7 ms·

So is working at Google, Amazon and probably 90% of the big corps of the world in many sectors - from oil to finance to pharmaceutical to telecommunications and

So is working at Google, Amazon and probably 90% of the big corps of the world in many sectors - from oil to finance to pharmaceutical to telecommunications and so on. And we can include the government. If you're a subcontrator or sold in body rental (modern IT slavery) you're also in the same position as an employee, so you're enabling their evils. Also, if one of those companies is a client of your company you're also enabling them (or a client of a client of your company? How many layers of separation should exist between you and Walmart before you stop being an accomplice in enabling their abuse of workers?). Your point? Should we stop working in IT and go back to the fields? Also, I fear that HN somewhat forgets the world is not SF, in Europe going to work for Facebook/Google/Amazon is a enormous bump (we're speaking 2-4x) of salary for many people, which in some cases means you can buy an house after 3-4 years even with the crazy rents back in your home country - and that's HUGE. Why should those people spend their time slaving as a subcontractor for yet another TLC/bank trying to squeeze their customers dry at the first occasion while getting 25% the salary and zero benefits? Are those less evil? What needs to happen is that people keep applying pressure so facebook is forced to adapt its business model even if it hits their bottom line - which is already happening apparently.

enraged_camel 8y ago
>>in Europe going to work for Facebook/Google/Amazon is a enormous bump (we're speaking 2-4x) of salary for many people, which in some cases means you can buy an house after 3-4 years even with the crazy rents back in your home country - and that's HUGE. So this is how we justify it now? “But it will allow me to buy a house in 3-4 years”?
- zeth___ 8y ago
  How else can any one justify working for capitalists? I enjoy destroying the environment for future generations so they don't have it too easy?
- chronid 8y ago
  I was just noting that in other parts of the world (where the average salary nationally for developers is NOT a comfy 60k$) finding alternatives to those companies can be a little bit complex, and for sure no less evil. The "justification" (if you want to call it that way) you are looking for is in the part you forgot to quote and respond to ;)
  - martimarkov 8y ago
    I find it hard to believe that only FB has on office in that country that offers the $60k you are referring to. I work in London and there are a lot of companies that will give close to FB salary if you are a good developer. And yes there are companies that are not as corrupt as FB, Google, Amazon. So I'm wondering (out of curiosity as I can't personally think of any) where in Europe is that happening?
    - eanzenberg 8y ago
      London isn't even EU
      - martimarkov 8y ago
        Kinda is buddy. Surpassingly the UK is part of the EU and London being the capital of the UK is part of it. Also EU != Europe
bepotts 8y ago
Too much common sense for the internet. I'd love to know the organizations all the Facebook and Google haters work for. No firm is perfect.
- foepys 8y ago
  HN trends to think there's nothing else besides Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Silicon Valley startups. Truth is, there are tens of thousands small software shops all around the world, working on - in HN's opinion - "mundane" software like machine controllers, production management software, ERP systems, etc. without collecting and indirectly selling all personal data they can get their hands on.
compcoffee 8y ago
>Also, I fear that HN somewhat forgets the world is not SF, in Europe going to work for Facebook/Google/Amazon is a enormous bump (we're speaking 2-4x) of salary for many people, which in some cases means you can buy an house after 3-4 years even with the crazy rents back in your home country - and that's HUGE. I guess if your entire purpose in life is personal wealth, this makes sense. It also makes sense why you fit in with SV culture.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  That feels pretty dismissive. Wealth independence is a huge deal that gains an individual very important security and well being. We can chastise the workers as much as we can chastise the consumers who support this system. We’re all complicit in this, for the most part. We can work together to build alternatives.
- holtalanm 8y ago
  if your entire purpose in life is to...idk...actually have a good life, then personal wealth does somewhat go hand-in-hand with that. The only people that say they don't need money are those that aren't poor, from my experience.
- dang 8y ago
  Personal attacks will get you banned here, so please refrain from them in your posts to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
I'm sure "but it pays well" is the rationale used to self-justify many morally dubious through to outright immoral and illegal acts. Doesn't improve the validity of the position though.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  I'll tell you what: you go to the cloister first and the rest of us will catch up with you later
- joelx 8y ago
  Nation states (China and Russia) are backing a massive PR campaign against tools that they can't control... Hence these major attacks lately and all the hate for Facebook and Google. In reality, those tech companies are enormously more ethical than Baidu or Alibaba or almost any mainstream alternatives... And compared to companies oil, gun, drug, tobacco, alcohol and most others, Facebook and Google are saints.
  - majani 8y ago
    Downvoted for diversionary red scare tactics.
  - roblabla 8y ago
    Can we get proof of this supposed massive PR campaign? You can't just shoo away several real, well-documented, massive breach of trust from Facebook with "well it's the Russians". The hate Facebook is getting comes from them being negligent about user data, and they were well-aware of the problem.
