When Do You Need to Quit Your Job?
How is "changing things from within" going for you?
On West 18th Street in Manhattan Monday morning, in front of a nondescript office building, a small crowd formed. As the minutes ticked by, they grew. They were there to protest Palantir, the evil, fascist-adjacent online surveillance company that had an office upstairs.
Banners were unfurled: “Palestinian Medical Staff & Patients Bombed & Murdered by Israel.” “ICE Out of NYC.” A few security guards stood out front, ushering the employees with badges into the building. The arriving workers—all of whom looked like young, upscale tech workers, fresh haircuts, stylish Nikes—crept past the protest without eye contact. The looked sheepish, uncomfortable. “Hey, I just work here!” their expressions shrugged. One chant got going: “Palantir, what do you say? How many kids did you kill today?” A 20something employee with white Beats headphones and a forearm tattoo who had just made it into the lobby glanced back when he heard that last line, grimacing.
The protesters formed a line, and the NYPD moved in, pushing them away from the doors. There was the entire tableau: the old peaceniks, the young activists waving signs, the chagrined building doormen, the impassive cops, and the embarrassed Palantir employees, one big seething mass. The chant that the protesters kept coming back to echoed down the street.
“QUIT. Your job! Quit your motherfucking job!”
Who should quit their job? The obvious answer is “everyone doing something that I think is bad.” But this is utopian, useless, like saying “if all the workers of the world just went on strike, we could win.” Sure, but wake me up when we get close. The interesting question is, “Who should quit their job right now, or be cast out of polite society?” Who, in light of all social and political and economic realities, and taking into account all personal responsibilities, is morally obligated to clock out today and never come back?
It is common to point out that this is a privileged question. Capitalism does its best to make morality a luxury good. Economic necessity, or desperation, is the leverage that our system uses to fill undesirable jobs. Historically speaking, who has made up the vast armies hacking each other to death in the name of various kings? Peasants! Who else would risk getting their head split open in exchange for a few nickels? We recognize that the moral responsibility of, for example, an unjust war rests more heavily on those who command the armies than on the soldiers shedding the blood.
On 18th Street, some of the protesters were young people who undoubtedly had elite university educations, relatively few responsibilities, and a better economic position than the Black and Latino building workers who were manning the doors. The right wing response to this observation is to condemn the protesters as snotty little fucks who don’t understand the rigors of the real world. This is exactly backwards. We should expect those with a privileged socioeconomic position to use that advantage for the common good. We should expect those who are not economically desperate not to take evil, lucrative jobs purely out of greed. They don’t need to. The protesters were living up to the standards we should have for those who went to places like Columbia and NYU. Their classmates who went and got jobs at Blackstone and McKinsey are not. Economically comfortable people who engage in progressive activism are just doing their duty. I firmly believe that the source of the vast well of upper class rage at college-aged protesters is guilt. People who used their own privilege only to improve their own position resent public demonstrations of the fact that they had another choice.
In the wider world, people take jobs because they need to pay rent and buy food and support their families. They take the best job available to them right now and try to move up. Furthermore, the vast majority of companies and other employers are neither righteous nor evil. They are fulfilling the dreary workaday tasks of society and scooping up a few bucks on the way. Whatever flaws they have are rooted in systemic issues far above their pay grade. It is a waste of time to try to stand atop an imaginary ethical hill and pass judgment on the vast, vast majority of workplaces for not living up to high social ideals. You don’t want to become the crazy person pointing an accusatory finger at the Subway employee and yelling, “You don’t give a damn about sandwich artistry! You’re only in this for the money!”
We should focus our condemnation. We don’t need to tell the (unionized) building doormen to resign because the people they are letting in work for a company that is facilitating mass deportation, genocide, and dystopia. There are, broadly speaking, two categories of people who should consider quitting their jobs immediately: Those who are doing irredeemably evil jobs within larger organizations; and those who work for organizations that are, in practice, irredeemably bad.
In many cases, the most productive thing to do at your immoral company is to try to change it. Indeed, one of the most compelling reasons to unionize the tech industry is that unions could be one of the only levers strong enough to force these enormous companies to be less evil. One of the speakers at yesterday’s protest was a former Meta employee who was fired for trying to organize against the company’s more unsavory work. She cite UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s recent report on the economic facilitation of the genocide in Palestine, which makes it clear that major tech companies are directly enabling Israel’s violence against civilians. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others build and administer the technological infrastructure used by the IDF. Not to mention the protest’s target: “There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making,” the report says. “In January 2024, Palantir announced a new strategic partnership with Israel and held a board meeting in Tel Aviv ‘in solidarity’; in April 2025, Palantir’s CEO responded to accusations that Palantir had killed Palestinians in Gaza by saying, ‘mostly terrorists, that’s true.’”
Where do you locate the dividing line between “trying to change a bad organization” and “time to quit to protect your own soul?” These judgments are not clear-cut. Those big tech companies have not been shy about firing employees who have tried to organize or protest. It is no coincidence that unionizing these companies is difficult. They make it difficult. I want my email account to work, but I don’t want to facilitate quadcopter assassinations of starving civilians. Reining in huge tech companies from within is a noble aspiration that should continue as long as practically possible. Otherwise we rely on the heroes of the US Congress to enforce global human rights.
