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Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

Putting yourself in a weaker position due to your views doesn't scale and thus doesn't work. For one hero there are ten conformists at the same level of skill, waiting for him/her to leave. While it's brave, it is also pointless. The problem as you state it can be solved only by explicit consensus, being it a law or just a manifesto. Modern privacy has no professional and power-y organization under it, except for few self-distanced like GNU, FSF, etc. Moreover, by staying at google engineers who have an opinion probably can influence much more than those who left.

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Citation needed. How do you know that? Maybe it's more like this: For every conscientious person deciding not to take a stand because they think it's pointless, there are ten conscientious persons also deciding not to take a stand because they think it's pointless.

Maybe when one person speaks up, others will be emboldened.

It is called a hunger strike and for that you must be literally hungry anyway. All other strikes are solved by dealing with few instigators. I doubt that it really requires any citation, since it is a manager’s textbook case.

you can use the same argument to tell people not to vote. it's not a good one.

Not a good one use or argument itself?

If your argument is that they can do more good by staying, fine. I say the exact same thing about staying in Ontario despite the recent election of a wannabe Trump populist.

But if you say, “Ontario made this stupid decision,” I can’t tell you, “I didn’t vote for this, I can’t change it, I’m not responsible.”

I have to tell you, “It sucks, and as a citizen I bear some of the responsibility, and here’s what I’m doing in the hopes of fixing it.”

My only argument is that people who stay have some accountability. Accountability doesn’t mean they are automatically bad people, but it does mean we can ask them, “What are you doing about it?” And they don’t get to shrug and say, “Nothing I can do, so my conscience is clear.”

I see your point, but personally believe that we shouldn't dismiss high morals of those who realized to work for misbehaving businesses. It is just impractical to think that these grounds are unbreakable in general, so why care at all. Why not give them vote box instead.

You are weakening your own case by grandstanding. No sane person would expect you to "take responsibility" for some politician you didn't like (or help) to get elected in Ontario (a place with 14 Million people, but of limited global impact). You staying in Ontario (even without engaging in political activism) is not at all comparable to directly working on products you consider immoral in a company with an engineering workforce roughly one thousands the size of that but vastly bigger global impact. Neither in terms of personal culpability, sacrifices required or plausible positive effect your decisions might have.

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