I understand where you're coming from.
In a past life I trained defence people how to build better software for their killing machines.
Sometimes you just have to pay the bills.
That argument is terrible. If you are smart enough to program weapons systems for a defense contractor then you are smart enough to make money doing something else.
The issue is convincing the other people that someone who does that doesn't need to be an "Angular Ninja" or know by heart the complexity of several sorting algorithms
This. I understand that sometimes you might need somebody who can hit the ground running with a particular piece of technology but, most of the time, what you need is a competent engineer, regardless of whether they are currently intimately familiar with your technology du jour.
Only because it has no bounds, like most schools of ethics, but it is responsible financially in this society and Op doesnt work there anymore
I was fresh out of uni, teaching Ada and C++ best practice, along with toolkit and processes. Literally spent my last penny getting to the job interview, then lived on credit and supermarket end-of-day markdowns for six months.
I live in a country which is fighting off an external aggression for the last several years, and here "making killing machines" for defence contractors is a noble thing because you are literally saving lives with your work. And it's close to volunteering because you won't get paid proper money on such a job (because the money paid to you would likely be donated by other citizens anyway).
I see where you're coming from but that war looks unwinnable to me for either side. You have reached a stalemate so further killing kinda seems pointless in light of that. I've seen civil war first hand and how it can be all too easy to rationalize the killing of "them". I'm not passing any judgment just saying. Anyway, we digress too far.
For us, winning means stopping their advance. This is not a civil war, there is a clear external force to counteract. What you call "stalemate" is actually a big achievement for us.
How far does this logic apply? If it covers building machines used to kill without justification (I'm assuming you wouldn't point this out if you thought the machines killed justified targets), does it apply to someone running a website teaching people how to use malware? Someone using malware? Someone running a website dealing in harmful material that is mostly illegal? Does it matter if we say the person lives in a place where the local authority allows for this activity?