https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
There are allegation that Microsoft changed Skype architecture (after buying Skype for $8.5 billion) to make wiretapping easier.
" In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism; "
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...
I’ve concluded that most people care far more about appealing to the crowd than actually thinking by anything through.
Sometimes people aren't in a position to be secure enough to act. Sometimes different issues are more effective at resonating enough to break through previously cached unconsidered patterns of thought. Sometimes people don't know all the things that are going on, and act once they've learned about them. Whatever the reason, if your reaction is "took you long enough" rather than "welcome", you discourage people from acting.
Don't punish the behavior you want to see more of.
(Also, OP is not even an instance of what you're decrying; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647687 .)
You’re making money from venture capitalists and tech firms, MS, Meta, X, Google, etc… which of them is any better than MS? They’re all awful in different ways.
I can't tell if your actual goal here is to be dismissive of the entire concept of people caring about ethics, or if you don't think that quitting is an effective means of acting in concert with those ethics. If it's the latter, then I'd suggest that it's a start, not everyone is in the position to do even that much, and some people who do so will be able to go further. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, particularly if someone is taking a step in the right direction.
Ironically, you are doing your own preaching in your comments. It could even be described as "performative."
Talking about doing something on a 4 month old account is not the same as doing it. I give credit to people for doing things, not claiming to do them in an anonymous forum they just joined. Cynical? Perhaps, but maybe if people were just a bit more cynical about believing any text on the internet just because it feels better to believe it, we'd be better off.
Not berate them because they didn't make it sooner.
Why do you think the elite business owning class wants to replace you with desperate and malleable foreign workers from countries where morals and human rights are suggestions at best?
The other thing is, you built your nest egg taking Microsoft's "blood money" for a few years giving you the luxury to quit on a dime, but there's a lot of people on the planet or even in your country, wishing to do as you did.
You can't just pull the ladder after you and expect everyone make the same sacrifice as you except without their own nest egg. If you want to start a moral and egalitarian society then what about a higher tax on the wealth of tech bros, to finance the lives of the non-tech bros to accept humane jobs?
There's survivor bias in that observation. There are plenty of "foreign born employees" who choose not to work for companies that explicitly violate their values by choice. (I phrase it that way because of the whole "no ethical consumption under capitalism" issue.) I know because I'm one, and I have friends with the same mindset.
If you want to get into parsing out who is “white” or not you can do that but it’s really something better done on 4chan and also not even sensible as a concept or relevant to this discussion.
this is legit hilarious.
As a first-gen immigrant I can say that what I witness is that yes, a lot of what I've been told about America were lies. But a quite few things actually weren't. I made a choice where to live so I accept the whole package, and on the balance it's a much better deal than pretty much anywhere else.
The 'will not' list in here I Just learned about today, https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies it easily maps to the employment situation question.
I've debated exiting tech fully but I do have people to support. I think that's kind of an excuse though. I also tell myself that anywhere I go, if you follow the money far enough up the chain, it will be unethical. That's also kind of an excuse.
I'm not brave, but I do feel trapped. I think we need some sort of reckoning as an industry, a country and possibly a planet. I don't know what will happen but I'm trying to balance living in 2026 with making choices that I can live with in the future.
“Education level” is probably also an indication of social ills and a social ill itself given that most people are not suited for higher education. Most “higher education” in the US is abject slop and partying for 4 years. College used to be restricted to the aristocracy and particularly promising students.
If you take a young person who is already not of an elite quality and subject them to slop and partying, campus meal plans, basically unproductive day care for 4 years that also fills their heads with nonsense that is obviously going to do a lot of damage to them, especially young women who are especially impressionable.
It’s also worth noting that while Israel does have universities, as a societal intuition they function very differently. Young people serve in the army first for 2-3 years or they do university with a deferral and then serve in specialized roles in the army based on their degree. It’s not slop and partying for 4 years starting at 18. And it’s normal to not go to university at all.
Because that's a bit easier than quitting or turning down a job when you need the income.
