A long time ago I worked for a Porn company. As someone who grew up orthodox Jew and turned secular later in life, I had to consciously reorient my moral compass regularly; When a recruiter for that company contacted me I suspended my knee jerked “no” reaction and asked myself “why?” - it’s not like I hadn’t watched porn occasionally (I later learned to avoid it, it’s basically sexual junk food), so what’s my problem supporting its creation? And if I do have a problem with it, where do I draw the line? participating in a movie was an obvious “no”, but would I work for a company that had Porn companies as clients? pragmatically and morally it was an obvious “yes” for me - somewhere between these were my boundaries. When you do these kind of mind exercises, it soon becomes clear that practical applied morality (as opposed to abstract ideological morality) is very fluid. I ended up realizing I don’t view porn as morally problematic but rather as aesthetically problematic, so as long as my particular job was interesting and didn’t involve watching too much junk I was ok with it.
For a technical person there are a lot of benefits to working in a porn company: high scale, forgiving users (most are borderline junkies), serious cashflow and management that is willing to take risks - a not-so-surprising-in-retrospect side effect of challenging the mainstream. It was a good job, but one of the biggest unexpected benefits it had was forcing me to deal with people who judged me on my choice of employer. It helped me to stop caring about other people’s opinions (unless I actually had a reason to care) and also to devise better ways of responding to criticism - like humor. One day when another person asked “how can you work for a porn company?” I found myself serendipitously retorting “well, after you work for an organization that kills people, seems like a moral upgrade”; That made them pause. “What do you mean an organization that kills people???”, to which I replied “you were in the army too, weren’t you?” - in Israel we have conscription, and while not everyone serves in the military about half of the population does. “That’s different” they said; “how so?” I pushed and they replied “the army doesn’t just kill people, only when there’s a good reason too”.
Oh boy.
We take for granted that killing people is fine when it is state sanctioned, but shudder when an independent killer says “the rotten bastards had it coming”. States rarely bother to explain with details their body count, yet oddly independent killers are happy to go through every grievance at length. Kill or be killed situations actually happen in real life and most of us would take a life in some extreme situation - like protecting your kids. We are happy to delegate these ugly choices to someone else, and hear none of it; this only means we are not aware of what is done in our name. It allows us to go through life feeling and talking righteous while someone else is doing the dirty work, only to be shocked and angry when we eventually find out what they are actually doing. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to only eat animals he personally killed he confronted this kind of common moral lending and was ridiculed by many - I thought it was a brave and honorable choice. Not only does everything we do have 3rd party implications, we also have a habit of sweeping the ugly ones under the rug. Moral judgement is a habitual pavlovian response, which means it isn’t actually “moral” in any meaningful philosophical sense; It is merely a discomfort reaction for abnormalities with a lot of unconscious social justifications. As the Joker so eloquently put it in “The dark knight”, people are OK with horrible things as long as it’s part of the plan.
Once I realized that, I started ignoring the justifications for things and rather look at the patterns without moral judgment. You can’t actually look at anything without any judgment at all, some decisions have to be made like what to look at, but you can suspend your automatic moral outrage - and when you do a lot of interesting things start to pop up. For example, Spy agencies are basically international crime syndicates backed by sovereign states - the Diplomatic services are tasked with all the legal stuff. The spies themselves are trained to lie, steal, blackmail, kill and so on. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them are bona fide psychopaths who found a socially acceptable outlet for their talents. One starts to ask “what” is someone doing rather than “why” is someone it - looking at things functionally. What is the functional difference between a gaming nerd and an e-gaming champion? one of them makes money and therefor ranks higher in our society. They might literally be the same person.
One learns to wipe the titles off of things, and this is a very useful habit in engineering as well. A VPC isn’t a “private cloud”, it’s a routing procotol over a public network. EBS is not actually a “disk”, but rather a block based API for storage, S3 a blob based storage API - and they may well be using the same storage under the hood, as is the case in Ceph. But if you are used to think of “disks” you start making bad design choices, like replicating yourself the data that is already replicated at the storage level. A lot of the cloud is layers of backwards compatibility because people are used to work with familiar patterns. These layers end up severely limiting what you can do with cloud infrastructure, and cost a fortune. The outrageous bills people pay for AWS NAT gateways are a prime example.
People often speak of “thinking from first principles”; It’s very hard to do in practice if you are habituated to mindlessly accept the status quo. This is why much of innovation is done by eccentrics and outsiders, but you don’t have to be one to innovate - just to suspend your judgement and be an outsider for for a while.