Tech workers are resigning, and not afraid of being blacklisted

Sparked in large part by the Israel-Palestine conflict, employees at large tech companies are leaving. What's next?

The media is cluttered these days with stories like “how to optimize your resumé for tech employers” —or “who are the ‘super-intelligence’ engineers” making hundreds of million of dollars at places like Meta, Microsoft, Google and OpenAI.

In an era where tech jobs are harder to come by and layoffs are rampant, I can see where this flurry of coverage is coming from. People still want stability, stock options, to pay their rent or mortgages—and enduring ways to support their families.

But what about those leaving tech altogether?

Catalyzed by their companies’ lackluster or retaliatory responses to employee solidarity with Palestinian civilians, an increasing number of career tech employees are voicing their discontent. But unlike past eras where people were understandably afraid to be black-balled from the industry, these tech workers are speaking up with a desire to exit the tech ecosystem entirely.

Hard Reset spoke with two former tech employees about their decisions to opt out all together, and what they’re doing next.

Joanne Carney, Oracle

I worked at an Irish company that was acquired by a smaller American software company. Then that company was acquired by Oracle. At the time, I was just delighted to be at a big tech company.

When October 7th happened, the company put out a notice to say that they unequivocally stand with Israel. In November 2023, I emailed Oracle CEO and Israeli Safra Catz to say: I understand you are with Israel—but now would be a time to stand up for Palestinians, too.

A few hours later, I got a call from HR who told me “we can see you’re distressed.” They recommended that I go on sick leave and see a doctor, since I did use the word “distressed” in my email to Catz.

I didn’t take sick leave at the time. But I continued to feel distress after seeing further messages from Catz saying that if employees don’t stand with Israel, Oracle isn’t the place for them. She was proud that her employees at Oracle weren’t protesting like the employees at Google and Amazon.

It was embarrassing. I started to feel that this was unsafe and discriminatory. It felt unfair that Israeli supporters could have the leeway to tell the company anything; meanwhile others who expressed support of Palestinians were told that they should leave. But once I started researching and learning about the history of the conflict, I realized how naive I was to plead with Safra. Even Larry Ellison has deep connections to Israel.

I made a complaint to the supposedly independent ethics portal—but after reviewing, the company decided that this wasn’t against Oracle ethics. So a group of employees submitted an open letter to the company advocating for representation of Palestinian voices, and we received nearly 200 signatures. At that point, a few of us were called up for disciplinary meetings. We had taken the watermelon emoji—a symbol for Palestinian solidarity—and placed it inside of an O. Oracle claimed that we were plagiarizing the Oracle O.

Someone was fired for their participation in the letter. I was written up—presumably because it is harder to fire employees in Ireland. It was around that point that I decided to take sick leave. During those months I was finding it hard to sleep, as I couldn’t rest at the fact that we were making millions in my department while others were building software for the Israeli air force. And even if we were working on other projects, our profits were feeding into the machine that was doing work for the military.

The conflict has really opened my eyes to these horrible systems built on oppression of other people. I’ve done that for years, and I now don’t want to be part of that.

I have a 21-year-old daughter. For her whole life, I saw myself as a career woman—and wanted to show her how to be a career woman. But now I have a toddler. I don’t want my three-year-old daughter to grow up thinking that you have to work and work and work, to earn more and to buy more. It’s all about buying—the next best car, the next best house. We were never fully satisfied. My husband felt the same, and I knew that what we were doing wasn’t fulfilling us.

So during my sick leave, we made our plans to sell our house and quit my job. I had recently gotten a bonus, and I had equity in our house. So are taking that money and buying a place in Porto, Portugal. At the place we’re looking to buy, there will be a vineyard. Before we embark on that we are just planning to lay our veggie beds and house chickens.

I feel for the colleagues that I left behind, specifically the 25 people underneath me on my team. I worked with some of those people for 19 years, and I was close with them. In the months leading up to my resignation, I spent time dwelling and going back and forth. There was always a reason not to leave—whether a new project was starting, or I thought deeply about how much I liked working with my team.

But I was not able to focus on the day-to-day, and it was stressing me out. I was missing out on my young daughter growing up—all for Safra Catz to spout about profits and Larry Ellison to make deals with the Israeli air force.

