of them, esp in central/eastern Europe, were rudely woken up in 2022 when Russian tanks rolle into a neighboring country. Others still have their heads buried in the sand and will not wake up even when Chinese robots march in Taipei in a few years.
As a person whose graduate work in GOFAI in the early 1980's was funded by DARPA, I am somewhat conflicted by choices like this.
In 2015, I told my son I would disown him if he went to work for Facebook. Several years later, he told me he was doing a contracting gig for Meta, on a project that would "definitely never see the light of day". Given the amount of engineering time that was squandered in the early 2020's, I chose to believe him.
Yea how is this comment so low. There was a brief period of time where the military industry complex wasn’t deeply entwined but that period is very much over.
>Keyhole, a small San Francisco-based company that developed software for creating three-dimensional models of the earth’s surface [was] provided seed funding in 2003 [by a CIA-backed VC firm, In-Q-Tel], and
within two weeks, military and intelligence agencies were reportedly using Keyhole’s software to support the U.S. war in Iraq. The following year, Google acquired Keyhole for an undisclosed sum. It was renamed Google Earth.
[...]
>A distinctive aspect of the shifting military-industrial complex is the crucial role played by venture capital (VC). Some observers have noted that the rapid rise in VC funding for defense tech firms has been spurred by recent global conflicts, particularly the war in Ukraine, and more recently, escalating conflicts in Gaza and other parts of the Middle East. According to this line of reasoning, the widely publicized use of drones, satellite imagery, Starlink, and other technologies are generating interest among investors, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to a shifting “ethical red line” that is prompting VC to back defense tech startups.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, maybe they will be more efficient than the usual defense contractors whose main goal is to charge as many hours as possible. Similar to SpaceX who have accelerated innovation while also lowering prices for launches.
On the other hand, it looks like Silicon Valley has run out of ideas for consumer stuff and are now looking to merge with the government to extract tax dollars while building the perfect surveillance state.
The way it looks right now, we are probably more going in the direction of Silicon Valley becoming a part the military industrial complex while also providing plenty of money making opportunities for people who are connected to Washington DC.
I've been reading Chip War and it seems like original funding for chip design was for the Space Race and for guided missiles - so basically most of Silicon Valley was started / funded by military all along
And ENIAC and ARPANET... what's interesting is how much of this is not capitalism but instead state funded and directed. I fear we're also seeing SOTA AI captured by the state. I am grateful for Chinese open models and a multi-polar world, especially given the egregious ethical violations the US has perpetrated very consistently since its formation.
Which was written as a call to action. The Valley should remember how trade is kept free, especially all those electronics moving Eastward across the Pacific. Worth reading Mahan if you're confused.
Silicon Valley started with companies doing defense contracting. Like many here, I disagree with a lot of current policies of the US. But I don't want the US to be weak or vulnerable. Tech is our strength. Silicon Valley should be transforming the way we do a lot of things, hopefully for the better.
I mean... the market was handed to the prime defense contractors on a silver platter for decades, and they utterly failed to deliver cost-effective or even working solutions.
It's not some 4d chess play by VCs, they just finally realized the market was dominated by the most disruptable enterprises on earth. Good riddance.
It was not just the VCs. There were also influential people in Pentagon who saw the inefficiency of the prime defense contractors, especially after having seen what SpaceX was able to do.
One of the consequences of this was the meteoric rise of the young Will Roper [1], who in a span of a few years went from a theoretical physicist to being in charge of the Air Force procurement program, and then tried to facilitate the access of startups to defense contracts, through AFWERX and "Defense Pitch Days".
Whether this worked or not is debatable, but the itch to change things was there. One example of a startup which was an early beneficiary of this top-down attention is Ursa Major [2], a rocket engine company. Unless one looks at them in the context of these military programs, their existence would seem quite puzzling.
We'll still have plenty of utter failures. I was shocked hearing about the IVAS program when it was announced, it was such an obvious loser. I guess it's better to have burned 2billion rather than the full amount but whoever green lit that nonsense should spend the rest of their career peeling potatoes.
reason I hate to say it is because companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.
if Palantir and Anduril were observing the same strict separation between political and military matters, and the same strict separation between domestic and foreign activity, that the military itself observes, then the only thing happening here would be the Valley disrupting a poorly-run industry. I have no issue with that. that is what the Valley's supposed to do.
but that's not what's happening.
It's not some 4d chess play by VCs -- this part is just provably false. they're using military contracting as a Trojan horse for some truly crazy shit.
> companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? How are these companies subverting governance?
> Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives
How so? I honestly haven't heard this before. I like Anduril's tech and have some friends who work there. I would be excited to work at Anduril but my skills have diverged away from what they do and so I wouldn't make a very good hire.
They will transform the world. Why? They don't know shit about security nor prioritize it. Hardware will be captured, hardware will be reversed engineered, hacked and duplicated faster than anytime in history. They will essentially innovate and do the hard R&D for the rest of the world. Yup, transformation indeed. That is of course unless they make security top priority and they won't!
I was around FEDRAMP stuff awhile back and there was a huge push to get "warroom" verbiage out of the tech field everywhere but there, like when visiting your normal silicon valley office we had to be careful about speech but you drive on base and let rip, since you had to interact daily with mil.
Wild seeing it come back completely unabated out of Luckeys mouth of all people. Missiles are kewl, bro!
The irony here is that the origins of Silicon Valley have deep ties to the military as well, and it was the successful commercialization of those technologies that turned it more into a consumer / b2b space.
But yeah, the tech bro elite are now tech fascists.
also the new war-profiteers are profiting from a war a certain family member started.
> NEW YORK (AP) — Among dozens of companies competing for Pentagon contracts to supply attack drones, one stands out.
> Powerus is flush with cash and ballooning in size as it buys up rivals and has one other advantage: It is partly owned by President Donald Trump’s two oldest sons.
> The latest Trump venture is hoping to win some of the $1.1 billion set aside by the Pentagon to build up a U.S. manufacturing base for armed drones now that the Trump administration put a ban on importing them from China.
also the new war-profiteers are profiting from a war a certain family member started
this is true but it's also kind of falling into a trap.
first, the weird endless hunger that man has for any and all spotlights draws attention away from the policy issues and rampant criminality, which are a lot more important than his personality problems.
second, he was causing chaos overseas with military in his first administration too. Silicon Valley wasn't all-in on that.
third, Anduril, Palantir, et al represent a consistent philosophy of how the Valley takes over the military-industrial complex. they come from the same financial backer, Thiel, who also put a lot of money behind Trump. so we got a paper here about the real issue, and if we're shifting our attention from that to this clown who kind of just works for Thiel (among other, even more dubious possible bosses), the risk is that the conversation transitions from substance to gossip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
There are allegation that Microsoft changed Skype architecture (after buying Skype for $8.5 billion) to make wiretapping easier.
" In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism; "
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...
Not berate them because they didn't make it sooner.
I’ve concluded that most people care far more about appealing to the crowd than actually thinking by anything through.
Sometimes people aren't in a position to be secure enough to act. Sometimes different issues are more effective at resonating enough to break through previously cached unconsidered patterns of thought. Sometimes people don't know all the things that are going on, and act once they've learned about them. Whatever the reason, if your reaction is "took you long enough" rather than "welcome", you discourage people from acting.
Don't punish the behavior you want to see more of.
(Also, OP is not even an instance of what you're decrying; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647687 .)
You’re making money from venture capitalists and tech firms, MS, Meta, X, Google, etc… which of them is any better than MS? They’re all awful in different ways.
I can't tell if your actual goal here is to be dismissive of the entire concept of people caring about ethics, or if you don't think that quitting is an effective means of acting in concert with those ethics. If it's the latter, then I'd suggest that it's a start, not everyone is in the position to do even that much, and some people who do so will be able to go further. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, particularly if someone is taking a step in the right direction.
The 'will not' list in here I Just learned about today, https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies it easily maps to the employment situation question.
Why do you think the elite business owning class wants to replace you with desperate and malleable foreign workers from countries where morals and human rights are suggestions at best?
The other thing is, you built your nest egg taking Microsoft's "blood money" for a few years giving you the luxury to quit on a dime, but there's a lot of people on the planet or even in your country, wishing to do as you did.
You can't just pull the ladder after you and expect everyone make the same sacrifice as you except without their own nest egg. If you want to start a moral and egalitarian society then what about a higher tax on the wealth of tech bros, to finance the lives of the non-tech bros to accept humane jobs?
It's useful that psychopaths always tell on themselves like this.
"The Dark Triad traits predict authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7369609/
These kinds of claims generally come from people who don't feel any moral or ethical impulses. These people are most commonly malignant narcissists and psychopaths. A great example is Elon Musk who described empathy as a "bug".