    - joelx 8y ago
      https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-helped-reveal-china-hackers-2013-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-helped-reveal-china... There are hundreds of more similar articles documenting hacking by China and Russia. The data breach at the parent of this article even is supposed to have been done by a coordinated nation states. How can a company ever compete against a nations resources? Expecting Facebook to magically secure themselves against attacks by a nation is wishful thinking. If you want to stop breaches like this, the nation's that are doing it must be held accountable. Facebook is an easy target, but that's just attacking the victim. China and Russia are much more intimidating but are the ones who are the true perpetrators.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
carapace 8y ago
> So is working at Google, Amazon and... ...oil to finance to pharmaceutical to telecommunications Yes. Most of the large and powerful organizations have severe moral problems, almost all of them due to violations of a simple rule: $ < Values "Love of money is the root of all evil." We all have choices. We all make decisions. I would go even further and say that people who ride Uber or buy from Amazon are moral cretins.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Ethical consumption is a dead end. You can't even buy slavery-free clothing or food reliably.
  - carapace 8y ago
    You're being an apologist for slavery? Alright then, where do we draw the line? Can I go buy a person? If not, can I invade Sudan?[1] > Ethical consumption is a dead end. Should we give up even thinking about it and just do whatever is most convenient? Will that solve all our problems? You know Amazon treats its employees like disposable shit. If you buy from them anyway you are putting your self-love above the love you should have for the folks working there. You know Uber is extracting value from their drivers[2] and will discard them without compunction when the robots come online. And they killed Elaine Herzberg. If you ride Uber you're rewarding them for all this and putting your self-love above the love you should have for those folks driving. I'm gonna keep fighting for what I think is right. That means telling people that they are moral cretins when they are blithe about it. (I don't think violence solves anything, but a good rant can shake up a body's thoughts. I have friends that shop through Amazon and ride Uber and I don't chide them too harshly or often.) Working at FB or one of the other emerging technocracies isn't an instance of "Never let ideological purity prevent you from effective action." It's a case of putting money above core values, or not having those values in the first place, or simply not paying attention. If you're going to be a Morlock at least be a self-aware Morlock, eh? > You can't even buy slavery-free clothing or food reliably. You can try. If you don't even try you're a moral cretin.[3] It's a common malady in this empty and abortive age. [1] One of the few places where outright slavery still occurs in modern times. If that's not grounds for attack what is? Oil? [2] "They don’t pay the cost of their capital. The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human." https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the-problems-of-uber-and-lyft/ https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the...? [3] "Origin Late 18th century: from French crétin, from Swiss French crestin ‘Christian’ (from Latin Christianus), here used to mean ‘human being’, apparently as a reminder that, though deformed, cretins were human and not beasts." https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/cretin https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/cretin
pslam 8y ago
"They're all like this so it's impossible to do good" is an even more morally bankrupt position. It rejects personal responsibility and agency, places you as the victim, and allows you to continue to be a bad actor in the world. You should change this.
- avip 8y ago
  It is completely ridiculous to try portraying someone working for FB as morally disabled. I'd suggest people express their moral superiority by deleting their own FB account, without much ado.
  - VMG 8y ago
    if I deleted my profile, I have no control over who squats my name preventing impersonation is literally the only reason I have an account, since I cannot trust facebook to handle this for me
- chronid 8y ago
  It's not impossible to do good, that's not what I'm claiming at all, and that's why the last line is there. I'm pretty sure you can do good even within facebook, doing your utmost to keep the company accountable (from my experience in another big corp, we don't see 1% of what's happening inside it, and how many people are facepalming - and we'll never know if many things were just humans being stupid or actual calculated decisions). You can also keep your guard up from outside and force facebook to fix itself (obviously, as much as its business allows) from outside, for example pushing it to hire more moderators and get as better so to prevent things like myanmar from happening again. What I'm saying is that it's impossible (and in my opinion, pointless) to claim moral superiority and to accuse people of being morally bankrupt because they work for corp X.
  - pslam 8y ago
    Sure it is. There are plenty of companies which can't easily be categorized as having significant negative effects to the world. You can work for a "bad" company but consciously constrain your work to a business unit which improves customers' lives. What you're using is false equivalence. You know what the worst thing for the environment is? Being born. Why do people insist on living when everything is bad? Reject the notion that you're powerless to change things.
baxtr 8y ago