That said, we must also admit that “I am going to change the bad organization from the inside” is often something that people wave around as a magic shield to protect themselves from accountability for their own evil jobs. Are you actually doing that? Are you actually working and organizing and taking risks to try to change the place for the better? Or do you just like your salary, and not want to quit, and assume that, since you are a good person, having you in the position is automatically a moral good? Consider the sound of this: “I am going to keep my job as a guard at Auschwitz—if I don’t do it, someone worse will.” “I am going to keep my job as a guard at Auschwitz, and try to change the organization from the inside.” No. We do not accept that. I use these extreme examples only to illustrate the fact that these explanations have limits. At some point, the explanation becomes an excuse, dissolving into absurdity.
Let me use an example from the media industry (I apologize for using this stupid industry as an example, but I must write what I know.) The New York Times is a high quality news organization the publishes many high quality and informative stories, and then also sometimes publishes things that are bigoted or ignorant or ridiculous. I do not believe that the New York Times reporter who is off covering, you know, the war in Ukraine, is obligated to quit because of the latest idiotic Bret Stephens column. What needs to happen instead is that the people running the New York Times need to run it better. It is a useful organization with flaws, and the task is to improve it.
Fox News, by contrast, is a propaganda organization whose underlying purpose is to use deception to build support for a right wing political project. Any real journalism it does is purely incidental to that underlying goal. Are there “real” reporters working for Fox News? Yes. But I would argue that the organization’s very purpose is so detrimental to society that contributing in any way to the ability of the company to flourish is immoral. Trying to improve Fox News is like trying to improve a cup full of rat poison. No amount of it is going to be good for you.
Then, consider the Washington Post. A high quality news organization with a proud legacy that is, right now, under the control of a billionaire owner who has unfortunately decided to meddle in the project to support his own (bad) political interests. The Post is an example of an organization whose fate hangs in the balance. Will Jeff Bezos succeed in diminishing its work, pulling it towards the Fox News end of the spectrum? Or will the great journalists within the Post, and their union, succeed in protecting the valuable work that the paper has long done? A place like this is one where “change from the inside” is not just a legitimate possibility, but a vital calling. The fight for its soul is on, and we should applaud those willing to fight for it, instead of dismissively calling on them to quit because their owner sucks.
It is difficult to know, from the outside, what is happening on the inside of a workplace. We should be modest about our ability to judge a place as irredeemable. Before we declare that someone is morally obligated to quit their job or be declared a villain, we should ask ourselves whether their organization is bad temporarily, or bad inherently.
Even by this conservative standard, we can comfortably say that a lot of employees at a lot of places should quit, right now. Palantir? Yes. Blood is on your hands. ICE? Leave now. The FBI? You work for a monster. Get out. Fox News? Goodbye. Anti-union law firms? No reason to be there. Gambling apps? Payday loan companies? Predatory private equity firms? Corporate lobbyists who exacerbate the ongoing crisis of economic inequality? Quit your job. Quit your motherfucking job!
You may believe that you are a good person. But sometimes it doesn’t matter. If you work for the goon squad then you are, by definition, a goon.
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Related reading: Leave The Military; Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation; Quit Your Evil Job.
In my shadow career as a boxing writer, I wrote a piece for Defector this week about the Shakur Stevenson fight in Queens, and the Saudi project to buy boxing. You can read it here, for free.
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𝘐 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘮𝘭𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘸𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴 𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘢𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘦-𝘢𝘨𝘦𝘥 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘵. 𝘗𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘱𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘤 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘪𝘤𝘦.
This is the same excuse used by armed forces and professional athletes when they engage in lighthearted/traumatizing hazing rituals: "It happened to me and I turned out fine therefore it should continue!" (Narrator: this person did not, in fact, turn out fine and the practice in no way should continue)
Been in STEM for decades now.
At Palantir, there's one or two people who might be a decent hang. Probably 40% of the company are those squishy libs, the ones you mention imagining themselves as "good people" and turning into frothing hateful reactionaries once college protestors demonstrate what a good person is and the distance between them.
But half or more of these people are racist chuds. Its endemic in STEM. Nerdy little twerps who get bullied all through school, building up a curdled, resentful worldview that allows them to revel in being bullies themselves once the powerb structure is reversed. Then in college they receive the gospel of their election to the elite which gives them all the excuse they need to cast themselves as hardworking bootstrap people who 'earned' it.
Neglecting of course that even 100 years ago society had use for probably 1% as many engineers/mathematicians/scientists as it does now and the ability to command high pay and a good job with those skills are historical accidents.
Anyway all that is to say that Tech workers even still with all the layoffs have more ability to select the job they want at the pay they want in the city they want that to choose Palantir is the decision of an open racist of which the STEM field is ripe, or the sort of utterly oblivious child of unquestioned privilege that this article may as well be directed at a tree stump.
Glad you're trying to win them over to the good but my opinion as to what we do with these guys to disrupt the functioning of the carceral state isn't fit for print.