I have more than enough friends, even good friends, working for them. The answer is they are not political at all, the problems company working on appeal to them, and the pay is unmatched.
Choosing to work for a company that develops software utilized in domestic spying is a political act itself.
Many people don't care about politics. They just want what's best for them personally and often in short-term. Although, working for defense contractors is usually a good long-term bet for such people too.
They are just following orders. Nothing wrong with that. Since 1939...
You do realize that at one point "working for the Nazis" wasn't really a bad thing. Over time, it became one.
You can draw other comparisons, besides body count. If you don't see parallels regarding people saying, "I don't care about the affect my work has on people around the globe, as long as I get paid" I don't know what to say.
If you don't understand how that type of hyperbole poisons discussions, I don't know what to say.
You realize the camps were not exterminating people until after the Wannsee Conference in January of 1942, right? That isn't to say the Nazis weren't murdering people before then, but mass murders didn't start until the war started and were generally committed by the Einsatzkommando units in the field. As for the racial policies of the Nazi Party, there was a disturbing amount of support for them outside of Germany prior to the war.
Still, Nazi metaphors are almost always an unnecessary hyperbole.
Agreed, the cost of living is high in DC and these contractors are the only game in town who are going pay a person big bucks to create poorly written HTML.
On a less sarcastic note, an average developer working for a gov contractor can receive a high salary which affords a very nice lifestyle in the DC area while still allowing them to save for retirement. This is something that is much more difficult to achieve or even impossible in the private sector. It's not surprising why defense contractors can attract fresh employees.
Just a month ago I visited DC and a contractor asked for help on some of his code...the JSP was quite cringeworthy, and I was amazed the contractor could not figure out what was a simple CSS issue. Even though I had lived in DC for about 4 years and started my development career there, it had finally clicked how old technology was in the government, along with the methods of development (I had never done any development for the government, although I've been on the receiving end of some very bad bugs on software created by contractors).
not as cringeworthy as the fact that people are still using JSP. TIL
Many other people believe that what they do is good for the country.
And a small handful want to affect change from within.