OP’s stance is (I believe) that we shouldn’t align our incentives along money only, but also on the core values of a company. Call it naive or idealistic but I, and obviously many others, believe that we have a responsibility as people and employees to work for companies with the right set of values. Truly lived, not just printed out and put up on the wall. I think this is something that motivates people these days. Do something with a good impact on this planet with the single lifetime we were given and f*ck the money (ideally have both).
majani 8y ago
I feel like this overreach is directly as a result of the absurd expectation VC backed companies have of constantly growing forever. People who are uncomfortable with this fact can choose to only work at bootstrapped companies that are doing well.
ddebernardy 8y ago
> Your point? Should we stop working in IT and go back to the fields? Not the OP... But no... Just stop working for morally bankrupt companies. There are enough consulting jobs, to say nothing of current and future startups around (including your own if you create one), to not need to work for them. > What needs to happen is that people keep applying pressure so facebook is forced to adapt its business model even if it hits their bottom line - which is already happening apparently. Then again, would-be employers saying loud and clear that they won't hire people who worked for morally bankrupt companies is a potential answer too. If software engineers pushed hard to consider that working for them was a dead-end job rather than something very desirable, then maybe they might end up attracting less talent and go bust eventually. On your deathbed you'll only take a single thing with you. Not your house or family; not your wealth; only whether what you did with your life was worth it. A very very few, like Alfred Nobel, are lucky enough to see what their contemporaries thought about their lives before they passed away and got to adjust. You probably won't.
naravara 8y ago
> So is working at Google, Amazon and probably 90% of the big corps of the world in many sectors While Google and Amazon both have their ethical problems and serious anti-trust issues, Facebook is in a league of its own. The complete, cavalier disregard for the consequences of its own actions as long as they get theirs is utterly unconscionable. Unlike Google or Amazon, they add nothing of real value to society to balance the abuses they bring with them. All their labors are geared towards extracting the utility of other creators (their acquisitions like Instagram or WhatsApp) or to suck the time and attention out of people through addictive mechanisms. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow a hundred federated online platforms to function as generic address books and life-updaters would crop up over night, and just about every one of them would be better. You would have to look at lines of business like Big Tobacco to find another field of similar moral perfidy.
- eanzenberg 8y ago
  That's, just like, your opinion man.
  - aonwoajdndj 8y ago
    We are all in the world of opinions here. Share your opinion or criticize his. Comments like this are not helping us make progress on these issues.
    - eanzenberg 8y ago
      Sure, let's all sling FUD around based on anecdotes and fake data. Let's shame people earning a salary working at a company and trying to solve real problems. Sure FB does some shitty things but honestly so does every large company out there. It's impossible to get to that massive size without breaking a couple eggs here and there. People expect saints when saints are imaginary. The baseline to measure cannot be "perfection".
      - losteric 8y ago
        > People expect saints when saints are imaginary. The baseline to measure cannot be "perfection". You're putting up a strawman. The baseline is other big tech companies (MS/GOOG/AMZN/AAPL) - companies that are definitely not saints. Amazon/Google's ethical tradeoffs are debatable, but they do deliver benefits that are unmatched in the market. Facebook? Not really.
rexpop 8y ago
Arguably, no: rather, we should work to organize our workplaces into democratically controlled firms whose bottom line incorporates the ethical thresholds of its employees, who are then free to adjust their ethical thresholds back to with what we can sleep at night.
pq0ak2nnd 8y ago
Is it really that bad being a software/hardware engineer in Europe? I was thinking of entering via Holland (easiest work rights) and then after a few years try to work in France or Italy where it is almost impossible to fire someone, so I could retire on the job.
- Mahn 8y ago
  Depends on your expectations. You can live comfortably as a skilled software engineer in Europe, but you won't be able to build a nest to retire comfortably in 20 years.
drb91 8y ago
What pressure can people realistically apply to facebook without help from labor?
throw2016 8y ago
It's only 2 large companies, Google and Facebook who are now out of control in building invasive surveillance systems so its completely disingenuous to try to pass this off as some sort of generic corporate issue. People who work for known unethical organizations are hardly celebrated so these are poor attempts at muddying the waters and distraction. The bottom line is if you can't behave ethically you can't expect ethics from others in society. If 6 figure earning engineers can't exercise ethical choice then who can? Its incredible given the level of discourse how anyone can expect any ethical behavior from the poor and starving and yet we do. The double standards and greed from educated classes is stunning.
ghrifter 8y ago
Society post Industrial Revolution was a mistake.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lord_braleigh 8y ago
OSKARSCHINDLERWASANAZI
rhizome 8y ago
This is why in my dating profile I say that I'm skeptical of people who work at FAANG, and if they do that they'll have to prove they're human. (not in so many words) going to work for Facebook/Google/Amazon is a enormous bump (we're speaking 2-4x) of salary for many people, which in some cases means you can buy an house after 3-4 years even with the crazy rents back in your home country Ah yes, the ends justify the means.