Since you say you're still working and have people to support I am guessing it was more the latter, but maybe the "very high paying job" gave you the runway needed to make that choice? I quit a high paying software job under different circumstances. The company wasn't doing anything unethical (that I know of) but I was just sick of how they managed people and projects. It had reached the point where I sat in my car for 15 minutes (or longer) every morning just trying to summon the willpower to get out and walk into the office. So I finally just quit. But it was easier as I had stashed away enough money to give me time to find a new job without having to jump on the first offer. I ended up freelancing a bit to extend the runway even longer.
Congrats on getting out of a toxic situation btw, that's hard to do too if you're getting paid well. In a way I was similar, every morning started to be a real struggle for me.
There's tons of things you can do to make people on visas more empowered to push back at work without them become citizens; and in many cases cutting ties to their original countries.
We should want people who want to stay here long term, because then they have a stake, an incentive to stand up to bosses that want to wreck the place.
As sympathetic as I am to the desires of somebody who wants to come for a while and then leave, I think a better policy would deprioritize such candidates.
Sadly in my experience a lot of tech workers just don't even care about the issue, let alone have the courage to push back against it.
I certainly care about it and I have immense respect for your decision, but I've worked with numerous "typical tech/dev" types in the past who later went on to work at places like Shield AI and Anduril with seemingly no compunction about the imperialistic baby-killing aspects of working directly within the military-industrial complex as long as the pay is good.
But all well, glad you can feel good about yourself by leaving so that someone with less concern about these ethical issues can fill the void and assert their own influence on the company instead.
Following your line of thinking, why don't you join microsoft and effect such change? I guess it's easier to leave a moralizing snarky comment and feel good about yourself.
This isn't how companies work or are structured. If you have the CEO's ear, potentially. If you don't, the only ethical thing to do is to quit. (I don't personally have an issue with the military per se. I have other issues with several tech companies which would make taking a job there something I couldn't do.)
Why are so many people supposedly principled but not militant about it? A principled militant would use their role in m$ as an opportunity to be an anchor to the efficiency of the operation that they do not agree with. They will fight to keep their position such that a more effective less moral person might not take it over and get the project moving.
One has to wonder how many projects in the world are in such a holding pattern, protected by people who had the foresight to think two steps ahead, attempting to keep their body holding that door shut as they possibly can.
But you won't be doing it. Companies are run top-down. If you're within the organisation you're advancing the goals of those at the top. You aren't going to change that by complaining internally (unless you have a direct line to the CEO).
It's fine to disagree with something and just not contribute to it. If you want to be principled and militant, staying is hypocritical. In that case, you should whistleblow.
> attempting to keep their body holding that door shut as they possibly can
Unless you're conducting sabotage, which within this context seems like a gross overreaction, you aren't holding any door shut. (Again, assuming you don't have a line to the CEO.)
I am saying you should conduct sabotage if you feel the work is immoral and against your principles to such an extent. It would be immoral not to in a lot of ways, saying you'd rather wash your hands of it and pretend it weren't happening than to try and think of what you might do about it.
There are people far braver than me, but they were indeed fired. There are probably people covertly fighting the system from within but I didn't work close enough to any of these projects to know them.
So ideally people would do what you say and/or just be very open about their objections, but it's also worth recognizing the risk of industry blacklisting and how things like employer provided health insurance raise the stakes.
The workers can't even influence things like office setup and floor plans. They certainly can't influence business decision to any meaningful degree.
I don't see how it could have gone any other way. The internet became too pervasive, too embedded into too many people's lives, for it to not be weaponized by governments and large companies.
People working at big tech are complicit in the destruction of communities and the mass depression and suicide of our youth, compared to that wanting your country to have the best military tech is altruistic. Military tech isn’t the problem foreign policy is, you can’t say the same about slop factory builders.
The implication of your idea is what? The desire for a destruction of a state of 10 million people and another exhile of the Jews? That's the stance you deem moral - or am inferring unfairly (I hope I am actually)
If I am following correctly - you left Microsoft because it doesn't share this genocidal desire? I guess that's consistent and I admire that part, but the underlying perspective is horrifying when you just casually drop it in like that
I understand everyone has their moral compass, and they act accordingly. But, I find it hard to not ask myself, if this is not OK, why is this other related thing Ok? how do I decide what's Ok and seems when you ask the question you get downvotes and lots of judgement instead of answers.
The concept of “No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism” and the moral framing of later seasons of The Good Place give good representations of how.
