Large institutions are complex, neither completely good nor completely evil. I don't think that's too much to ask users of an internet forum intended for intellectually substantive discourse to understand.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11927587 and marked it off-topic.

> Large institutions are complex, neither completely good nor completely evil. I don't think that's too much to ask users of an internet forum intended for intellectually substantive discourse to understand.

Except you did not intellectually substantiated anything, but your own/company's opinions.

Nor it makes sense for you or anybody else to arbitrarily mark the parent as a flamewar comment.

You are very free to have and express your own opinions, you should others have and express their own, though.

For example I worked on software that helped soldiers look at patterns of IED placements to hopefully help them figure out where others were. I wouldn't consider what I worked on even indirectly supporting any type of killing but helping out people stay safer.

I'm sure that's not what you meant, but this sounds like damning with faint praise :)

Precisely no part of my current job involves killing people. I think I'll stick with my job.

But no matter Russia/US it all for a good cause - congratulations

I get it. You hate war. Most people hate war, even the soldiers in our army hate it. You want change? Vote and get outside and protest. Don't shit on a DoD contractor while sitting there doing nothing.

Real change requires real effort.

I understand the need for people to have jobs. I'm not unhappy about individual soldiers, individual cops, individual TSA workers deciding that's how they want to get employment. (I'm sort of unhappy at society-as-a-whole for making the military such a good career decision for many people, but the fact remains that it is a good career decision, and I won't begrudge that.) I'm not unhappy about you, because I have no idea what your job is or what your life is like. But this article is about a person who had an extremely good job at Google deciding that he wasn't doing enough for the world and that he could make the world a better place by working for the DoD. He could have stayed at Google; he could have even worked for the USDS for any of the non-war functions of government, if he really wanted to. I think that's fair to criticize.

However, even in "peaceful" countries you'd have a hard time avoiding that, as most of them have some sort of mandatory pensions system, who in turn most likely fund arms production, which will then sometimes be sold to be used for war.

So the same logic would be okay with people where all reasonable career decisions require working for a company that pays taxes to the military, and both Matt Cutts and I seem to be in that situation. But I think we're both in the situation where we have plenty of reasonable options other than working for the military directly. And it specifically sounds like he took an option that is worse for him personally, because he thinks it's better for the world. I disagree it's better for the world, simple as that.

(Whether this logic would forbid working for companies that support the military indirectly is an interesting question, and I think 'BinaryIdiot has convinced me that it should.)

I don't know what you expect your comment to accomplish here but it's incredibly tone deaf.

That said, there are certainly peaceful tasks the military is responsible for, and we can make exception for those, like handling natural disasters, providing logistics for weather research, etc., but let's not kid ourselves, the military didn't grant the invention of the Internet for connecting the world population.

Regardless are you willing to do the same? Just as millions are employed through the various agencies of the DoD through contracting it'sthe same with the large technology companies. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and many others are actively DoD contractors. So they're making money in the exact same way and yet I never hear people telling them to stop or quit .

So are you going to continue using Google, Microsoft and Amazon knowing they actively work on DoD projects and profit off of them?

If you don't happen to live in a region where the military is the sole employer, and therefore you have the option to not work for them, and you're also concerned by the conflict of their actions vs proclaimed mission, then what justification is there to work for them directly?

What it boils down to, if I were at Red Hat, and I got presented a project to work directly with and for the military, I would kindly decline. But I would still work on Fedora and/or RHEL because those aren't exclusively for the military.

You can work for an arms producer on automatic assault rifles, but then you cannot reasonably expect me to believe you're under the impression that the products you build are purely for hunting and sports. Then there are arms which you can work on that are unlikely to be used by the military and primarily for hunting/sports, and assuming hunting is for controlling wildlife population, it's understandable why it's morally acceptable.

You offered your work experience as a specific example of how you could work for the DoD without being involved in killing people. I think there's no good way to discuss the validity of that example without being a bit callous, since it involves a) your personal work b) discussions about killing people c) politics, but I think the commenters here handled it appropriately. I certainly think it would have been worse for the discussion for it to go unchallenged.

The commenters are largely tone deaf in this arena. They never call out any large technology companies for doing the exact same thing. Google and others actively work on the same projects. They are all DoD contractors. HN seems to think anyone involved in the DoD complex is accountable to some degree for military action then completely ignore all of the west coast companies involved in the exact same thing.

(Also, war is messy. I know that the insurgents also kill civilians, and I'm certainly not supporting them any more than I support the US military. I'm advocating pacifism, and if you want to say "well, pacifism doesn't work because other people want to wage war", sure, that's a debate approximately as old as the idea of pacifism itself.)

Cool.

I work with dozens of peaceful, bright people, on projects that are responsible for keeping people safe without violence or conflict or any nonsense like that. Many of the people whom I work with wouldn't swat a fly, so I don't really concern myself with the thoughts of people who have no clue what they're talking about, like commenters on HN who google "depart of defense not really about defense???" and then think they've stumped me. Honestly.

Exactly. Then why did you bring the name up? Nobody was even talking about the name before you posted; seems rather silly to complain about people discussing it now.

Oh the irony.

Reminds me of the clip of the Us Marine pointing a gun in the face of unarmed protesters screaming "GET BACK WE ARE HERE FOR YOUR MOTHERFUCKING FREEDOM"...... yeah right mate, you just keep telling yourself that.