People who continue to work Facebook at are going to face tough questions not just from current-day peers, but from future generations about why they willingly continued to work for such a company when there were no shortage of other opportunities available to them. At this point, engineers have to weigh the ability to work on "cool technical problems" at FB vs the serious risk of historical/reputational stain on one's legacy.
I think the blame is misplaced. People work at Facebook because they offer among the highest salaries, and are insulated enough from the bad PR to not feel bad about it.
It is hard to understand the breadth of scope of the FAANGs. You read in the newspaper that Google exists to turn over dissidents to the Chinese government, but there are plenty of engineers working on making the Linux kernel more secure, or providing gigabit internet for $79/month. Should those engineers quit and go work on CRUD apps for some startup at half their salary? It doesn't make much sense, and that's why people don't do it.
(I don't know if the scope of Facebook is similar to that of Google, but I imagine it is. I submitted a patch to some open source project of theirs that collects diagnostic information from NTP servers. Are those people really to blame for targeting their product at 6 year olds? No. They just want to work on interesting projects for a great salary, and hope that whatever bigger system they're part of works out.)
Basically, it won't be effective to be an Internet Tough Guy and tell all Facebook employees to quit. They won't do it. Make their work illegal (regulate), or make their work unprofitable (stop buying their ads), and the problem solves itself.
Alternatively, you may be working very close to the issues at hand and watching traditional media distort the facts and social media lie about them may have caused you to distrust both.
My old roommate works there on a database/storage team. They are pretty insulated. He doesn't directly interface with the product-side. Sure perhaps on some level he could look at his role and say he's enabling mass collection of user data. But at the end of the day he has no interaction with the actual filesystem contents or what they mean. They're just bits flying around.
So, should the graphic designers of the emoji buttons feel responsible for misinformation? The CDN/network folks keeping the websites available? The janitorial and cafeteria staff for cleaning up and feeding the "monsters of humanity" ?
Similarly to working at the database team of an online casino or gambling site. Personally, I wouldn’t want to work for such companies or FB no matter what salary.
>at the end of the day he has no interaction with the actual filesystem contents or what they mean. They're just bits flying around
Whatever helps him sleep at night I guess. I doubt history will make this distinction when talking about "legacy," as this sub-thread is.
>"monsters of humanity"
You have to realize that this exaggeration contributes poorly to the discussion, right? Are you seriously trying to satirically hyperbolize the characterization of Facebook's effects on society in order to make it seem like people are overreacting to the whole thing? This is a wild take on the matter, to me, in 2021.
Only a few posts below this is one where someone unironically equates Facebook engineers defending their choice of employer with SS officers defending their part in the Final Solution.
I used to work in defence. A colleague of mine said that he didn't have a moral problem because "we didn't make things that went bang".
We actually worked on training systems for soldiers. Technically, we didn't make things that went bang. But we enabled their use. So I didn't personally believe that we could escape the moral dilemma using that argument.
The short version is that a bunch of tech people are asked to design all kinds of man-traps, the buyer then combines the various traps in a shifting maze and the techies are kidnapped and dumped in the maze trying to survive their own creations.
Ha. Yes. I was just going to write this (in reply to jacquesm's comment above, and also in reply to his parent commenter):
"No, it's that Upton Sinclair quote about salary that is the reason", but you beat me to it :)
When will people learn? Always look for the motive.
As they used to say (and maybe still do) in detective novels, "cherchez la femme", which is French for "search for the woman", i.e. the reason why the crime (of passion) was committed.
Give me a break. Most of us aren't dropping everything to go join the Peace Corps, we want to live a comfortable life, and by no coincidence, most of us work for assholes. Nearly any sufficiently old company has its share of controversies (this includes startups, they're just smaller so they're not as publicized).
I will agree that Facebook's controversies are a bit more egregious than most, but at the end of the day I don't really see how a random Facebook engineer is substantially worse than an engineer who works for Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or Lockheed Martin, or <insert large corporation here>. People just want to make a decent living, not change the world.
However, I think there's plenty of blame you can place on the decision-makers at Facebook (most of the executive level team).
Have you read Solzhenitsyn's "From Under the Rubble?"
It has a section called "The Smatters" where he derides Soviet Russia's intelligentsia for being cowards that would trade physical comfort in return for sacrificing their soul and morality.
This is in contrast to "Old Russia's" intelligentsia, that would canktankerously fight and even sacrifice themselves and their personal needs, just to uphold their own (many times removed-from-reality) ideals.
The former's "pragmatic nihilism" of only taking cares of one's self and one's interests is mirrored today among our society.
I mean, I said in a sister thread that I do think there could be an argument that me working for an awful corporation does enable them and I am at some level responsible for their actions, but I don't know that it's realistic to expect someone in the corporate world right now to drop everything and only work for ethical people right now...our entire society is somewhat based around us working for evil corporations.