enraged_camel 8y ago

>>in Europe going to work for Facebook/Google/Amazon is a enormous bump (we're speaking 2-4x) of salary for many people, which in some cases means you can buy an house after 3-4 years even with the crazy rents back in your home country - and that's HUGE. So this is how we justify it now? “But it will allow me to buy a house in 3-4 years”?

zeth___ 8y ago
How else can any one justify working for capitalists? I enjoy destroying the environment for future generations so they don't have it too easy?
chronid 8y ago
I was just noting that in other parts of the world (where the average salary nationally for developers is NOT a comfy 60k$) finding alternatives to those companies can be a little bit complex, and for sure no less evil. The "justification" (if you want to call it that way) you are looking for is in the part you forgot to quote and respond to ;)
- martimarkov 8y ago
  I find it hard to believe that only FB has on office in that country that offers the $60k you are referring to. I work in London and there are a lot of companies that will give close to FB salary if you are a good developer. And yes there are companies that are not as corrupt as FB, Google, Amazon. So I'm wondering (out of curiosity as I can't personally think of any) where in Europe is that happening?
  - eanzenberg 8y ago
    London isn't even EU
    - martimarkov 8y ago
      Kinda is buddy. Surpassingly the UK is part of the EU and London being the capital of the UK is part of it. Also EU != Europe

bepotts 8y ago

Too much common sense for the internet. I'd love to know the organizations all the Facebook and Google haters work for. No firm is perfect.

