Obviously a vocal departure is the easy way to enforce public outcry, but I'm not sure a quiet one is as useless as this suggests. There are certainly some fun

Obviously a vocal departure is the easy way to enforce public outcry, but I'm not sure a quiet one is as useless as this suggests. There are certainly some fundamentally-broken things that will happen as long as anyone is willing to do them - I don't expect spammers and ad fraudsters to disappear because a few programmers quit in a burst of ethics. But Yahoo wasn't dependent on unethical behavior, they had a (somewhat) viable business doing reasonable work. Those are the companies susceptible to quiet moral stands. They're not dependent on ethical lapses to survive, so they can push back on them and continue to exist. And they're big, wealthy companies that spend lots of money on getting good programmers, so if some of those talented programmers say "screw this" and quit, it's a problem even if they can replace the missing bodies. None of this addresses the last point - I don't expect people to starve over this, and I imagine most would stick around until they had a new job lined up. But I do think that pushing back on these companies can help even if there are people willing to do the dirty work.