But that's just an easy argument that keeps the status quo. In a western society today may be impossible to escape some big "evil" corporation, but there's a major difference between having no choice to participate in the system and willingly choosing to work for said corporation. In the case of Facebook someone who works there may not be directly responsible for its actions if they're not at a very high level but they are directly condoning them by working for Facebook and helping further its mission.
I would absolutely give you a break if you don't join the Peace Corps. I won't give you a break if you choose to take a lucrative job at Facebook. This is not a black-and-white issue.
>I will agree that Facebook's controversies are a bit more egregious than most
So, I would posit that working at Facebook is, thus, "more egregious than most" other jobs. That's the point here. Nobody is saying that it's either work at Facebook or join the Peace Corps. I, personally, think an engineer at Facebook is contributing more harm to society than an engineer at any of the other companies you mentioned, yes. Substantially worse? Depends how we define that. But, worse? Definitely.
>I don't really see how a random Facebook engineer is substantially worse than an engineer who works for Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or Lockheed Martin, or <insert large corporation here>. People just want to make a decent living, not change the world.
The Nazi SS officers also used this line of arguments during the Nuremberg trials, that they were just "following orders from above, with no choice in the matter (other than the choice to voluntarily join the SS for personal gains), just like the soldiers of the allies; what's the difference that makes them the bad guys?"
My point is, you can make big tech bucks at other places as well, nobody forces you to work for an evil corp, you choose that voluntarily. And there are other less evil places you can work for.
I knew this was going to come up because this is the internet, but I don't think this line of reasoning applies to every arbitrary Facebook engineer.
The Nazi soldiers tried at Nuremburg were directly murdering the Jews, and so "just following orders" led to a direct harm. However, I don't think that logic went transitive for forever; did we execute the secretaries that took phone calls in military Germany headquarters? I don't think we did, but you could argue that they helped enable all the murders.
Similarly, if a person's entire job at Facebook is to contribute to Presto or React, I don't really view them as guilty as a person who worked on all the data-harvesting stuff, and way less guilty than an executive making the decisions.
>did we execute the secretaries that took phone calls in military Germany headquarters? I don't think we did, but you could argue that they helped enable all the murders
Unlike military members of the SS, their secretaries didn't really have the power to send people to their deaths or perform executions.
Isn't that what they are doing? There was a story not long ago about a lady in her 90s who was a secretary at a death camp at 18. She's being dragged to court.
I appreciate the personal evaluation. I worked at Google for about 6 years, and left to make half as much money working on open source software. I can't find a single thing that HN would disapprove of, except maybe banning all the cryptominers that appeared all at once after our product was discussed here ;)
This is not much of a hardship for me personally, because half of a lot is still a lot. It wasn't HN that factored into my decision to leave, though, that's all I'm saying.
I'll add that the majority of my colleagues at Google actively opposed the things that HN thinks is evil, and still do. You can steer things in the right direction from the inside perhaps more effectively than from the outside. You know the tradeoffs and can suggest a reasonable compromise. That's engineering in a nutshell. No doubt, Google has tens of thousands of engineers that think just like the average HN reader, and are working hard every day to steer the company in that direction. Maybe you're not satisfied with the results, but at least they're doing something about it more impactful than typing screeds and sending them into the ether.
You're missing the point... completely. Until unethical behavior doesn't pay dividends, people will engage in that unethical behavior. Ostracizing them to any degree less than the sex offender list offers fails at 'making it not pay dividends'.
Snide comments are useless, and posting a snide comment in response to a post literally saying that snide comments are useless is hilarious and ironic.
As long as a lack of money is able to present a serious danger to one's quality of life, health and well-being, money will always win over not having/getting money.
> money will always win over not having/getting money
This statement could benefit from less certainty. According to Stoics, a non-virtuous life is not worth living. They would prefer to die rather than earning money in a non-virtuous manner.
You might want to reference the Cynics instead, since it's a bit easier to be stoical when you already have money, power and status, as another poster pointed out.
>People work at Facebook because they offer among the highest salaries, and are insulated enough from the bad PR to not feel bad about it
I'm curious how you draw a line between "the bad PR" and everything else at Facebook? Are you distinguishing the media coverage of the company as a separate thing that employees have to deal with other than the actual actions the company takes, and the ramifications of its real effects on society?
If someone is "insulated from the bad PR," does that mean they are insulated from anything working with or enabling the bad actions/effects? Or just insulated from the "PR"? If the former, how could we possibly make that distinction with an organization as large and complex as Facebook? How can you be so sure that anything any given employee touches does or does not connect to the bad effects on society? If you just mean insulated from the "bad PR," then can you see why history might look unfavorably on someone who hides the greater negative effects of their actions from themselves?
> I think the blame is misplaced. People work at Facebook because they offer among the highest salaries, and are insulated enough from the bad PR to not feel bad about it.
Would you say the same if they were say peddling crack to kids, that hey it pays better....
If all one cares about is money, then yes, it is one's fault and the blame is correctly placed.
