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> Ms. Brown said a lot of students criticize Facebook and talk about how they would not work there, but ultimately join. “Everyone cares about ethics in tech be

• leesalminen 8y ago
  I could see debt-laden recent grads compromising their ethics to work at FB. I don't see myself (not debt-laden, have a great job) compromising mine just to work for them. What's the long term effect of that trend? Will FB be chock full of juniors with an ever depleting number of seniors?
  • Kadin 8y ago
    > Will FB be chock full of juniors with an ever depleting number of seniors? Doubtless some of those junior devs will be willing to stick around. In for a penny, in for a pound — very few people want to suddenly take a pay cut; your lifestyle has a way of keeping you hooked on a paycheck of a certain amount, once you get used to it. And assuming the organization follows a standard "pyramid" model, you don't need that many people to stick around to give a good balance of junior to senior people, and have opportunities for promotion for high-performing/interested junior folks. Lots of companies have to create that attrition artificially; if they get it naturally as a result of people parting ways when their school loans are paid, it's probably solving a problem for them.
  • save_ferris 8y ago
    > Will FB be chock full of juniors with an ever depleting number of seniors? Only if everyone that has an opportunity to work there shares your moral compass. This industry is really good at marketing, and not just to customers but employees too. I mean, look at how popular facebook still is among the public even after all of these scandals. There doesn't appear to be any serious attempt by the shareholders to demand change, and Zuck always seems to escape responsibility. I don't remember the exact number, but someone posted data on HN showing that a high percentage of current employees at FB (far more than 50%) see the company as still providing a net positive impact on the world.
    • recharged96 8y ago
      FB is the MS windows of the social media world. 1999,MS Windows was de facto, but everyone hated it. Linux/Unix/MacOS was for the cool kids. But all business folk loved MS, still do, from shareholders to 401k holders. FB is no different.
  • toomanybeersies 8y ago
    In my experience, there's no shortage of people who have no moral issue working for Facebook and other similar companies.
• FilterSweep 8y ago
  And I don’t blame them. Developers are largely undercompensated for the utility they provide for firms, both across companies and within (compared to other roles). In the Bay, it’s the difference between living comfortably+saving for their future and just making ends meet. It’s a bit like blaming the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb.
  • eesmith 8y ago
    > It’s a bit like blaming the scientists of the Manhattan Project for dropping the atomic bomb. Consider Joseph Rotblat. He worked on the Manhattan Project because believed that it was needed as a deterrent against a German nuclear weapon. After he learned that Germany had given up on the bomb, he left the Manhattan Project - the only one to do so - and felt betrayed by its use in Japan. "Rotblat believed that scientists should always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work.[39] He became one of the most prominent critics of the nuclear arms race ... Rotblat shared, with the Pugwash Conferences, the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts toward nuclear disarmament." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rotblat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rotblat . There's a movie about him, "The Strangest Dream", at https://www.nfb.ca/film/strangest_dream/ https://www.nfb.ca/film/strangest_dream/ .
    • xxpor 8y ago
      The difference is the nuclear arms race was inevitable. The soviets would have made it eventually anyway, and then what would we (the US) have done? Facebook on the other hand is not inevitable.
      • eesmith 8y ago
        Should scientists always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work? Should Facebook employees always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work? I think your argument is that the ethics means we really needed enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet several times over? And we really needed to let the government sell the lie that there was a 'missile gap' to the US population? Or was that lie in order to hide that there were U-2 overflights? Who were we hiding the knowledge of U-2s from? The Soviets, who could see them on radar and were developing ways to shoot them down? Or the US public? It's all very odd ethics. I'm sure the Rand Corporation has some game theorists who would clear everything up.
• gpm 8y ago
  My theory is that pay and working conditions at Facebook are as good as they are precisely because of people feeling like this. They are having to pay a premium to attract engineers as a result of the moral opposition.
  • Barrin92 8y ago
    Facebook also has a comparatively small number of employees compared to the other big players and as a result significantly more net income / per employee. https://www.recode.net/2017/8/4/16090758/facebook-google-profit-per-employee-comparison-chart https://www.recode.net/2017/8/4/16090758/facebook-google-pro... Income per employee (as of 2017 according to the article) is about three times as high as it is for Microsoft.
    • oculusthrift 8y ago
      that isn't really a fair comparison considering microsoft makes a significant chunk of money from enterprise and that requires a lot of salesmen instead of engineers.
  • ralusek 8y ago
    It's very similar to when you hear people say "I love my job but they don't pay a living wage!" It's because you love your job, you have to pay for that.