Morality is a fundamental feature for most humans. The people who make the kinds of claims above constitute a small, single digit percentage of the population. They tend to have an outsize influence though, because they exploit the trust of others to rise to positions of power, where their lack of compunction can be an advantage.
People like Trump, Musk, and Thiel are canonical examples of this. Eventually, when their actions make things bad enough for everyone else, people tend to take action. We may be approaching a time like that. You acknowledged this yourself in earlier comments.
The cultivation of a sense of actual morality requires a lot of study and humility and quieting your own feelings and ego. This is very difficult and most people can't do it, ideally in a healthy society the elites you have are people who can and do do this.
Ironically Thiel in particular is precisely one of these people. He's very thoughtful and well read and displays a lot of humility in his speech and conduct.
Well, that’s a point of view, I guess.
Maybe DHH was right.
Oh good grief. Hot take of the month right there. All you're doing is demonstrating how uninformed you are on the subject. Can you name anything you've ever read about this?
> [Thiel] displays a lot of humility in his speech and conduct.
You can't be serious. Where in this does the talk of the "Antichrist" fit?
What kind of humility are you talking about? Because if it means intellectual modesty, willingness to acknowledge one's own fallibility, or reluctance to cast one's own political/intellectual beliefs as uniquely farsighted, Thiel's public record is not consist with "displaying a lot of humility."
It's really that simple and this is a good illustration of what I'm talking about.
So when imported workers are having strong conservative values prioritizing their family over progressive values = good, but when western locals are having strong conservative values prioritizing their family over progressive values = bad?
>But these things dissipate within a few generations of living in the US
Have you heard of the amish? Or the ultra orthodox jews? Or other such groups with strong conservative values. You underestimate the stubbornness of certain cultures to adopt american/western progressive liberal values. They can stay conservative longer than you can stay alive.
And also, given their significantly higher birth rates of their culture and religion, they'll also be able to outvote liberals who have catastrophically low birth rates, within a few generations. What do you think happens then with liberals and their values in a democracy?
>hence the need for more and more foreign workers.
Even when the locals are struggling to find jobs?
> Have you heard of the amish? Or the ultra orthodox jews?
Yes and Western elites do not think like the Amish or like Orthodox Jews, they do not spend their time studying the Bible or care about that at all (they don't even study the Western classics).
> Even when the locals are struggling to find jobs?
They don't care about this, again this requires a whole metaphysical framework, at most they care about their own families and you'd probably be surprised at how dysfunctional these people are in their own private lives
There's survivor bias in that observation. There are plenty of "foreign born employees" who choose not to work for companies that explicitly violate their values by choice. (I phrase it that way because of the whole "no ethical consumption under capitalism" issue.) I know because I'm one, and I have friends with the same mindset.
I've debated exiting tech fully but I do have people to support. I think that's kind of an excuse though. I also tell myself that anywhere I go, if you follow the money far enough up the chain, it will be unethical. That's also kind of an excuse.
I'm not brave, but I do feel trapped. I think we need some sort of reckoning as an industry, a country and possibly a planet. I don't know what will happen but I'm trying to balance living in 2026 with making choices that I can live with in the future.
But all well, glad you can feel good about yourself by leaving so that someone with less concern about these ethical issues can fill the void and assert their own influence on the company instead.
Following your line of thinking, why don't you join microsoft and effect such change? I guess it's easier to leave a moralizing snarky comment and feel good about yourself.
I understand everyone has their moral compass, and they act accordingly. But, I find it hard to not ask myself, if this is not OK, why is this other related thing Ok? how do I decide what's Ok and seems when you ask the question you get downvotes and lots of judgement instead of answers.
The concept of “No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism” and the moral framing of later seasons of The Good Place give good representations of how.
Ultimately each person makes a mark of what they can and cannot care about, and caring about literally everything is a fast-track to total impotence.
Some situations are (relatively) easy:
Some situations are way harder. Unfortunately, this is all up to you, and there are individual scales of “harm to the world by participating” vs “harm to you by abstaining” you have to personally weigh. There is no global answer.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
It is when it's an intelligence agency for a country that's actively committing genocide.
Answer a question for me: is the lesson you took from the Holocaust something like "if there are going to be holocausts anyway, I want to be the one committing them"?
Guess it doesn't matter now when they have full on defense orgs.
People working at big tech are complicit in the destruction of communities and the mass depression and suicide of our youth, compared to that wanting your country to have the best military tech is altruistic. Military tech isn’t the problem foreign policy is, you can’t say the same about slop factory builders.
