That is a very judgmental comment. Is everything you work on 100% a net positive to society? Do you work for a non-profit helping the homeless or other social issue at 20% of the salary you could get working for a big tech company? Most people hate change and like to have money to support their family. Each person has to establish their own moral threshold.

Past tense.

I still have an extremely conservative outlook, and I have no ideological opposition to the private sector, but when "conservatives" are the ones running around upsetting apple carts and setting fires, it becomes hard to be an engineer and a conservative.

Well, just like "liberals", there's different flavors of conservatives out there, and this has always been the case. There's the pro-big-business old-school Republicans, for instance, on one side, and on the other side you basically have nationalistic fascists. These days, in America, the "conservatives" are swaying closer to the latter side. But even the milder ones, because of their generally pro-business and anti-regulation stance, can be a problem in the context of this story, because that mindset generally seems to lead to too much power with the corporations, too much regulatory capture, etc.

This is a pretty huge generalization. As an engineer in Seattle, I find most of my coworkers are very liberal. I imagine it varies wildly depending on discipline and location

Software engineers are far, far more liberal than all other engineering professions.

Don't forget, a lot of engineers don't even consider software engineering to be an engineering discipline.

What does that have to do with my comment? I'm not a software engineer