This is a genuine question - I really would like to learn more about why someone is OK working at a company with such an investor.
99% of statistics are made up and 60% of the time they are accurate everytime.
Government-financed jobs (private and public sector jobs financed directly by the government) make up 27.3% of employers in DC, 29.8% of employers in Virginia, and 15.9% of employers in Maryland[1]. Federal job share (how many jobs are working directly for the government) in DC is 27.4%, in Virginia it's 4.6%, and in Maryland it's 5.5%[2].
So if you live in DC 54.7% of employers are either the federal government itself or working for an employer that is financed directly by the government. I apologize for the rounding error in my made-up statistic earlier.
[1]http://mercatus.org/publication/government-financed-employme... [2]http://www.governing.com/gov-data/federal-employees-workforc...
That is surely what you attempted to portray with the original comment. That if you want to check the morality at the door you can't work in ANY government financed occupation in the DC region.
Having worked for a government consulting firm in DC, there was a line of business that received funding for social research projects to help inform and ultimately guide government initiatives to improve the welfare and education of certain demographics. This company would be included in your statistic, and there is no moral check needed for that work. While this is anecdotal, it's pretty obvious that a blanket statistic like yours cannot hold up.
You might as well be asking why people join the mob or why some women love mobsters.
Agreed, the cost of living is high in DC and these contractors are the only game in town who are going pay a person big bucks to create poorly written HTML.
On a less sarcastic note, an average developer working for a gov contractor can receive a high salary which affords a very nice lifestyle in the DC area while still allowing them to save for retirement. This is something that is much more difficult to achieve or even impossible in the private sector. It's not surprising why defense contractors can attract fresh employees.
Just a month ago I visited DC and a contractor asked for help on some of his code...the JSP was quite cringeworthy, and I was amazed the contractor could not figure out what was a simple CSS issue. Even though I had lived in DC for about 4 years and started my development career there, it had finally clicked how old technology was in the government, along with the methods of development (I had never done any development for the government, although I've been on the receiving end of some very bad bugs on software created by contractors).
not as cringeworthy as the fact that people are still using JSP. TIL
Many other people believe that what they do is good for the country.
And a small handful want to affect change from within.
They are just following orders. Nothing wrong with that. Since 1939...
You do realize that at one point "working for the Nazis" wasn't really a bad thing. Over time, it became one.
You can draw other comparisons, besides body count. If you don't see parallels regarding people saying, "I don't care about the affect my work has on people around the globe, as long as I get paid" I don't know what to say.
If you don't understand how that type of hyperbole poisons discussions, I don't know what to say.
You realize the camps were not exterminating people until after the Wannsee Conference in January of 1942, right? That isn't to say the Nazis weren't murdering people before then, but mass murders didn't start until the war started and were generally committed by the Einsatzkommando units in the field. As for the racial policies of the Nazi Party, there was a disturbing amount of support for them outside of Germany prior to the war.
Still, Nazi metaphors are almost always an unnecessary hyperbole.
Choosing to work for a company that develops software utilized in domestic spying is a political act itself.
Many people don't care about politics. They just want what's best for them personally and often in short-term. Although, working for defense contractors is usually a good long-term bet for such people too.
Also whats wrong with the CIA?
To turn your question on its head, what's not wrong with them? It's not controversial at all that there are many people who don't wish to work in the defense side of aerospace, or on other weapons tech, why would it be controversial that someone wouldn't want to work in intelligence. Some people take professional codes of ethics (or their own personal ethics) more seriously than others.
While I completely understand people that say would not like to work on the next generation of guided missiles, one would be hard pressed to find job in the tech sector that is not partially funded by the more militant parts of the US government, and if they completed STEM studies in the US more likely than not that some of their grants and scholarships were funded by the DOD directly.
Though it's presented as a trade off, torture isn't just bad from an ethical perspective, it's bad from a technical perspective.
It's really not pretty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_interrogation_techniq... [2] http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/18244-we-kil... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
More agencies should consider this model or variations of it. More governments, too. Aligns the incentives right so the market, at least chosen players, will do what you need done. Plus, they built a lot of cool tech this way.
Some people just don't care about what the ends are used for. But more importantly, just because some of their stuff may be used for Big Evil™, most of it may also be used for good.