[ex-aws-now-goog]

By all means, stop idealizing. Learn what you can but please don't idealize anyone or any company.

But I hardly think that I or most of my colleagues are an insult to any discipline. Apple, Amazon and Google each has tens of thousands of engineers (and many more folks if you consider other roles). In most companies, there will be parts of the company engaging in behaviour you disagree with.

Expecting people to resign from company X because some people at company X do bad things is a very black and white way to think about the world.

[DyslexicAtheist]

taking sides and not cherry picking the positive contributions to society while turning a blind eye to them aiding foreign regimes in committing crimes¹, is not easy to do. And I mean this in the most sincere way possible.

But in the words of Desmond Tutu, "if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor"

¹ Tracking China’s Muslim Gulag: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-...

[ex-aws-now-goog]

I am afraid that I missed the link where running a business in China is equivalent to turning a blind eye to their human rights abuses.

There is a spectrum between doing nothing and quitting that falls under "not being neutral in situations of injustice". If our only tool for reforming systems (such as countries or companies) is to abandon them, progress would hardly be possible. Tutu understood this and worked hard to enable reconciliation after Apartheid.

[Fins]

What if the only (FB) or almost only (Google) purpose of the company is to do bad things?