These companies also attract that sort of person. Most software engineers I've met aren't the "hacker" type. A huge number of them are in it for the mo ey and don't really have a hacker inclination. I feel that it's a culture in danger
Nah people with the "hacker inclination" are just as easy to buy but in other ways. There are people who will solve any interesting problem put in front of them and have a great time doing it without reflecting on why someone put it there or what it will be used for when they're done. Giving them more interesting problems, more autonomy to pursue intellectually stimulating solutions to them, is the reward you can use to keep them building your drone assassination algorithms or whatever.
In fact the overwhelming consensus on this site has long been that skillfully solving problems that are personally interesting to you is at worst morally neutral. I'll bet significant number of the people who work at for example palantir are like this. Curiosity-driven "little eichmanns."
My personal theory is that tech folks are often under-educated -- in the sense that they've specialized so much, that they missed out on a well-rounded human education.
This makes it easy to hijack the "ooh look! shiny/sexy technology" part of their brain, to work on Palantir-type stuff, whereas anyone with a more liberal, broad education would go "wtf! I don't want to help build that!"
I don't think it's entirely wrong as a model but it struggles to explain thiel himself having degrees in philosophy and law. I think there is a certain contempt engineers can have for other domains and ways of knowing that might be closer to the source of this. But I'm not very confident in that explanation either fwiw.