I don't see how it could have gone any other way. The internet became too pervasive, too embedded into too many people's lives, for it to not be weaponized by governments and large companies.
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/microsof...
---
Also thank you for your bravery, it is not easy leaving well paid jobs. If you haven't already, I'd start donating some time with your local mutual aid groups. It's very therapeutic to spend time with people that believe similar things while helping others.
Nothing is ever enough, all the top tech companies, it's not enough that the conquered the global market, not enough that they dominated commerce, media, automotive, cloud, space ...
it's not enough that they have the largest headcounts on the planet (outside India / China).
they always need to do more and bigger the next quarter.
no morals, no core market, no other guideline, simply more, and I have to do it because else someone else will.
I really hope the Chinese keep killing everything that gets too big to fail.
endless growth is the same as cancer. unnatural destructive.
Be careful what you wish for. What happens when China gets too big to fail?
Has this level of obtuseness infected the software industry because this is not the first time I've heard this; usually someone will take a job at a missile factory then later realize "Wait, we build war machines AND sell them to countries I don't like? I had no idea!"
This isn't an employee-owned grocery store where your opinions matter.
You're at the point in Goodfellas where he tells the babysitter "do you understand what we're involved in here?"
This appears to me to be unrealistic or performative, except if you mean pushing back in the sense that anyone could, as a voter for example. Boycott of defense work won't work; attempting to claim some special authority in debate won't work either.
Too many nihilists in the tech industry with the attitude “if I don’t do it someone else will”, and here we are as a professional class actively making the world an objectively shittier place. The VCs can’t do it without us.
This is one of my personal bugbears. I keep making this point on HN but devs want to LARP as professionals so they usually don't want to hear that they have more in common with retail workers than they do with carpenters, engineers, or accountants.
Previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625159
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932441
I’d be willing to pay a few hundred dollars a year to be a part of a professional organization that maintains ethics requirements at this point.
I think there's a real question: would the world be a better place had Fairchild and peers e.g. refused to build ICs for missile systems (including the minuteman), for example? Would the same tech have been developed with purely civilian funding? Would missiles built with other tech have caused some awful disaster?
To the extent that the internet descended from ARPANET, and the internet is now both how we access a range of information and also hospitals get shut down by remote attackers, would the world have been better if researchers refused to build it b/c it was from military funding and motivations?
In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people. I don't know that the kinds of things listed in this research are likely to lead to broad other applications in the future like microchips and networks did. But neither do I think it's straight forward to just condemn this stuff as purely evil and say we shouldn't do it.
Personally, I view “Department of War” as more honest, because that’s always been its business.
War Is a Racket is almost a 100 years old and it's about one man's feelings towards his manipulation in the banana wars [1] + middle east interventions. You can go back every century and see what damage colonialism has done both abroad and at home.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars
Is there room for ethics in military research and procurement? Absolutely. An AI company might say, "We will help you choose the best targets when under time pressure, but we won't provide an oracle that lets you justify indiscriminate killing of civilians." An explosives factory might say, "We'll build precision missile warheads for you, but not white phosphorous or cluster munitions, because these kill civilians indiscriminately.". People working for companies that do defence work have a moral obligation to observe how their labour is used and refuse to give it if the results are unethical. It's no different from soldiers having a moral duty to refuse illegal orders.
To answer your question, I'd say that participating in the defence industry can be justifiable if you remain guided by ethics, and unjustifiable if you abandon them for money. e.g. If you're currently doing anything to help develop the IDF's Lavender or "Where's Daddy" programs, it's pretty hard to argue that you have a functioning moral compass.
It's also completely fine to say, "I don't want to deal with moral grey zones" and refuse to work for companies that do military work. You might make less money, but you'll almost certainly sleep easier.
A good chunk of the human population has never known a "Pax Americana" and regions such as East Asia are clearly better off due to declining American hegemony.
Also if the other is Iran, lol at “stopped supporting respective belligerents” as if the US itself was not one of the major belligerents.
also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that
But specifically yes america has been directly attacked 20 times in the last 40 some odd years... so averaging once every other year.
Some of them, esp in central/eastern Europe, were rudely woken up in 2022 when Russian tanks rolle into a neighboring country. Others still have their heads buried in the sand and will not wake up even when Chinese robots march in Taipei in a few years.
In 2015, I told my son I would disown him if he went to work for Facebook. Several years later, he told me he was doing a contracting gig for Meta, on a project that would "definitely never see the light of day". Given the amount of engineering time that was squandered in the early 2020's, I chose to believe him.
