The following letter was originally produced in print, and left on the desks of all my workers on my last day of work.
To my beloved coworkers,
This past week, I spent a lot of time explaining to people why I was leaving Microsoft, and to consolidate a year of thinking, I mostly have been telling people that I don’t want to make weapons anymore, which gets to the gist of it. But it has come to my attention that this quippy explanation combined with my nose ring and quirky haircut have been throwing people off, and leading them to believe that I am exercising some kind of arrogant and blasé leftist snowflake moralism. I’m really not. I don’t think I’m better than you for leaving. I don’t believe that what I’m doing is the right thing to do. I don’t believe leaving or staying makes me a good person or a bad person. In fact I look up to you all so much. You are the smartest people I know. I want to be just like you when I grow up.
Five years is a long time to spend together, talking, working, and in simple terms just existing beside you every day. You’re a very odd group of people, you know. You aren’t very average. I have found it difficult, for example, to find other groups of people in my natural life who are so interested in teaching me things. Clearly, I have the profit incentive to thank here in part, since it is ultimately advantageous to Microsoft for me to learn good engineering skills, but I also think it is born to you like your flesh.
I can see that you love learning. You have a deep and generous curiosity about the world and indulge always difficult problems, difficult solutions and open-ended questions. Some of you, I think can’t help yourselves. Karel is like this and seems almost attacked by interesting problems, as if he is compelled to scratch the itch. Abhisek is more pleasantly entertained by interesting problems, like he’s peacefully reading an Agatha Christie book – not as tortured I think. You’re strong teachers because you’re strong learners, and I can tell when you are enjoying the accomplishment of others’ learning. Once, I asked David why he chose to stay a manager and if he ever missed IC work. He told me that he loved helping people, and that he liked spending his entire day helping people and enabling others to think and work. I believe I joined the team in the same year as Heng and Karthik (around 2021?)
Watching them learn Allocator beside me and quickly outpace me inspired me to be like them and to keep up with their grasp. I was trying to study how they acquire knowledge, and still I’m learning that all the time from Berwin, Lazar, Andres and other new people who have blown me away with how well they learn. Each of you has a very particular personality of learning and knowing, and I’m really so charmed by you all in your own ways.
Early in my career, probably three years ago, I messaged Karel apologetic to have woken him up on a SEV2 I caused (a bug I wrote). He was so, so gracious and told me that it was fine and that it was natural and to just try to understand why I made that mistake and to see if I could avoid doing it again. He was right. Forgiving me was so natural to him, he probably didn’t even understand what it meant to me at that time – to learn that punishment and shame are actually not necessary to improve things. They’re actually kind of counter-productive. This is true, not just of Karel, but also of Jason, Chris, Kuan, Valentina, and other wonderful people who have come and gone. Everyone who is ever oncall on this team embodies this generosity of spirit because if we really think about it, livesite is a humbling and terrible custodial duty that could easily inspire rage. We’re learning to make up for each others’ mistakes without resentment. It’s very rare to develop an ethic like this at large scale. I wish our greater society was more like that.
So I became like you. I also love building things and learning things and solving problems. I love helping people and strengthening systems against inevitable human weakness. I can’t take credit for any of that character myself; you have raised me up into being this way. You all are so special, and just being beside you – just the privilege to work in your proximity – has given me a pure and crystalline understanding of the dignity of my own labor. But this is where you lost me.
I never understood why the smartest people I know could all work together in the pursuit of pure intellectual excellence and still create weapons of mass destruction. It is not very dignified work! Many of you have pointed out that we serve armies as well as hospitals and normal non-war interests, but let’s be honest, we aren’t exactly making roads and bridges. We entered a competitive multi-million dollar contract with the Israeli Defense Force to provide compute power and access to OpenAI and it is my great shame to have contributed any amount of my personal labor toward what I’m sure will be considered one of the great tragedies of our generation. As an American citizen at an American company, most of all, my heart is completely broken to enable the Palestinian genocide because we can all see that the occupying state of Israel really has no other powerful world allies except the United States. And Microsoft, along with the other American companies (Google, Amazon, IBM) who are also wrapped up in powerful, lucrative compute contracts with the occupying Israeli state are essential to the mass surveillance and extermination of the Palestinian people. Without the compute power, the occupying state could not target missiles using OpenAI models (as reported by the AP news in Feb 2025). Or identify a civilian by a photo of their eyes. This takes massive compute power. Only a few corporations can provide this, and without support from the American empire this genocide would not be operating at the scale it is – not even close. American profit-mongering has always been blatant in wartime, but perhaps I am now dawning into the full feeling of disgust for this because, as Jovan or maybe Nikola suggested, I’m 25 which is the age for understanding the horrible truths of the universe.
Also, I completely understand that I am only able to leave my job because I have the insane luck to have been born safe, American, and middle class. I won the lottery. Of course, the winnings of the lottery were earned for me also by the occupying empire of the United States which performed the EXACT same horrific deeds as Israel now, but 250 years ago: showing up to a random land where people already lived, enacting a mass genocide of the aboriginal people, and then establishing an empire of selfish brutality based on the riches of stolen, occupied land.
