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Comment by jsgo | Hacker News Reader

Think that was with Hololens. Previously there were qualms with Office too. Though I imagine there'll be an open letter about this one too.

Dunno, I try to be sympathetic to concerns, but don't work for a business that is willing to do government contracts (or have the government as a customer, for that matter) if you don't want anything you work on to be used by the government.

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The lower you go on the stack, the greater likelihood you're building something that could be used in a way you disagree with.

I don't know how you can work on a cloud provider ANYWHERE and not have this issue. I don't know how you can work on any open infrastructure, honestly.

There are worse actors than the government already in the cloud, if you ask me.

>you don't want anything you work on to be used by the government

Is this the work of some kind of extremist libertarian branch inside of Microsoft?

the open letters and what not? I have no issues with their, or Google employees for that matter, frustrations on a surface level, but at some point you either have to make peace with the fact that what you're working on has the potential to be leveraged in a way you don't agree with or move on to somewhere else where you have some semblance of the corporate ethics and/or morality aligning with your own if that matters to you as a person. Unintended consequences stink, I totally agree as I did a bunch of enhancements on a system once with the intention of making everyone using it have an easier time but it resulted in the company needing less people to do the job (not by firing thankfully, but these roles were filled by temporary workers so as attrition naturally happened, instead of being a revolving door, they just weren't replaced as they were leaving). Felt miserable about it when it happened and it still informs me to this day, but I also learned from the experience that you can intend one thing yet the result can be very different.

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