There's at least one company that straight-up reverses a pacifistic cultural reference: a Ukrainian autonomous weapons company called The Fourth Law, as in Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics to prevent humans from coming to harm.
Apart from my own thoughts on the Ukraine war and autonomous weapons, that name makes me feel like the company's founders either haven't engaged with the moral questions of their technology, or want to mock them.
I've run into one government website that required email addresses to come from gmail.com, outlook.com, or another common domain, and several websites that won't let you change your email address once registered. It also makes it really confusing if someone needs to share Google Docs with you. So I've moved as much as I can off of Google, but some stuff will linger forever.
How do you fix that data has already leaked and been copied somewhere else under someone else's control? That damage has already been done, and it's not restorable like rebooting a crashed system.
Honestly, yeah -- it's not a cheat code, it's facing two sets of pressures from discrimination, not seeing many like you in your field, what you deal with outside of the workplace, etc. And it helped me to see how many people before me succeeded regardless of all that; learning about Lynn Conway ~15 years ago was really important to me.
This and "Security Engineering as Caring-For" [0] have been the guideposts in my security career, helping me think about what I should work on (or not) and reminding me why I keep working on bad days.
Essays like these aren't just moral admonishments; they offer a way to find deeper meaning in your work or figure out what work would have meaning for you. Personally and politically, there can be so much more to your tech career than just "puzzles and math."
Apart from my own thoughts on the Ukraine war and autonomous weapons, that name makes me feel like the company's founders either haven't engaged with the moral questions of their technology, or want to mock them.