So you can understand that it is very jarring actually that when I send an OOF notification with the flu, sometimes Abhisek will respond saying “I hope you rest and feel better soon.” And when Karthik had his baby I was genuinely so excited that she was born in the year of the snake, like me. I was so moved by these small acts of beauty. For me, the most radicalizing realization was this: All systems of immense human evil are constructed of smaller discrete, fundamental systems of human love. This is why I am leaving. I can see that if I stay longer, I will be compelled like all of us (like everyone in the world) to accept that my dignity, my labor, my beauty, my dread, my mind, my body, and my heart can be taken from me toward the end of brutality and carelessness and violence. I’m not leaving as a radical act to change the world. When I leave, I will quickly be replaced by a smarter, faster engineer. Someone who is more desperate for my wonderful job with amazing healthcare benefits, and someone who is more compliant to the rule of this little empire called Microsoft, who will not mind the cognitive dissonance required by our uniquely luxurious subjugation. Of course I can’t change the world this way – leaving is too easy. It would not change the world. I am leaving Microsoft because I need to believe that a reality outside of this subjugation exists.
Don’t get me wrong – I am wrestling with it. In the modern world of the global supply chain, almost everything requires some amount of intentional blindness toward some exploitation or subjugation or violence downstream somewhere. Even something simple like going to the grocery store and buying avocadoes has become a complex political act, and in a sense, is a type of “working at Microsoft”, which is to say supporting the empire and its brutality. But I refuse to stop believing in a better world. There is a job I can do that is good, honest and simple. There is a life I can live which does not require the pain of others. We can’t see it yet, because they’d like us to believe it is not possible, but I believe that it is one’s civic duty to imagine a future that is better than the past. We need to keep things moving. We can do better. We can always do better. So you see, I am leaving Microsoft to protect myself – and to nurse my own hope in the realization of a future which currently seems impossible. I’m going to go out and see what it will take. I’m wary myself of becoming like the self-assured revolutionaries who created so much bloodshed in the pursuit of a more beautiful future, but I’m careful to hold it all a distance away from me. Most of all, I love people, and I believe that we are owed our own liberation and happiness. None of us should be forced to support a genocide, and yet they have bent reality to make it so. We can hardly NOT support the genocide. Isn’t that sick? How did they design it so cleverly?
I still hold you all in the highest possible regard. I understand that you are staying for much the same reasons that I am leaving. Having a baby, for example, is a classic performance of faith toward the goodness of the future. Or marriage. Or living each day at all. Maybe for you, staying in this job is also a meditation on radical acts of hope in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.
Anyway, I’ve been rambling a lot. I’ll leave you with one last thing. The purpose of this letter is not to convert you into a socialist – I wouldn’t insult our Serbian and Russian friends by suggesting their own past to them. The purpose of this letter is to thank you for all you have done for me. To let you know how much you matter to me, and to that end, I would like to suggest one more thing.
Tech is tightening up in this country – we can sense it. It used to be that tech was practically the last true American meritocracy, and I still know many people my age who have lifted their families single-handedly out of relative instability by working hard and working in tech. Now, as the labor market biases toward supply (too many tech workers) and away from demand (not enough jobs), we can see that hiring is becoming biased toward favoritism, referrals, if-you-know-you-know-ness. Even for those of us in the industry, we see the reins tightening with more and more mass layoffs, restrictions like RTO, etc. Up to now, tech companies have been giving us very good deals because they had to – because the free market has demanded it, and because Google had to woo you with ping-pong or free lunch or whatever. This won’t always be the case. It is already not the case for those most vulnerable among us. Two years ago, my friend was laid off from Microsoft in the middle of her visa process, which dequeued her application. She then had to find a new job within 6 months or else risk deportation. This doesn’t seem like a very consensual working experience. What is it? That word for forced labor at the risk of life and body? Anyway, if we don’t protect ourselves now, we will not notice until it is too late. The New York Times Tech Guild and the NPR Tech Guild have both negotiated terms with their employers to protect employees in a visa application process. Your employer should not extort your labor at the threat of deportation. They also have negotiated protections against at-will firing which we don’t currently have at Microsoft. We can be fired for any reason or no reason at all, which is why irresponsible over-hiring and reactionary mass layoffs are legally condoned/industry standard for us. We don’t have to accept these things.
Our labor belongs to us. Our learning and our knowledge and our dignity belong to us. Without the people inside of it, Microsoft has nothing. It is nothing but us. Employment is a contract. It’s not particularly revolutionary or communist to say that we should have a say regarding the terms of our contract.
I can’t personally endorse a specific union even though I am unionized with the Communication Workers of America because unions themselves eventually eat themselves to their own end by becoming entrenched and obstinate and dynastic. I can say that the CWA has been negotiating contract terms with Microsoft in the gaming division already and the progress has been slow, but these events may interest you. I do recommend the Tech Worker Coalition which is NOT a union, but a coalition of labor advocates that ally with some American political groups like the DSA (Democratic-Socialists of America).
I’m extremely uninterested in controlling you, not least because I don’t think it’s possible. I don’t want you to join a union or become an anarchist or a communist. I want you to be okay. I want you to look at the resources available to you and to decide for yourself how best to advocate for your own life, your own dignity and your own happiness, and well as those of others we love and know. I want you to know that when the empire seizes your body, your labor, and your mind, it won’t be out of malice. It will just be the inevitable market conditions unspooling themselves in the same careless ways all horrible empires have managed to rise and fall. Corporations will only do what they absolutely must. Let’s think about how to protect ourselves. I’m getting so sentimental now that I know I am leaving, and to be completely honest, I just want to know that you’ll be okay.
Truly, nothing but my best to you,
Hannah Lim
P.S. Let’s stay in touch! My email is Lim.Hannah0228[at]gmail.com. I’m really good at long distance friendships! <3