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Comment by burger_moon | Hacker News Reader

It's kinda interesting how people are just now realizing that all the big tech companies are government contractors and not this imaginary utopia of 'making the world a better place' they were sold on.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft are all US gov't contractors. It's hilariously ironic seeing the political views of the employees suddenly clashing with their employers views of making money as if it's a new thing.

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This isn't a new debate though...

My grandfather started a company which was a smaller player in the military contracting space.

It was somewhat large and his argument was that he was always 'helping democracy' but he was willfully blind IMO.

It's always going to be a bit fuzzy but it's another thing entirely when the organization you're selling to is just flat out evil.

Every tech company I've ever worked for has done a project, in some way, with the government. I worked for a small healthcare startup of 5 developers, we had government contracts. I worked for a medium sized dropbox-like startup, we had government contracts.

Unless you're some dinky, meaningless, retail company, you will do business with the government at some point. That's not a bad thing, it means your company is actually doing something important.

Google and Amazon get very marginal portion of their revenue from government, and reputation risks for main revenue sources likely discourage them in participation in shady activities with government.

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