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I get that we don’t like Facebook, but isn’t this a bit much? Are they worse than google or amazon? What about people who work for Coca-Cola? What about the peo

I get that we don’t like Facebook, but isn’t this a bit much? Are they worse than google or amazon? What about people who work for Coca-Cola? What about the people who make mobile games and loot boxes for Blizzard? Where is it ethical to work? I mean, I’ve been in public service for decades, so I know a thing or two about choosing idealism over money, but that’s not for everyone and I frankly don’t think Facebook is really that more evil than around 90% of the hundreds of software companies we deal with. Like we recently ordered a system for abused children journals. A nationwide bidding landing in a 120 million danish or deal, for a piece of software that 30 municipalities build an equivalent of on their own for 2 million danish kr a few years back. So some company is making 118 million because the world is rotten. That company is the most popular tech destination for newly educated CS grads in my country by the way.

deleted 8y ago
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cgoecknerwald 8y ago
> Like we recently ordered a system for abused children journals. A nationwide bidding landing in a 120 million danish or deal, for a piece of software that 30 municipalities build an equivalent of on their own for 2 million danish kr a few years back. Can you give the name of this company / case? I can't find anything in English news of Denmark.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  The system that won the bidding is called DUBU. https://www.kombit.dk/dubu https://www.kombit.dk/dubu The system that does the same thing DUBU does today, and the next DUBU will, good enough is called sbsys. It’s not a secret, the 120 million might be 128 million though, but it’s not completely unreasonable for what it’s meant to do, the politics involved and so on. It’s just hilarious that communal co-ownership of software did it for 2 million. I mean you could argue that it’s illustrating how silly enterprise software companies are in general, but it is what it is.
  - avinium 8y ago
    > I mean you could argue that it’s illustrating how silly enterprise software companies are in general, but it is what it is. Enterprise software companies know exactly what they're doing - fleecing the government for every single dime they can. You can't blame them - they're just acting on their natural capitalist instinct to maximize their return to shareholders. Blame the government for its ridiculously bloated procurement process, uncompetitive career opportunities and a broken management system. Government waste is utterly gobsmacking.
    - eksemplar 8y ago
      I’d say the same thing for enterprise companies though. It’s not like they bank that money. They use it on project management, sales management, key account management, four layers of testing setup that still lets bugs slip into production, and a whole lot of other useless stuff. I mean, the budget is transparent, they spend less than 20% on actual development and makes less than 10% out as profits, so that’s 70% inefficiency, and they only won the contracts because all the big companies are like that. You’re not wrong though, turning it political isn’t really great for building software. My point is just that a big company is almost as political as the public sector, and sometimes they are less adaptive because their political leadership and vision changes slower and has smaller range. The equivalent system sbsys was also build by private sector developers you know, but here the political side handled the project management and codebase leadership, and apparently we’re just a lot better at that.
      - avinium 8y ago
        Oh yeah, companies of substantial size have large/meaningless overheads too. That's the unfortunate consequence of having a lot of people work together with varying opinions/motivations. They also have to spend a lot on warm bodies/lobbying to get those contracts in the first place. I'm not letting the enterprise providers off the hook. Just pointing out (as you note) that true responsibility lies with the project managers. Ineffectual project managers mean overblown budgets and undercooked results.
    - 8y ago
bluntfang 8y ago
They aren't worse. They are different. People want to work on products they relate to, especially when they are young and without dependents. Young people don't relate to facebook anymore, but they relate to google and amazon because they use those services in their home life and career life.
deanmoriarty 8y ago
From my experience, most of this negativity just appears on HN or on channels who have some strong bias (usually business related) against Facebook. All my acquaintances working in tech, which includes people from very wide sociodemographics ranges, consider Facebook an absolutely prestigious employer, with top talent, top challenges, top compensation and top name for building a personal brand. Hell, I interviewed at FB about a year ago and was _thrilled_ to get an offer (which I ultimately didn't accept for other reasons) and I loved the technical challenges that they are working and how they are advancing the state of the art on some really cool scalability problems. I'll be downvoted, but when it comes to Facebook, HN is a broken record.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > Facebook an absolutely prestigious employer Anecdotally, I’m helping several friends, who are each exceptionally capable, employed at Facebook with new jobs. They reached out before this revelation, to their credit, though this threw fuel on the fire. I suspect Facebook will be known for having hired mediocre sell-outs a few years from now.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Jonanin 8y ago
    From your profile: > I trade private equity stakes in technology companies. Former aerospace investment banker and before that, algorithmic equity derivatives trader. You're also the one who submitted this article. Somehow I doubt you are actually helping friends at FB find new jobs. I think it's much more likely that you are short FB. There's a lot of your type out there spreading articles like this as much as possible. Maybe you should spend some time thinking about what contributions you investment banker types are making to society, if there is any. Good riddance...