foepys 8y ago
HN trends to think there's nothing else besides Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Silicon Valley startups. Truth is, there are tens of thousands small software shops all around the world, working on - in HN's opinion - "mundane" software like machine controllers, production management software, ERP systems, etc. without collecting and indirectly selling all personal data they can get their hands on.

compcoffee 8y ago

>Also, I fear that HN somewhat forgets the world is not SF, in Europe going to work for Facebook/Google/Amazon is a enormous bump (we're speaking 2-4x) of salary for many people, which in some cases means you can buy an house after 3-4 years even with the crazy rents back in your home country - and that's HUGE. I guess if your entire purpose in life is personal wealth, this makes sense. It also makes sense why you fit in with SV culture.

TaylorAlexander 8y ago
That feels pretty dismissive. Wealth independence is a huge deal that gains an individual very important security and well being. We can chastise the workers as much as we can chastise the consumers who support this system. We’re all complicit in this, for the most part. We can work together to build alternatives.
holtalanm 8y ago
if your entire purpose in life is to...idk...actually have a good life, then personal wealth does somewhat go hand-in-hand with that. The only people that say they don't need money are those that aren't poor, from my experience.
dang 8y ago
Personal attacks will get you banned here, so please refrain from them in your posts to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

I'm sure "but it pays well" is the rationale used to self-justify many morally dubious through to outright immoral and illegal acts. Doesn't improve the validity of the position though.

emodendroket 8y ago
I'll tell you what: you go to the cloister first and the rest of us will catch up with you later
joelx 8y ago
Nation states (China and Russia) are backing a massive PR campaign against tools that they can't control... Hence these major attacks lately and all the hate for Facebook and Google. In reality, those tech companies are enormously more ethical than Baidu or Alibaba or almost any mainstream alternatives... And compared to companies oil, gun, drug, tobacco, alcohol and most others, Facebook and Google are saints.
- majani 8y ago
  Downvoted for diversionary red scare tactics.
- roblabla 8y ago
  Can we get proof of this supposed massive PR campaign? You can't just shoo away several real, well-documented, massive breach of trust from Facebook with "well it's the Russians". The hate Facebook is getting comes from them being negligent about user data, and they were well-aware of the problem.
  - joelx 8y ago
    https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-helped-reveal-china-hackers-2013-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-helped-reveal-china... There are hundreds of more similar articles documenting hacking by China and Russia. The data breach at the parent of this article even is supposed to have been done by a coordinated nation states. How can a company ever compete against a nations resources? Expecting Facebook to magically secure themselves against attacks by a nation is wishful thinking. If you want to stop breaches like this, the nation's that are doing it must be held accountable. Facebook is an easy target, but that's just attacking the victim. China and Russia are much more intimidating but are the ones who are the true perpetrators.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

carapace 8y ago

> So is working at Google, Amazon and... ...oil to finance to pharmaceutical to telecommunications Yes. Most of the large and powerful organizations have severe moral problems, almost all of them due to violations of a simple rule: $ < Values "Love of money is the root of all evil." We all have choices. We all make decisions. I would go even further and say that people who ride Uber or buy from Amazon are moral cretins.

