I feel like you are deliberately or inadvertently missing the point. Its simple, The claim was that working for some of the biggest companies in the world that employ hundreds of thousands of people is wrong and called all of them a sellout and I disagree. Feel free to disagree with me, and don't worry I wont judge you for it.
if i'm missing your point, that's an honest miscommunication. i read the conversation like this:
matt_s: devs working for Meta must be sacrificing their values in exchange for money.
eilnvlrn: why do HNers always speak from a moral high horse, rather than accept that others operate with other moral codes?
colinsane: our different moral codes here do put us in conflict: vocalizing our values is the least destructive way for us to come to terms.
eilnvlrn: so long as i act within the law then you're wrong to consider us in conflict.
> don't worry I wont judge you for it.
i don't care if you judge me. if i speak from a "moral high-horse" i don't do it to rub it in your face, or to self-aggrandize, or anything like that. i would do it to make known that your actions are an impediment to the aims i have for my own life -- and hope that you might be compassionate enough to consider such things.
literally just erase every occurrence of "moral" from this thread if it makes it easier to see through to the content. i'm trying to build my own future: it's made difficult by every variant of anti-competitive "moat building", "vendor lockin", "embrace extend extinguish", dragnet surveillance, and so on which is core to the business model of the company (companies) in question.
_forget about morals_: i call that thing out because when you work for this kind of company you are an aggressor to me. if i camped out on the sidewalk in front of your house and watched every action you made, you would find it hard to live a peaceful life. you would call me a stalker and see me as an adversary. yet when i instead design and sell Ring cameras to all your neighbors to achieve that exact same end without a physical human on your sidewalk, suddenly you wouldn't see me as an adversary? that's nonsense. for real though, because some are quick to dismiss it: do you understand how nonsense that type of thinking is?
and yes, i get the nuance about distance. that going way upstream and working for TSMC doesn't erase the link between your work and the harmful end result. but that doesn't mean proximity is irrelevant. a lateral move from Amazon's Ring team to a GoPro team would surely put us in less conflict. an upstream move to some vendor which supplies both Amazon and GoPro puts you closer to the midpoint. just about _any_ move away from the companies in question puts us in less conflict, hence why the heat is focused more specifically on them.