I don't understand your point. Are you saying that things like Linux and NTP servers can be used by an evil organization, therefore people who work on them are partly to blame for the resulting evil? If so, I disagree. There is a pretty clear line between working to improve the Linux kernel and working to get more children and teens to use Facebook.
No, the opposite, that many of the people working for evil organisations are not doing evil stuff, but instead maintaining kernel drivers or whatever, and they don't concern themselves with how exactly the money that pays their salary was generated.
I've never bought an ad on Facebook, and yet it continues to run, and Facebook won't comply to non-US laws, and will almost certainly have a large influence on whatever regulations are put in.
Your suggestions are even more toothless than banning Facebook engineers from the local bars and breweries
When I've gone to tech conferences over the years, I've heard talks given by fb/instagram devs about the problems they're working on, and the tools they've created to do it.
On one level it seems very alluring--pay, technical challenges, being at the cutting edge of new technology. But for me those points can't counteract the role fb has in society and what people generally think of the company.
When you retire, with very few exceptions, nothing you did in your working life will be remembered by anyone but yourself. So it's important that you be content with it. That realization has taken a while to hit me, and it's growing into a desire to retire early so I can do things that are personally rewarding and are not just goals on someone else's project plan.
For various reasons (including age and working in tech) I've considered leaving software development when I reach my 40s, to pursue something that I love doing that's a bit more tangible.
That I very much doubt. The average outrage timer is 48 hours, then everybody forgets and jumps to a new controversy. As for Facebook, many of my relatives still use it, either indirectly through WhatsApp or Instagram, or directly. Maybe my technically minded friends would care if I worked for Facebook, but even then those are far and few between. I barely remember my coworkers from 10 years ago.
A few counterpoints. The average outrage may be 48 hours, but I am sure the median is much higher. I'll boycott nestle and Samsung products forever, for instance, and have for nearly a decade and a half with nestle.
Some of my closest friends started as work colleagues, and since I retired 8 years ago I still talk to a half dozen or so, with a couple talked with daily.
You (nor I) are not everyone, and extrapolation from our own viewpoints is very nearly always invalid.
What’s wrong about Nestle? Also Samsung is strange company to boycott.
Overall boycotting both of these companies is easy because replacement products for everything they do is plentiful, widely available and the same price. Not much sacrifice here.
Having worked for WhatsApp, mostly my friends and family said, "What's That?" ... and I sighed. Of course, when I worked for Yahoo Travel, mostly they said "That's still around?", so no love wherever I work. :)
Nah. They'll remember that you paid their way through college, could afford to make their childhoods and path to "the good life" easy in general, and left them a pile of cash when you died.
> But your family and friends will remember, and not kindly, if you worked for FB.
If this was even remotely true Facebook would have had a massive impact on its usage since its consumer based. It would seem weird that the Facebook brand is so tarnished to the point that the population would still be users but at the same time tar and feather loved ones who maintain it.
Over my career it is somewhat impressive how true this has been. Across companies that say very similar things about what it means to be an employee of X, the behavior of execs and senior leadership ripples through the ranks in obvious ways. When statements from high-level people are empty or specious, you can expect to encounter the same in your own management chain.
It only takes a moment to remember this each time a FB recruiter pings me. Couldn't I be one of the people working on solving these big problems and making XX% more while doing it? It's a false choice.
True, also wgen it comes to changes up the chain. I don't buy the whole "these high level org and management changes won't affect the way work" stuff anymore.
which is what exactly? if they didn't like it, they'd be leaving in droves. tech nerds are really the only ones upset about anything that FB has done/is doing.
instead, the average person looks at what they get from FB. most of them never, not once, think at about what cost. to them it is free to use, and that's all that matters. raising privacy concerns goes no where. manipulating people's emotions isn't really doing much negatively to FB either. addicts are like that though. deep down, they might actually be aware that what they are doing is not good for them, but that isn't strong enough to fight the addiction.
The parallels with the tobacco industry continue to amaze me. People viewed that industry very negatively but continued to smoke even after all revelations about their lobbying and its health consequences came to light. It has taken decades for the number of smokers to decline substantially. I imagine that FB will similarly die a very slow death over the next 10-20 years, and even then it won't die completely (but it will be replaced by other toxic social media corporations).
It's not a lie. People can have a negative view of something and continue to do that something. They can also have that negative view without truly understanding why they have that view. People are actively trying to mislead polls with answers they think the poll is looking for, or just false info to skew numbers. FB is in the news with negative stories, so they repeat those when asked even without thinking about why.
If you asked someone about a teacher or some other adult trying to manipulate a kid, they'd obviously say that it is bad. Telling them FB is doing it with what posts they see, they don't respond the same way. They just don't get how an "al-go-rythym" can be so bad. They don't truly understand the ramifications of the hoovering up all of the data they do. They shrug their shoulders and say things like they are okay with it as long as it's not real money.
So, I stand by my stance saying it is only tech nerds that truly get what is going on here.