Ultimately each person makes a mark of what they can and cannot care about, and caring about literally everything is a fast-track to total impotence.
Some situations are (relatively) easy:
* Harry Potter is a relatively isolated (though formative for many)
franchise.
* Nestle creates a HUGE amount of the food we eat.
* Amazon powers half the internet
* Microsoft is the backbone of a huge number of corporate sites.
Excel makes the world go round.
* Bad news: "Voting with your wallet" is actually pretty ineffective. Big companies know it, diversify around it, and they're happy when consumers are neutralized and busy infighting with one-another over consumptive purity, instead of...
* Good news: Organizing politically does work, and is so much more-effective that you can arguably redeem any evil taint on your shopping list by engaging in it.
[0] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-05-21...
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/microsof...
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Also thank you for your bravery, it is not easy leaving well paid jobs. If you haven't already, I'd start donating some time with your local mutual aid groups. It's very therapeutic to spend time with people that believe similar things while helping others.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
It is when it's an intelligence agency for a country that's actively committing genocide.
Answer a question for me: is the lesson you took from the Holocaust something like "if there are going to be holocausts anyway, I want to be the one committing them"?
this conflation is extremely unhelpful
also, there was conflict between Jewish Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians long before the Holocaust. Zionists were trying to take over in the late days of the Ottoman Empire.
As I said, it's mystifying that the conclusion from being targeted for genocide is "...therefore we must commit genocide against others." I suppose it is consistent with biblical commandments, though.
Attempted genocide better describes Hamas, who slaughtered a 1/4 of the civilians in the first villages they got their hands on, before being pushed back.
> a neighbor sending rockets my way, would make me sick to my stomach
Israel has been murdering Palestinians since Nakba. They literally eliminated whole cities in Gaza. I think that makes most people in the world sick to their stomach.
Guess it doesn't matter now when they have full on defense orgs.
man imagine when you learn about what MS did to all Americans phone conversations, emails, meta data, and basically all digital communications flowing in and out of the US for the NSA.
Has this level of obtuseness infected the software industry because this is not the first time I've heard this; usually someone will take a job at a missile factory then later realize "Wait, we build war machines AND sell them to countries I don't like? I had no idea!"
This isn't an employee-owned grocery store where your opinions matter.
You're at the point in Goodfellas where he tells the babysitter "do you understand what we're involved in here?"
Nothing is ever enough, all the top tech companies, it's not enough that the conquered the global market, not enough that they dominated commerce, media, automotive, cloud, space ...
it's not enough that they have the largest headcounts on the planet (outside India / China).
they always need to do more and bigger the next quarter.
no morals, no core market, no other guideline, simply more, and I have to do it because else someone else will.
I really hope the Chinese keep killing everything that gets too big to fail.
endless growth is the same as cancer. unnatural destructive.
Be careful what you wish for. What happens when China gets too big to fail?
Taiwan would like a word.
Okay, Taiwan. They are the losing side from the Chinese civil war from over half a century ago and proclaim themselves as the true Chinese government. I'm not saying China has the right to crush them, but the tension is at least understandable.
A comparison with the democracies and lives destroyed by US FP is ridiculous. If Taiwan would like a word with China, well, half the world would like a word with the US.
We already see China deploying debt traps and surveillance technology to developing nations. They are building surveillance states which feed back into China. With that, I feel that we have yet to see how China is going to exert its power.
What we do know right now is that the US has been a poor hegemony, inflicting a century of suffering around the world, and China has not. They might end up being worse, but given the last hundred years of history, I find that unlikely.
I'll take the risk of surveillance and debt traps a thousand times over something like Operação Condor.
This appears to me to be unrealistic or performative, except if you mean pushing back in the sense that anyone could, as a voter for example. Boycott of defense work won't work; attempting to claim some special authority in debate won't work either.
Too many nihilists in the tech industry with the attitude “if I don’t do it someone else will”, and here we are as a professional class actively making the world an objectively shittier place. The VCs can’t do it without us.
This is one of my personal bugbears. I keep making this point on HN but devs want to LARP as professionals so they usually don't want to hear that they have more in common with retail workers than they do with carpenters, engineers, or accountants.
Previously:
I’d be willing to pay a few hundred dollars a year to be a part of a professional organization that maintains ethics requirements at this point.