emodendroket 8y ago
Ethical consumption is a dead end. You can't even buy slavery-free clothing or food reliably.
- carapace 8y ago
  You're being an apologist for slavery? Alright then, where do we draw the line? Can I go buy a person? If not, can I invade Sudan?[1] > Ethical consumption is a dead end. Should we give up even thinking about it and just do whatever is most convenient? Will that solve all our problems? You know Amazon treats its employees like disposable shit. If you buy from them anyway you are putting your self-love above the love you should have for the folks working there. You know Uber is extracting value from their drivers[2] and will discard them without compunction when the robots come online. And they killed Elaine Herzberg. If you ride Uber you're rewarding them for all this and putting your self-love above the love you should have for those folks driving. I'm gonna keep fighting for what I think is right. That means telling people that they are moral cretins when they are blithe about it. (I don't think violence solves anything, but a good rant can shake up a body's thoughts. I have friends that shop through Amazon and ride Uber and I don't chide them too harshly or often.) Working at FB or one of the other emerging technocracies isn't an instance of "Never let ideological purity prevent you from effective action." It's a case of putting money above core values, or not having those values in the first place, or simply not paying attention. If you're going to be a Morlock at least be a self-aware Morlock, eh? > You can't even buy slavery-free clothing or food reliably. You can try. If you don't even try you're a moral cretin.[3] It's a common malady in this empty and abortive age. [1] One of the few places where outright slavery still occurs in modern times. If that's not grounds for attack what is? Oil? [2] "They don’t pay the cost of their capital. The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human." https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the-problems-of-uber-and-lyft/ https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the...? [3] "Origin Late 18th century: from French crétin, from Swiss French crestin ‘Christian’ (from Latin Christianus), here used to mean ‘human being’, apparently as a reminder that, though deformed, cretins were human and not beasts." https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/cretin https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/cretin

pslam 8y ago

"They're all like this so it's impossible to do good" is an even more morally bankrupt position. It rejects personal responsibility and agency, places you as the victim, and allows you to continue to be a bad actor in the world. You should change this.

avip 8y ago
It is completely ridiculous to try portraying someone working for FB as morally disabled. I'd suggest people express their moral superiority by deleting their own FB account, without much ado.
- VMG 8y ago
  if I deleted my profile, I have no control over who squats my name preventing impersonation is literally the only reason I have an account, since I cannot trust facebook to handle this for me
chronid 8y ago
It's not impossible to do good, that's not what I'm claiming at all, and that's why the last line is there. I'm pretty sure you can do good even within facebook, doing your utmost to keep the company accountable (from my experience in another big corp, we don't see 1% of what's happening inside it, and how many people are facepalming - and we'll never know if many things were just humans being stupid or actual calculated decisions). You can also keep your guard up from outside and force facebook to fix itself (obviously, as much as its business allows) from outside, for example pushing it to hire more moderators and get as better so to prevent things like myanmar from happening again. What I'm saying is that it's impossible (and in my opinion, pointless) to claim moral superiority and to accuse people of being morally bankrupt because they work for corp X.
- pslam 8y ago
  Sure it is. There are plenty of companies which can't easily be categorized as having significant negative effects to the world. You can work for a "bad" company but consciously constrain your work to a business unit which improves customers' lives. What you're using is false equivalence. You know what the worst thing for the environment is? Being born. Why do people insist on living when everything is bad? Reject the notion that you're powerless to change things.

baxtr 8y ago

OP’s stance is (I believe) that we shouldn’t align our incentives along money only, but also on the core values of a company. Call it naive or idealistic but I, and obviously many others, believe that we have a responsibility as people and employees to work for companies with the right set of values. Truly lived, not just printed out and put up on the wall. I think this is something that motivates people these days. Do something with a good impact on this planet with the single lifetime we were given and f*ck the money (ideally have both).

majani 8y ago

I feel like this overreach is directly as a result of the absurd expectation VC backed companies have of constantly growing forever. People who are uncomfortable with this fact can choose to only work at bootstrapped companies that are doing well.

ddebernardy 8y ago

> Your point? Should we stop working in IT and go back to the fields? Not the OP... But no... Just stop working for morally bankrupt companies. There are enough consulting jobs, to say nothing of current and future startups around (including your own if you create one), to not need to work for them. > What needs to happen is that people keep applying pressure so facebook is forced to adapt its business model even if it hits their bottom line - which is already happening apparently. Then again, would-be employers saying loud and clear that they won't hire people who worked for morally bankrupt companies is a potential answer too. If software engineers pushed hard to consider that working for them was a dead-end job rather than something very desirable, then maybe they might end up attracting less talent and go bust eventually. On your deathbed you'll only take a single thing with you. Not your house or family; not your wealth; only whether what you did with your life was worth it. A very very few, like Alfred Nobel, are lucky enough to see what their contemporaries thought about their lives before they passed away and got to adjust. You probably won't.