That’s not what you said, you said “tech nerds are really the only ones upset about anything that FB has done/is doing” which the article I provided proves that’s not accurate. Move the goalposts all you want, I don’t care, but it is certainly not only “tech nerds” that disprove of what FB is doing.
Maybe. Wasn't my intent, but let's allow the conversation to move past that.
The mass populace is not stopping their use of FB regardless of what's in the news or what these polls say about their views of FB. From the evidence, one can only surmise that people don't truly care what FB does. Most addicts don't care what their drug dealer does as long as they can get their fix when they need it.
Does the majority of the public know that Instagram == Facebook, though? Genuinely curious - non-tech folks do seem to love talking about how awful Facebook is and how they don't use it anymore, but then comes the scrolling through Instagram for 6 hours..
Look at the poll yourself, linked at the bottom of the article.
Facebook 36% positive, 33% negative.
Of course their public image has not been improving, as there is high frequency campaign from newspapers and TV news to attack their competition. CNN in particularly has wanted to deflect blame to Facebook for all of the free airtime CNN gave Trump in 2016. However, it seems to be quite a stretch to extrapolate from 2019 survey that listed 33% negatives for Facebook.
I think Jan 6 and the Big Lie are pretty clear evidence of the power of network effects. To claim I don't understand them is you trying to twist a narrative.
I actually anticipated your diatribe, but decided against making that part of my original comment. Yes, there's "no where" else for them to go blah blah blah. However, some people do actually decide to walk away from it for their own personal health/sanity regardless of how it affects relationships from not being on the platform. We see these comments all the time about "I quit FB x years ago". I'm one of them because of what I know about FB.
Every quarter or so, I tell FB head hunters to go away. I do think about the money I'm turning down, but I also like to sleep at night.
Having morals does cost money.
And yes, I do think less of the 'typical' FB employee. Everyone's story is different and I'll listen, but the presumption is that working there means being OK with enabling genocide for a nice paycheck.
This hasn't really played out historically has it? Goldman Sachs (as a corporation) did a lot of bad leading up to the 2008 financial crash, and yet we continue to hire ex-engineers from there.
I used to work for Apple, but they didn't really ask my advice on how they should charge people on the app store, or how they should make it difficult to repair the phone, or how they should throttle phones if the batteries get worse. I was just a mediocre software engineer working a mediocre job that paid relatively well. Should I be blamed for all the problems listed out before if I didn't contribute to any of them directly?
Maybe, and I do think there is an argument to be made for that, but I don't think that's how most people think. Most people are relatively happy to blame the executives of a company with an understanding that regular salaried workers are more or less stuck with what they're doing.
For some reason everyone likes to blame Goldman for the 2008 crash, but no one wants to blame themselves for getting over-leveraged by buying 3 houses.
Everyone likes to blame Facebook, but no one wants to blame themselves when they're one of the 2.8 billion using Facebook.
Everyone likes to blame oil companies, but they drive cars and have plastic all around them. I worked at an oil company for a few years. I sat near the environmental engineers who were doing their best to make it clean as possible. HN readers want to hate oil workers for doing their jobs but then turns around and still demands cheap oil.
I disagree -- I think a lot of people are concerned with what their job is. Many people have a lot less agency, but software developers are in demand and can more easily change jobs than many other careers.
Would you have worked for an oil extraction company, like Shell or BP?
Would you have worked for the NSA? A defence contractor? The military itself?
There are plenty of technical roles in these sectors, with (at least in Britain, where I studied) a big presence at careers fairs, recruitment events etc. But I, like all my friends, ignored them all.
Someone else I knew joined GCHQ. He was keen to catch criminals, defend British interests etc. I wouldn't do it, but at least he had considered the morality of it and decided it aligned with his own.
Working on something without any care for how it's used, or what is being built... these people deserve criticism for their complacency, at least.
"They paid me $400k a year whereas the median income in the US was like $30k a year" would be enough for a lot of people to forgive you for the egregious crime of working for Facebook.
$80k a year is still a big raise even from $320k. But the bigger issue is that in most cases it wouldn't be easy to establish high confidence that the company offering the $320k salary is significantly less bad for the world than Facebook is (for whatever one's own definitions may be for "bad").
Ethically I felt pretty good working at Rubrik (data backup company), as my first job out of university my total comp was >50% of that, I'm sure the senior people (who would be making $400k at facebook) are making that much.
people who believe drugs should be legal will work as guards at prisons locking up non-violent drug offenders for a lot less money. As a misanthrope I think you expect too much of your fellow humans if you expect a good grasp of ethics.
The criticisms towards FB are definitely warranted, but I'd argue that other tech giants are on the same level. Facebook was just the only one that openly picked a fight with the entirety of traditional media who have massive resources and experience in manipulating public opinion, so bad or gray area things that Facebook does get amplified more than they would were it another company.
In what way are e.g. Netflix and MS evil on a level even close to Facebook?