    • AlexandrB 8y ago
      This kind of post-facto justification for poor working conditions or wages needs a name, so it can be dismissed out of hand. It seems to assume that the market is “fair” and getting poor pay must be justified by some other factor about the job. In reality, there are plenty of jobs that have garbage pay and suck. As well as jobs that are both lucrative and “easy”. Consider the average CEO: not the exceptional visionaries but the type that loses the shareholders money for years and then exits on a golden parachute. These jobs are hard only in the sense that you have to know the right people, (being born to the right people helps) to even be considered. On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage (or now, Uber, for below minimum wage). The free market is not fair, and it is not a meritocracy. It is subject to all the same tribal impulses and inequalities that have persisted in humans throughout history. In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage, no matter how enjoyable it is. That’s just an excuse for exploitation.
• enraged_camel 8y ago
  >>Everyone cares about ethics in tech before they get a contract Another way of saying, everyone has a price.
• EpicEng 8y ago
  This is true of anything, just a bunch of talk. It's easy to be opposed to X when X does not offer you anything. As soon as X is good for you, many (most?) people don't stick to their guns.
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    It’s always a compromise. Facebook offering you an extra $10K but you have to work on increasing engagement? Probably a pass. Facebook offering an extra $500K to work on public research that doesn’t help their bottom line? Maybe something worth looking at. Currently, I don’t see any jobs at Facebook that tip the scale for me personally.
    • EpicEng 8y ago
      Well, exactly; it's easy to take the moral highground when, well... it's easy. When there's a real choice at hand most people do what's best for them.
      • saagarjha 8y ago
        “What’s best for them” often also includes a vague notion of “feeling good by helping humanity” of similar, which often doesn’t show up when just looking at salaries.
        • EpicEng 8y ago
          "often"? I don't know how often altruism beats out personal gain.
  • daveFNbuck 8y ago
    Facebook doesn't just come out and offer students contracts. They have to apply and do a phone screen and travel to the office and spend a whole day interviewing. There are so many steps where it's still easy to be opposed but they're doing it anyway.
  • scottlocklin 8y ago
• rinze 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet
• estsauver 8y ago
  There are a lot of people who interview at the big tech companies + a couple small impact oriented startups, but it's very rare for them to take the small impact oriented startups offer. It's hard to turn down 250k a year.
  • partyshah 8y ago
    I actually don't think this is true. Many computer science students are not only looking for morality in companies but also excitement. Also it's not 250K. Big Tech might give advantage of like +15K. Also, the work is not nearly as exciting. It's safe and cushy, but as a person in their 20s out of college, safe and cushy isn't fun.
    • estsauver 8y ago
      Not all new grads will be making 250k, I know at least 2 were making around that 1 year out of undergrad. (+-20k) https://www.paysa.com/salaries/facebook https://www.paysa.com/salaries/facebook I saw an offer for Facebook that included a 100k signing bonus. I believe one acre funds highest salary for a software engineer is in the neighborhood of 120k. I'm also speaking from experience, I am regularly trying to hire top tier talent to work on ending poverty in subsaharan Africa. I, and other I talk with in the space, have all seen this phenomena in Bay area candidates. I honestly don't blame people, it's an incredibly expensive place, it's just meant we do a lot less recruiting out of the us/bay area.
    • thedufer 8y ago
      15k? Maybe it widens as you gain experience, but my last job search (at ~3.5 years of experience) resulted in a 90k difference between the highest startup offer and lowest non-startup offer.
    • pqn 8y ago
      As a new grad out of college with friends at FB, I can attest that it can actually be 250k (base + equity + returning intern signing bonus). At least for year 1.
• amelius 8y ago
  And that's exactly why your colleagues at Facebook are likely to care less about ethics. Another reason to not work there.
• nemild 8y ago
  I loved this quote: > “Employees are wising up to the fact that you can have a mission statement on your website, but when you’re looking at how the company creates new products or makes decisions, the correlation between the two is not so tightly aligned,” said David Chie, the head of Palo Alto Staffing, a tech job placement service in Silicon Valley. “Everyone’s having this conversation.” I call these anodyne mission statements, false mission. Mission that feels good, but that doesn't have teeth in incentives — or selectively ignores inconvenient facts. Beware False Mission https://www.nemil.com/snippets/beware-false-mission.html https://www.nemil.com/snippets/beware-false-mission.html
  • sjg007 8y ago
    Chomsky talks about this.
    • nemild 8y ago
      Any chance you know the pieces where he most focuses on this?
      • sjg007 8y ago
        Here's a summary post: https://medium.com/@wtfmitchel/the-political-nature-of-industry-bb2dac5c51c1 https://medium.com/@wtfmitchel/the-political-nature-of-indus... I guess I would read some of his books: Profit over People and the one on Media. He has a 1997 talk at northeastern on youtube where he addresses it a bit during question time.
