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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

If the author is reading this: thank you for having the strength to say no to morally wrong work, despite the money, despite pressure from your family.

Good for you. You stood up for your morals. I wish that more people had your strength.

You are experiencing an identity crisis over this, which is normal. Writing about it is good. Talking to a therapist would probably be good too, if that works for you.

If I can give one piece of advice, it would be to stop talking in absolutes. Instead of "I'm done with coding", which is final and sets a stake in the ground which is hard to come back from, why not say "I'm putting down coding for a while to focus on my startup". For many people, myself included, it's normal to have many different interests over a lifetime. This is a good, and normal, thing.

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> In fact, I’ll just live off dividend income and try to get my new IT startup Fourplex off the ground

It’s easy to say no when the money is not needed.

It's actually worse than that. By holding his stocks he remains invested in the company in every meaning of the word. The dividends he's living on are the literal fruit of the proverbial sin that caused him to quit. In order to be morally honest about divesting himself of this line of business he needs to sell his stock.

He should invest it in something else, that he believes in, so that any dividends are thus just.

I agree with this.

He must rid himself of any remnants of Microsoft he helped build, therefore he still has a stake in MS through stock, which means he is still supporting surveillance capitalism.

Are his shares voting shares?

Shares are Shares.

Whether they are voting shares or not is irrelevant as he is still invested in the company.

As long as he is still invested in Microsoft he is still invested in surveillance capitalism, the very thing he is arguing against, and I am sure if he wants higher dividend payments, he would want the stock to go up.

Even if they are voting shares, he has no realistic meaningful power or say when a shareholder vote happens.

If I hated the company I worked with for over 10 years why would I still have shares in the company, I wouldn't want anything to do with it, this includes selling shares and wanting Microsoft's share price to go down.

I understand your perspective. I imagine, since they're the shares he has and it would cost a lot of money to sell them all, this could be seen as another example of "No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism".

Paying for food that Nestle makes supports their system too, for example.

Don't be dismissive of people's challenges in life, especially when they have the strength to share them. Money isn't the only cause of pressure in the world.

> Money isn’t the only cause of pressure in the world.

Of course not. However having FU money relieves many of them. Taking a moral stance is far less impressive when nothing is on the line.

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