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.
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.
> 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.
>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?
Because they're intelligent, work hard and have strong family ties. They put their energy into their families instead of trying to derive meaning from political activism. But these things dissipate within a few generations of living in the US, hence the need for more and more foreign workers.
>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
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft has been participating in PRISM program (SIGAD US-984XN) since 2007.
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-...
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.
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.
> 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 mean non-Europeans/non-Anglosphere
>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?
Because they're intelligent, work hard and have strong family ties. They put their energy into their families instead of trying to derive meaning from political activism. But these things dissipate within a few generations of living in the US, hence the need for more and more foreign workers.
>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.
Even when the locals are struggling to find jobs?
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
> They put their energy into their families instead of trying to derive meaning from political activism.
It's useful that psychopaths always tell on themselves like this.
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"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7369609/
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.
Thank you, both for following your values and for sharing it publicly
yes, OC was so brave
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).
Did you realize that sharing personal attacks is, in fact, optional?
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.
Wouldn't this be an argument for people who can take principled stances to do so?
that they'll be replaced by H1Bs?
That's exactly why they are imported in such huge numbers.
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.
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.
There's a solution to this problem, and that solution is workers unionizing.
You’re doing the right thing! Glad to see this kind of action.
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 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:
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.I sold my Microsoft stock when they started talking about military AR headsets. Except the index funds. I'm not sure what to do about that.
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.
What was your job at Microsoft?
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
War is a massive racket.
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.
Recently? Blind (teamblind.com) culture has been taking over tech for like a decade at this point.
Blind culture is really just asian cultural values in aggregate form.
I think the parent commenter is referring to a much darker side of tech than just TC-chasing Blind culture, which is pretty harmless in comparison
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.
It should be noted that MSFT is the only tech company that explicitly asked the FBI to surveil about workers that were protesting the Gaza genocide:
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/microsof...
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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.
This is the problem with capitalism.
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.
> I really hope the Chinese keep killing everything that gets too big to fail.
Be careful what you wish for. What happens when China gets too big to fail?
> 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.
Previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625159
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932441
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.
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.
US military power does most of its heavy lifting without throwing bombs. We're seeing the end of Pax Americana and it isn't pretty.
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.
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.
In even more recent times, the US made war on Iran for no apparent reason at all.
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.
Transforming? You guys do know where google got it's start right? SV has been DOD funded from the start.
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.
Post WWII built SV - it has always been the case.
I originally read the headline as "Silicon Valley Is Transforming Military-Industrial Complex".
Tech workers on the way to work: I wonder why this tram stop is called "Lockheed-Martin". I guess we'll never know!
Wait till they find out where the Internet came from.
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.
[delayed]
some interesting tidbits from the longer report:
>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.
Keyhole founder John Hanke also went on to found Niantic and develop Pokémon Go.
VCs don't have ethics. The first puppy crushing startup will achieve record valuation in record time. The Torment Nexus is already real enough.
Silicon Valley was practically built by the military industrial complex.
True. 'The Secret History of Silicon Valley', Steve Blank, is essential viewing, IMO.
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.
hoisted by its own petard!
heh upvoted, came here to note same; the continuous net gain of defense R&D
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
Before chips it was radio and radars. The Klystron was invented at Stanford. Lockheed Martin Space and Raytheon have locations in Silicon Valley.
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.
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.
Always has been.
Secret History of Silicon Valley by Steve Blank https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
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.
[1] https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Biographies/Display/article/1467...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE1HZAPPSrE
[delayed]
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.
I hate to say it, but this is mostly true.
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.
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!
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.
https://apnews.com/article/drones-eric-donald-trump-powerus-...
Evidently they want to deplete the military's reserves in order to sell them the refills.
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.
The game is always the same. Josh Kushner leads a funding round, then someone in the Trump environment boosts the company:
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...
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.