Netflix has to be some saint in comparison. MS just now is starting to be a wanna-be Googlesque spy and has a history of screwing competitors over, not the people in general.
Netflix is a saint, I'll agree with you. Microsoft less so. They had market dominance in the 90's and got hit with antitrust for, e.g. preventing users from uninstalling and replacing internet explorer. I remember reading that the only thing this changed about their behavior was they started donating more to political campaigns.
The real offense is that it's been 20 years since then and congress hasn't trust busted any of these companies that have committed way more egregious sins. Apple has your device locked down such that you can't get an app on your own phone unless it's been approved by them. The charger changes every few years so you need to buy a new one, and iphone screens crack notoriously easily. Google and Facebook are competing for who can collect more data on users, but Google's more entrenched by providing services that people need to use like email, search, internet browsers, maps, a phone. Facebook's trying to have a monopoly over your online social life.
Microsoft's brand is strongly B2B, which is lucky for them because businesses 1. have a lot of money to spend on your service, and 2. are unlikely to make very public critical statements about you the way an average Joe consumer would. It's a great position so they're doing everything they can stay entrenched. It makes sense that their biggest sins are in being anticompetitive; they hit the jackpot and are trying not to share it.
It's subjective. I don't love Facebook but I appreciate that it's easy* to live without it. Can't say the same for Google's ecosystem when my gmail is increasingly tied to my identity. Can't say the same for Amazon when they have so much monopoly over supply chain that some things you literally can't obtain if you don't purchase through them. There's also Disney silently monopolizing creativity. Facebook manipulates people to keep them on their site to increase data collection and drive up ad revenue. Google put adsense everywhere on the internet, so they don't need to do anything manipulative to keep you on Google because they earn ad revenue and get your data wherever you go**.
Everyone I know who works at one of these companies is a great, smart, kind, talented person -- including those at Facebook. We need better consumer protections and to break up their monopolies.
By manipulation, I meant profiting from dissemination of fake news or other harmful content. I don't think other tech giants come close. Though, I would agree that all of them abuse their dominant position against their users' interest in some form.
I don't mean this to be snarky, but this sounds like someone who has no family, no kids, never been in a serious relationship. Once you're committed to one or more other people, you're pretty much putting their interests ahead of yours most of the day. If my friends who are parents are to be trusted, their kids are their priority in every substantial decision they make.
Also, it's surprisingly cynical to say that people don't put their interests above society -- most of the people I know have taken on work and hobbies that don't maximize their personal gain, because they'd rather improve society somewhat.
I just don't think that's true. Some people scrupulously pay taxes, but others don't and push the line as hard as possible. There's real variation in people's willingness to 'defect' from the public good.
30k is not the median income in the U.S. and there are plenty of ways to make a decent living without working for FaceBook. You can make a very nice living as a developer working for non-tech companies. Or, if you prefer not working in front of a computer, you can make quite a bit driving a forklift or working as a plumber.
Note that “family” for income statistics means a household of two or more people who have relations from specified set between members, so that median family income is kind of like median household income, except that it excludes all single-member households as well as multimember non-family households (who are typically living together to save money), so it is biased strongly upward compared to similar household stats.
The census specifically doesn’t ask for income for children below 15, so perhaps that is the meaning of the sentence above, and per capita calculation does include kids as $0 income for calculating median - although that would be weird IMHO. Unclear, and I got bored looking for exact details, so gave up quickly!
I disagree. This comment seems to come from the idea that work defines you, but that doesn't generalize at all. Family and friends hearing that you work at FB will almost alway only think about the prestige/money angle.
I work at Uber, another company whose leadership historically made some very questionable decisions, and not once did I ever get holier-than-thou crap from acquaintances. And even if I did, I have enough internal perspective to appropriately call BS or disregard people who think parroting 5 year old articles constitutes having an educated opinion on the company today.
Another similar example is Microsoft. They were demonized extremely heavily a decade or two ago, but these days, claiming that working there is a reputational stain would be pretty laughable. LinkedIn, Groupon, AirBnb, etc all had negative press at one point or another. But if you work in any of those, the most common reaction is "Oh, cool!"
> Every major tech company does all the same shit Facebook does, the rest are just lucky that FB takes most of the heat.
> Tell me, what exactly has Facebook done that is so bad compared to Google, Amazon, or Microsoft?
You're angling to absolve Facebook here, but I'll flip that in the other direction. They all deserve a healthy serving of contempt, and frankly it's the reason why I never respond when Amazon and Google recruiters come calling 3 times a week.
But what separates Facebook from the others is the utter lack of shame about what they're doing, and the fact that Zuckerberg has no accountability due to the arrangement of voting shares. That makes them uniquely dangerous.
That's a bit illogical. They're not trying to 'absolve' them, as if somehow Facebook isn't bad because others are also bad. They're all similar (ly bad).