        • wallace_f 8y ago
          There are some good thoughts and complaints in there about propaganda and nepotism, but isn't this old news? Isn't it also pervasive throughout society? I mean, there are even blatant industry-wide propaganda agendas such as Harvard scientsts lying about sugar, MIT scientists lying about climate change, and scientists lying before courts about leaded gasoline... Of course always after payments from profit-seeking industry. There are countless examples. Of course Walmart is known for both nepotism, and brainwashing their employees about union membership. And of course they are also close with the top-echelon of politicians at state and federal levels. Like the article mentions, companies say they are progressive, and for an example， promote gender equality, but their engineering divisions tell a completely different story. And then if you really take a moment to stop and look around the world we live in, we are in a society full of propaganda. Of course the War on Drugs, War on Terror, and War on Poverty all increased poverty, poor outcomes related to drugs, and removal of liberties and prosperity that terrorists sought for. Over the last year, MSNBC covered Stormy Daniels on average >1/day. War in Yemen? 0 times. Or, here is Wolf Blitzer saying that arms sales to Saudis is a "moral issue" because defense contractors will "lose jobs." Propaganda is part of our daily lives. My favorite Einstein quote is: "Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."
• mattlondon 8y ago
  Yup. +1 to this. Ethics are cheap when you've got nothing to lose...
  • garysahota93 8y ago
    So true!! I really wonder how some of the folks that live there sleep at night. Like some of the things they do, do in fact change the world, but many more do harm it!
• almost_usual 8y ago
  It's not unusual for people to compromise their morals for pay. Actions speak louder than words.
  • Lio 8y ago
    Actually, we know from the Milgram Experiment[1] that most people just compromise their morals for authority figures regardless of pay. Most people aren't bad inherently they just do what they are told and then alter their world view to justify what they've done because internally we generally don't think of ourselves as bad people. So if you do nasty things to someone because someone else in authority tells you to, you tend to dehumanise them after the fact not before. Next time you have to do something nasty you'll find it easier because you've dehumanised the victim previously. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
    • almost_usual 8y ago
      This is a good point, however, I think this would apply more to workers who have already been employed for awhile. Anyone joining should have the sense they'll be subjected to dubious practices.
      • Lio 8y ago
        You'd think that but that isn't what the experiment showed. None of the subjects had been through the experiment before. They were all commanded by an authority figer (man in a white coat with a clipboard) to shock an unseen but heard fellow subject with increasingly large voltages. The "victim" was an actor who begs for mercy with each shock and then suddenly goes quiet. The experiment goes on with the subject shocking the "dead" actor when it finishes. Most did what they were told with no complaints. Some complained that what they were doing was wrong but still did it anyway. Only a very few said "no I won't do that, it's wrong" and left the experiment. There's no reason to think that the people working for Facebook or Google are any different to those test subjects. They'll spread fake news, dodge taxes or compile massive amounts of data on people just because they're told to by their boss. Just like most other people would.
• Swizec 8y ago
  It's like Tyson always said: Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Everyone is moral and principled until they have to choose between morals/principles and temptations. That's the true test.
• bamboozled 8y ago
  It doesn’t mean grads are excited about working at Facebook, it means they accept an offer for the sake of common sense. This will most likely work to Facebooks disadvantage long term however; Facebooks workforce can’t only be motivated by money. There was certainly a time that people would’ve took way less money to be part of FB because they believed in the product and mission, which is now a joke.
  • rajataghi 8y ago
    Agreed. Also, now if any other Big-N company is willing to offer about the same compensation as fb, people will be more inclined to leave fb because of the joke their product and mission have become.
• Iv 8y ago
  That's fine. You can't expect 100% of the taskforce to have the same morals. Thing is, there are enough out there so that immoral companies need to pay more or offer better conditions to have people who would work for less for an ethical competitor. And actually it probably also means that some people competent enough to gain a salary they consider enough in ethical venues will just say no to Facebook whichever salary they are proposed.
• QML 8y ago
  If you can't change the incentives, change the game: either cap salaries and stock grants, or provide a universal basic income. The point being is, you want to make it easier for people to make the ethical choice.
• cauchyschwartz 8y ago
  Right, as long as there is still prestige associated with the company name, people will still try and work there. We as a society encourage it. You can get social clout from working at Exxon-Mobil or any of the big banks -- likewise the social capital you get from working at Facebook/Google/etc. is large, regardless of the privacy and ethics implications in working there.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• warp_factor 8y ago
  perfect summary of Silicon Valley. Everyone pretends to be on the morale high ground, until they see their paycheck.
• cimmanom 8y ago
  Why would you even interview in the first place with a company you didn't want to work for?
• jondubois 8y ago
  Everyone wants to make the world a better place... For themselves... At the expense of everyone else.