My first job out of school was for a U.S. defense contractor. I told myself for a while that we weren't directly doing any harm (our software was basically a te

My first job out of school was for a U.S. defense contractor. I told myself for a while that we weren't directly doing any harm (our software was basically a terrible front end over a database, not eg. weapons research), but when it came down to it I don't know who all was using our software or for what purpose. Sadly, I didn't really realize that until years after I'd left. I also worked recently for a large modern tech company. Almost from week 1 I was disgusted by how things were run internally. I think the CEO honestly believed that he was helping people, but really it was just a toxic environment and the product made people more secure online by asking them to give all control up to this company (which, as far as I know, didn't do anything bad with the data, but the opportunity was there and the CEO didn't seem to be in any hurry to put any safe guards in place to make sure it wasn't abused in the future). I never want to work anywhere again that uses the excuse "we can't help it if other companies are forming monopolies and generally doing bad things, so we should get a piece of the pie".