What separate's Facebook is their namesake product is too close to the source of controversy. Google's "public facing" products are things like search, YouTube, gmail, google docs. Amazon has 2-day shipping and prime video and such.
When people think of Amazon/Google they think of that first. Sure, they're doing all the same controversial with their products. But in my experience, the average non-tech person has more buffer for that, when there's a bit of separation between the brand identity and the bad behavior.
A lot of non-tech people aren't even aware that FB (Meta?) owns Instagram and WhatsApp - that's the kind of tolerance buffer that the other FAANG has for _all_ of their main products.
In this sense, the rebrand to "Meta" might actually work a bit.
Facebook's entire business model is creating people addicted to chaos. It has radicalized people, led to suicides, and caused a huge rift in many countries' political ecosystems. That is their business model, it's the only way they make money.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc have flaws but their business models don't depend on creating conflict.
I think that’s a little unfair. As an idea FB genuinely revolutionised person to person communications, not all for the worse. Remember what it was like before to stay connected with family and friends remotely. Swapping email addresses, posting your holiday snaps on your shared hosting server space running some cr*p Perl or PHP scripts. And that was progress. My thoughts towards Facebook are complicated. They certainly have some issues but I am not sure that makes their core mission inherently evil.
That's probably the most damning thing. They know they could promote more positive content and kill doom scrolling with the flip of a switch. But that would probably reduce their session length and reduce the number of ad impressions to sell.
Yeah sure, they report, we decide. Weird thing, I can go on YT or Reddit and easily find all sorts of conspiracy theories and fake news. It's almost as if when you give the population the ability to post their own content, it's going to reflect what different segments of the public believe, and others who agree will be drawn to that.
Most of her claims make a gigantic leap to conclusions. I'm asking for a source that shows, for example, a suicide that was _because_ of Facebook. Radicalization trends as another example have been on the rise in the US long before FB or social media, and there are many other countries where FB exists but radicalization is on the decline.
There is plenty wrong with FB, but this all seems like trying to pin a root cause to something b/c we need something to blame. Maybe correlation, but I don't see the causation.
In said study, Facebook acknowledges problems with the study itself as do other researchers without a dog in the fight. Let's see an independent study show the same thing.
An independent study of the effects of Social Media (instagram, FB, TikTok, whatever) needs no insider information. We're studying the effect, not the company.
Hypothesis: Instagram causes teenage girls to have a lower opinion of their bodies than they would otherwise have without Instagram.
Study: Have 2 cohorts of teenage girls rate their appearance or happiness with their bodies. The two cohorts are separated by those who use Instagram and those who don't. Run independently, of course.
This study is incredibly flawed (like the original) b/c it is self-reported happiness (incredibly subjective, ephemeral, and prone to bias) and subject to the same issues as all qualitative research. The only way to get any semblance of reliable data is with a _large_ set in each cohort. Even then, the data raises more questions than answers it provides. But, you could say after this study whether 'it seems Instagram may be harmful.'
It is also flawed for other reasons but you get the point. You don't need insider info to study the effect of something.
A magazine is not interactive. It's a unidirectional feedback flow. Magazine photos are also at a specific higher standard than the totality of Instagram pictures.
IOW, they are not equivalent. I'm sure we can glean something from those studies, but to get an answer to the question we're asking now, you'd need a better study than Facebook's own.
I agree with hermitwriter here. Currently I'm not at all convinced somebody can claim that all of these negative effects wouldn't have existed if we had a morally correct social media platform instead.
Most of them do plenty of bad shit but at least for a company like Amazon you can make the case that their logistics and infrastructure delivers real value and moves material goods around the world and creates quite harsh but at least reasonably paying blue collar jobs whereas Facebook and other 'social media' giants' drive political discourse to ruins, teenagers mad, and employ hordes of underpaid gig workers to sift through child abuse content and other horrid crap.
And that aside you're not forced to work for FAANG. Plenty of small companies around who do good work in healthcare or what have you, or national security, the defense sector and other public sectors desperately looking for engineers.
Plenty of work to do that is more meaningful than getting kids to click on ads.
>reasonably paying blue collar jobs
As a disclaimer, I'm not from the US and my sources might be entirely biased but I thought a big chunk of amazon employees were ill paid and on foodstamps?
They pay a starting wage of about 18 - 22 bucks an hour depending on the location for warehouse workers. For comparison, that's somewhat more than twice the federal minimum wage or what you make as a cashier, say.
It's not what Facebook does that the others don't, in my opinion, it's that Facebook does not have services for businesses. They have scant little utility to businesses outside of advertising services to temper their outrages with, so they're given even less of a benefit of the doubt than other tech companies.
> People who continue to work Facebook at are going to face tough questions not just from current-day peers, but from future generations about why they willingly continued to work for such a company when there were no shortage of other opportunities available to them.
I honestly don't think so. Were all ex-Enron employees considered unemployable or even immoral? How about Union Carbide or tobacco concerns?
I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison. It seems to me tech companies experience a much higher level of employee activism around moral issues than other industries.