I know it’s hypocritical, but I waited to resign until I got my bonus in May. I did have to think about my husband and daughters, to find a way out of this. But I forfeited other compensation. If someone wants to take the same path as me, I’d say wait for your bonus to come and be practical with your money—especially in America, where you can get blacklisted. In Ireland it’s different; a lot of people reached out to me, even strangers, to ask if I was okay for money. So many people are afraid of posting on LinkedIn, but when you take the leap, there is so much support. It was such a relief to just do it, to get my thoughts out there.

I remember seeing a Palestinian protest in Cork City several years back. I am embarrassed that I ignored it, because it didn’t affect me and my life is comfortable. There is hope for others because I changed my perspective. I now see what the Palestinian people are going through—how Israel was controlling their phone lines as well as the products that go in and out of Gaza.

I’ve always had empathy for others; it may be in the Irish blood to stand up for oppressed people. My grandmother’s father was high up in the Irish Army in 1916, friends with the revolutionary Michael Collins.

Some of my friends think I’ve gone a bit mad, that I’m a hippie. Tech in Ireland is massive—so people have their heads in the sand, happy so long as they can drive their Mercedes and have easy lives. But I know longer care about contracts or appeasing those customers; in a way I’ve seen the light.

I haven’t been shunned into a corner. Some people certainly ignore the topic. But I would encourage people to speak up, as it gets easier and easier.

Michael Batchelder, Cisco

I knew that I would resign when a Jewish colleague at Cisco posted about her resignation. She really walked the walk, and was part of a broader culmination of employee activism that in an open letter alleged that Cisco was in violation of its human rights policies. Cisco's global human rights policy starts with a quote from CEO Chuck Robbins, where he talks about not being evil and upholding the human rights of all people.

Signed by 1,700 Cisco employees, the leadership team shut down discussions and largely ignored the letter. When this colleague of mine resigned, it was a gut punch. I knew I had to follow her path.

As an escalations engineer, I held a high-end technical support role in the security business unit. I helped companies send all their web traffic through a proxy server and Cisco’s cloud, to apply security rules to the traffic and ensure that employees weren’t entering to some malicious site or sending confidential information out of the company.

I never saw anything explicitly come through that had to do with the Israeli government. But it is entirely possible that the products could have been used by the Israeli military.

From what I could see at the company, the annual revenues from doing business with the Israeli military were probably on the order of $10 million a year. It might be $20 million, but definitely not $100 million. It’s not nothing—but compared to Cisco's annual revenue, it's not much, and we have customers who do much more than that on an annual basis. If it were an order of magnitude bigger I think they might have a point. But they don’t need this contract.

Before my last day (last week), I made a very public LinkedIn statement pointed at Cisco’s leadership. I don’t intend to take that post down—so I don’t think too many tech companies of any notable size would hire me given what I said. Maybe early-stage startups with people who know me; but in this current environment, I think my tech career is coming to an end.

I’m not so happy about that—but I have been working in tech for 30 years, and at least I'm going down on my own terms. In terms of what’s next: I may do something political to address the current situation in the West Bank. I also own equity in Cisco, which is now starting to feel like blood money. So the idea of shareholder resolutions, or trying to use my equity with Cisco in some positive way, is intriguing to me.

I've never looked into shareholder policies, but I’m interested in the angle of calling out the internal Cisco human rights policies that Cisco is violating. Bringing it up in the text of the shareholder resolution is going to be embarrassing. Perhaps that is a lever, that there are retirement funds out there who don't want to be invested in what I think is a genocide.

I've always been politically minded because I believe it's a civic duty. The entire world is everyone's space—and whether local or global, we all have a responsibility to understand what's going on and what's being done politically.

In the same way that I’ve always been technologically-minded, I want to understand how things work and how the world works. Little kids are curious around why the sky is blue. As someone who is deeply curious about science and technology, I applied that similar thinking and questioning to why political systems ignore obvious moral issues. And this eventually got me into intractable conflicts.

Have you left tech to pursue a totally different path—either because of the Israel-Palestine conflict, or because of issues with the incentives and overall system? We’d love to hear from you. I’m on Signal at @ari.steinhorn17.

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