Or what drove the demand for silicon in the first place.
As for "transforming", that happened some time during the Vietnam war when the laser-guided bomb was introduced. Been a smooth sailing ever since.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/09/defense-tech-covenant-anthem...
>Keyhole, a small San Francisco-based company that developed software for creating three-dimensional models of the earth’s surface [was] provided seed funding in 2003 [by a CIA-backed VC firm, In-Q-Tel], and within two weeks, military and intelligence agencies were reportedly using Keyhole’s software to support the U.S. war in Iraq. The following year, Google acquired Keyhole for an undisclosed sum. It was renamed Google Earth.
[...]
>A distinctive aspect of the shifting military-industrial complex is the crucial role played by venture capital (VC). Some observers have noted that the rapid rise in VC funding for defense tech firms has been spurred by recent global conflicts, particularly the war in Ukraine, and more recently, escalating conflicts in Gaza and other parts of the Middle East. According to this line of reasoning, the widely publicized use of drones, satellite imagery, Starlink, and other technologies are generating interest among investors, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to a shifting “ethical red line” that is prompting VC to back defense tech startups.
On the other hand, it looks like Silicon Valley has run out of ideas for consumer stuff and are now looking to merge with the government to extract tax dollars while building the perfect surveillance state.
The way it looks right now, we are probably more going in the direction of Silicon Valley becoming a part the military industrial complex while also providing plenty of money making opportunities for people who are connected to Washington DC.
Now that spending is definitely x10 more than 2023, at least.
Secret History of Silicon Valley by Steve Blank https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
It happened with Cursor, where Musk completely overpaid (what will he get in return? a new kind of circular deal?)
It happened with Anduril (topic of this submission). Kushner led a round and days after Anduril got a huge Pentagon contract:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-admin-hands-mega-d...
It's not some 4d chess play by VCs, they just finally realized the market was dominated by the most disruptable enterprises on earth. Good riddance.
One of the consequences of this was the meteoric rise of the young Will Roper [1], who in a span of a few years went from a theoretical physicist to being in charge of the Air Force procurement program, and then tried to facilitate the access of startups to defense contracts, through AFWERX and "Defense Pitch Days".
Whether this worked or not is debatable, but the itch to change things was there. One example of a startup which was an early beneficiary of this top-down attention is Ursa Major [2], a rocket engine company. Unless one looks at them in the context of these military programs, their existence would seem quite puzzling.
[1] https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Biographies/Display/article/1467...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE1HZAPPSrE
reason I hate to say it is because companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.
if Palantir and Anduril were observing the same strict separation between political and military matters, and the same strict separation between domestic and foreign activity, that the military itself observes, then the only thing happening here would be the Valley disrupting a poorly-run industry. I have no issue with that. that is what the Valley's supposed to do.
but that's not what's happening.
It's not some 4d chess play by VCs -- this part is just provably false. they're using military contracting as a Trojan horse for some truly crazy shit.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? How are these companies subverting governance?
How so? I honestly haven't heard this before. I like Anduril's tech and have some friends who work there. I would be excited to work at Anduril but my skills have diverged away from what they do and so I wouldn't make a very good hire.
Wild seeing it come back completely unabated out of Luckeys mouth of all people. Missiles are kewl, bro!
But yeah, the tech bro elite are now tech fascists.
> NEW YORK (AP) — Among dozens of companies competing for Pentagon contracts to supply attack drones, one stands out.
> Powerus is flush with cash and ballooning in size as it buys up rivals and has one other advantage: It is partly owned by President Donald Trump’s two oldest sons.
> The latest Trump venture is hoping to win some of the $1.1 billion set aside by the Pentagon to build up a U.S. manufacturing base for armed drones now that the Trump administration put a ban on importing them from China.
https://apnews.com/article/drones-eric-donald-trump-powerus-...
this is true but it's also kind of falling into a trap.
first, the weird endless hunger that man has for any and all spotlights draws attention away from the policy issues and rampant criminality, which are a lot more important than his personality problems.
second, he was causing chaos overseas with military in his first administration too. Silicon Valley wasn't all-in on that.
third, Anduril, Palantir, et al represent a consistent philosophy of how the Valley takes over the military-industrial complex. they come from the same financial backer, Thiel, who also put a lot of money behind Trump. so we got a paper here about the real issue, and if we're shifting our attention from that to this clown who kind of just works for Thiel (among other, even more dubious possible bosses), the risk is that the conversation transitions from substance to gossip.