I also think it’s naive to assume reputational stigma won’t weigh in on hiring decisions.
3 years ago I was seeing a lot of candidates with Uber resumes. It wasn’t surprising that they were trying to leave, but it was surprising it took them so long. I would wonder if they were unable to get hired elsewhere.
I always did my best to give a fair interview but it’s possible bias crept in.
I've worked at facebook in past. Facebook has been complimented at a number of interviews and one company I worked for very actively poached fb engineers. It was extremely clear for that company given the resume system even marked resumes with certain desirable companies and the sheer amount of fb employees we hired. I think my current one also has a bias for them. I have tended to stay in social media industry but I've interviewed for other industries and gotten positive reception with facebook. I remember once getting negative reception on going from facebook to a small lidar startup as interviewer viewed it as dropping to lower tier/prestige company.
I have not worked for Uber, but my experience at other big tech companies is they're viewed fine too for engineering talent.
As for non-engineers most of my family/friend group views facebook/similar very positively. Facebook remains largest social media by a ridiculous amount. Nearly 3 billion MAU is something no other social media company comes close. They certainly have negative sentiment too, but there are tons of people happy with them. I have worked at one company that some friends did show negative view and that was tiktok (mostly because of china concerns). Tiktok as worse then facebook in perception and even for tiktok it was still mild thing. It was never a job concern with both of them I found myself in demand anyway.
I remember reading a comment very much like this 3-4 years ago about Uber. Can't find it of course, but there was this article 4 years ago https://insights.dice.com/2017/03/08/uber-alumni-trouble-fin... although that is about Uber having a bad work culture, not that working there meant you were ethically compromised which is what I remember being the previous concern - like yours is for FB.
Hey, my middle name is your username! Neat. Anyways, the pearl-clutching around "working for bad companies" is pretty misplaced. Every major company has things they do that are bad; Google, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft to name a few are companies that regularly perpetrate evil daily. People need to work to earn a living, the idea that "they can easily just get a job somewhere else!" is a fallacy.
There's a huge number of companies out there that are not as evil as those big ones. And even among those big ones, there are obvious choices for ones that are more or less bad, to anyone with principles. And yes, it is pretty easy to find a job somewhere else if you have Google or Netflix on your resume.
"every company does bad things and therefore they're all equally bad, phew, now I don't have to leave my cushy $300K FAANG job where I push microtransactions to little kids" is not very convincing.
> There's a huge number of companies out there that are not as evil as those big ones.
Facebook didn't start off targeting 6yos. Once you go public, you're on a treadmill to keep delivering profits for Wall Street. So who's to say that the new startup you join will continue to be this angel who does no evil?
> the idea that "they can easily just get a job somewhere else!" is a fallacy.
Actually in today's tech driven world, this isn't hyperbole. There are more than enough opportunities for talented technologists to find opportunities outside of Facebook.
Not really. Facebook's disinformation capabilities are far worse than Apple's or Googles. Key differentiation example - Apple doesn't have an algorithm that bubbles up iMessages in the interface.
Even then, I'm not evening actually alluding to those companies - I'm talking about other tech start-ups, smaller companies, etc.
FB interview standards are extremely high. People who work there, probably about 95% of them could work at any other tech company if they choose to. What keeps a majority of the people there I would assume is 2 things,
#1. The pay is very close to top in the industry, hedgefunds/netflix pay usually more.
#2. Getting to work on products/features that are used by millions and sometimes billions of users, not many companies can offer that to a candidate.
I personally am hounded by their recruiters but will never work there due to moral objections about their leadership and their companies effect on society. That being said I am not judging people for working there, everyone has a free choice to make and some people may not have my convictions and there are many great people who do work there.
Yes, that is the point I was attempting to make. These people are talented enough to work anywhere, but could they make the same pay? Is it guaranteed they won't run into something as morally troubling to them, such as Microsoft/Google's partnerships with ICE and aggressive seeking of defensive contracts, for example?
> People need to work to earn a living, the idea that "they can easily just get a job somewhere else!" is a fallacy.
Do you know anyone at FB? I know several engineers at FB, and it's a fallacy to think they can't easily get offers from many top startups, and other FAANG companies.
Yes, I know many people at FB. I wasn't saying they aren't talented enough to work with other FAANG companies; if you read my entire comment I'm saying that every company has things you can be morally outraged about, so unless you want to cycle through seed-round stage startups every 6 months, you're probably going to run into some things you're not a fan of in your career as an engineer.
Clearly by everyone's perspective on HN, we can establish that there's few companies in the same category as FB. Maybe Experian or something, but I doubt anyone at FB would go there?
Arguably it's so much worse to work at FB, because if you can work at FB, you can clearly work at many decent companies that aren't doing this sort of stuff.
Then don't work for a “major company”. There are hundreds – nay, tens of thousands – of other companies; heck, just Facebook alone has over a dozen household-name competitors.