naravara 8y ago

> So is working at Google, Amazon and probably 90% of the big corps of the world in many sectors While Google and Amazon both have their ethical problems and serious anti-trust issues, Facebook is in a league of its own. The complete, cavalier disregard for the consequences of its own actions as long as they get theirs is utterly unconscionable. Unlike Google or Amazon, they add nothing of real value to society to balance the abuses they bring with them. All their labors are geared towards extracting the utility of other creators (their acquisitions like Instagram or WhatsApp) or to suck the time and attention out of people through addictive mechanisms. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow a hundred federated online platforms to function as generic address books and life-updaters would crop up over night, and just about every one of them would be better. You would have to look at lines of business like Big Tobacco to find another field of similar moral perfidy.

eanzenberg 8y ago
That's, just like, your opinion man.
- aonwoajdndj 8y ago
  We are all in the world of opinions here. Share your opinion or criticize his. Comments like this are not helping us make progress on these issues.
  - eanzenberg 8y ago
    Sure, let's all sling FUD around based on anecdotes and fake data. Let's shame people earning a salary working at a company and trying to solve real problems. Sure FB does some shitty things but honestly so does every large company out there. It's impossible to get to that massive size without breaking a couple eggs here and there. People expect saints when saints are imaginary. The baseline to measure cannot be "perfection".
    - losteric 8y ago
      > People expect saints when saints are imaginary. The baseline to measure cannot be "perfection". You're putting up a strawman. The baseline is other big tech companies (MS/GOOG/AMZN/AAPL) - companies that are definitely not saints. Amazon/Google's ethical tradeoffs are debatable, but they do deliver benefits that are unmatched in the market. Facebook? Not really.

rexpop 8y ago

Arguably, no: rather, we should work to organize our workplaces into democratically controlled firms whose bottom line incorporates the ethical thresholds of its employees, who are then free to adjust their ethical thresholds back to with what we can sleep at night.

pq0ak2nnd 8y ago

Is it really that bad being a software/hardware engineer in Europe? I was thinking of entering via Holland (easiest work rights) and then after a few years try to work in France or Italy where it is almost impossible to fire someone, so I could retire on the job.

Mahn 8y ago
Depends on your expectations. You can live comfortably as a skilled software engineer in Europe, but you won't be able to build a nest to retire comfortably in 20 years.

drb91 8y ago

What pressure can people realistically apply to facebook without help from labor?

throw2016 8y ago

It's only 2 large companies, Google and Facebook who are now out of control in building invasive surveillance systems so its completely disingenuous to try to pass this off as some sort of generic corporate issue. People who work for known unethical organizations are hardly celebrated so these are poor attempts at muddying the waters and distraction. The bottom line is if you can't behave ethically you can't expect ethics from others in society. If 6 figure earning engineers can't exercise ethical choice then who can? Its incredible given the level of discourse how anyone can expect any ethical behavior from the poor and starving and yet we do. The double standards and greed from educated classes is stunning.

ghrifter 8y ago

Society post Industrial Revolution was a mistake.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

lord_braleigh 8y ago

OSKARSCHINDLERWASANAZI

rhizome 8y ago

This is why in my dating profile I say that I'm skeptical of people who work at FAANG, and if they do that they'll have to prove they're human. (not in so many words) going to work for Facebook/Google/Amazon is a enormous bump (we're speaking 2-4x) of salary for many people, which in some cases means you can buy an house after 3-4 years even with the crazy rents back in your home country Ah yes, the ends justify the means.