> Every major company has things they do that are bad
I am sorry, but funding random shows that people might not like as Netflix does is quite below the "evilness" meter of setting up ways to target 6 year Olds.....
The fact that you are even trying to equate these as being anywhere the same, at least in my eyes strongly strongly undermines your capacity to make moral judgments
What level of moral outrage should cause someone to want to quit their job? Does Microsoft's repeated contracts with ICE count? Netflix's ads for content like "Cuties" showing children "twerking" and doing other sexual provocative poses (plus the current strikes from their trans employees and their handling of it)?
People could apply this same reasoning to folks who work for the US federal government. Or defense contractors. Or fossil fuel companies. Thing is, I think very few people would see "Chevron" on someone's resume and refuse to hire them (aside from maybe environmental organizations).
I believe this is false. Every day at work, I see many instances of people choosing self-enrichment over the betterment of society. We are lost in a see of state and corporate sponsored activism for social justice causes, which distracts from other significant existential issues.
I doubt it. There are so many companies out there doing far, far, far worse than Facebook and nobody bats an eye with respect to the employees that work at these firms.
Personally, I don't find it that easy to get another job as an engineer so I'd be very careful with that logic.
For reference, I'm a dropout and therefore struggle with abstract algorithm problems like the ones they dump on you to solve in 30-60 minutes in interviews. I certainly can solve them, just not in that kind of timeframe, but that is now a common expectation in order to achieve a certain level of (mostly unrelated) problem solving and income.
Regarding peers, first, if it becomes an issue just take it off your resume. Second, don't work with those people. Go somewhere else that pays well and work with other mercs instead of people working for free soda to save the whales.
As to future generations, as long as you take responsibility for it your grandkids will think it's pretty bad ass.
Kids: Grandpa, what did you do for work?
Grandpappy: Well, kids, let me tell you about the time that grandpappy came up with this algorithm that reduced obesity in America by several points and made millions doing it. Big Ag wasn't happy about it, but dietpills.com loved it.
If this is what prevents someone from considering a job at Facebook they’re a fool. This day of judgement will never come. Future generations have potential to be just as egregious, maybe even more so than today’s generation of engineers. They might even invent something even worse than Facebook, and we’ll look back at today as the good old days. The only questions that will be asked is how did they make so much money and what advice do they have for replicating such success.
I wonder how frequently this "stain" impacts people in practice. I've got some defense contractors on my resume. I suppose some people might flinch on that, but I've never felt like I had a problem getting work or growing my career.
I suspect it might be like that. A small percentage of people would nix you, but you would never know. Compared to something like the porn industry, which I've heard is death to a resume.
This disregards the effect of inertia. Looking for a job is a lot of extra work that must be undertaken in the context of already having a job - working around schedules, interviewing etc. It is simply easier to continue working at the same job, so I don't think you can say "they would have obviously quit if there were better opportunities."
I hope you're right, but to me that sounds like the probable outcome in a world that is more just than the one we live in. A big organization leaves a lot of room to deny hands-on involvement with the more unsavory stuff that's going on, and on a purely technical level former Facebook engineers still have skills that will be valuable to future employers.
I do not equate Facebook engineers with actual Nazis, but what seems more likely to happen to me is something analogous to the "Clean Wermacht" myth. I think anyone who isn't directly and publicly implicated in especially egregious actions is going to have all the deniability and technical skill they need to remain an attractive hire in most cases.
If we assume that "evilness" or what ever metric we use to shame FB employees is transitive, is it really possible to work in a way that is significantly better?
Or all those evil, "devil-worshipping" heavy rockers, and the the back-masking records. Or like when Bart Simpson said, "Eat my shorts" for the first time, and how that was teaching kids disrespect. Which is truly hilarious now given the many years of Family Guy, South Park and other adult cartoon shows.
Frankly I think that there will be a cultural divide, just as we have pro-covid and anti-covid camps today (due in part to Facebook's algorithmic amplification of disinformation). Many will say "actually, surveillance targeting children is good", "actually, social networks that promote genocide are good", "actually, lying about your numbers and destroying entire industries that rely on your numbers is good", etc. Some entities and people will take a stand, and some will proudly hire anyone who seems in danger of experiencing consequences.
In order for Facebook engineers to be judged by future generations:
- there would have to be future generations
- they would have to have accurate information about what Facebookers have done
- they would have to live in functioning democracies where accountability is possible
The result of Facebook/Meta's efforts, intentional or not, will be to prevent any of these eventualities from coming to pass.
Are you actually saying that Facebook is working to prevent _future generations of humanity_ from existing? I can't imagine how you expect people to take you seriously.
I totally agree. I know people that work in different areas, but their salaries are mainly paid by Ads money. To me is like working for Nazi party and saying you were only working in poster ink technology...
They already are. We rarely hire former facebook engineers anymore. They cost too much, most of them have done very little interesting work and of the FAANG companies, they are by far the most entitled.