    - pantaloons 8y ago
      I graduated six years ago, have worked at Microsoft and Dropbox, and anecdotally around a quarter of my friends at either of them wouldn't work at Facebook now. Parent comment is not obviously wrong, and you shouldn't assume bad faith. Your last submission was titled "We're lucky Mark Zuckerberg is in charge" and around half your comment history is devoted to defending Facebook. At least if you're going to question someones motives, you should state yours.
guelo 8y ago
It is their personal moral decision, you can't make it for them. I encourage everybody to try to align their values with their work. Capitalism is wrong that we are all just replaceable cogs that can be put to work on any capitalist's dreams.
htor 8y ago
there are so many ethical things you can use your brain on. first of all, you can start by not investing your talent/intelligence on advertisement. everybody knows ads are bad and they make making people suffer in many ways. we know so well that facebook, google et.al have no good intentions for the planet and are harvesting massive profits. ultra capitalist, maybe? we have many choices as humans, we can choose to organize, work for honest people and take a big shit on evil companies destroying our environment!
Karrot_Kream 8y ago
> Are they worse than google or amazon? What about people who work for Coca-Cola? What about the people who make mobile games and loot boxes for Blizzard? The recent Times article indicates that they are dirtier than Google and Apple, so yes.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
zandl 8y ago
If you can link the fall of democracy to misinformation being spread on their platform, genocide and mob murders, yes I’d say not all tech companies are that bad.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  I think poor education, stagnation of living standards and rising inequality is a lot worse in that area than Facebook. Granted, I think angrymob-media would be a much more fitting description than social-media, but it’s not like humanity wasn’t perfectly capable of making really shitty decisions long before the internet.
Voloskaya 8y ago
The point is that these peoples in the article have leverage. Companies are competing for them not the other way around, so it's natural for them to consider ethics because it will not affect their standard of living. If I have the choice between working for Palantir or Facebook, I choose Facebook. If have to choose to between Facebook and Apple I choose Apple. Whatever I choose I will still live extremely comfortably. And yes not all those companies have an equally bad impact on society. In both of your examples it's fair to say that you (or CS grads in Denmark) probably don't have that kind of leverage, because this is not the Silicon Valley. If you have to choose between working for FB at 150k$/year or public service for a third of that, then yes, choosing ethics has a big negative impacts on your life and it's hard to blame anyone for choosing FB. They don't have this problem.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  Danish CS degrees are in high regard, and we’re all fairly good at English. There are a lot of Danes in Silicon Valley, I mean, C++, C# and Ruby were made by Danes, so it’s not like Murica isn’t open for us. You can make a lot of money in IT anywhere though. I manage 70 people, in a muniplacity that is well paid. I’ve been headhunted for much higher salaries throughout my career though, but I’ve always preferred public service. The fact that I could be home at 15:00 on a Friday, with my kids picked up and the groceries done helped a lot in my younger years as well of course.
  - Voloskaya 8y ago
    "Danish CS degrees are in high regard, and we’re all fairly good at English. There are a lot of Danes in Silicon Valley, I mean, C++, C# and Ruby were made by Danes, so it’s not like Murica isn’t open for us." That is my point. Many of them move to the SV because they can get better conditions (caused by more leverage) there than if they stay in Denmark because there is a magnitude more tech companies there than in DK. I'm pretty sure they don't just move to avoid the rain :)
  - anoncake 8y ago
    Yukihiro Matsumoto is Danish?
aglavine 8y ago
I still like Facebook, but I get all the hate. It is an annoying product and can be addictive. And it used to be less annoying, more about persons and not products, and they don't care about not being addictive. They seems to be trying to cope with thinks like fake news, though. It is part of being a totally new product. But yes, the reaction is exaggerated.
stevenicr 8y ago
yes, they are worse than all those. Perhaps loot box companies are close and only less so because of current scale and not because of less sinister intent. Google is not fbook, (not that I am a fan of big G - it's evil in other ways more so than fbook) - Where is ethical in my mind is more shades of grey rather than place A is and Place B is not.. I think many people do not understand the immense power the fbook wields to truly get how damaging it is and can be. Some of us may not get sucked in by our evolving news feed, but that does not mean that it is not indeed sucking people in and keeping them hooked for it's benefit and to the detriment of other's lives.
hinkley 8y ago
> where is it ethical to work? Possibly these companies: https://bcorporation.net/directory https://bcorporation.net/directory
CobrastanJorji 8y ago
Neither Amazon nor Google hired a PR team to push alt-right narratives about how "George Soros is out to get you." Facebook has.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
neves 8y ago
Yes, it is a lot worse. I live in Brazil, where a Facebook company, was used in a plot to spread fake news to elect a far right president. They are really against doing anything that may affect their bottom line. No other tech company is this bad.
- hanspeter 8y ago
  Can you elaborate? What was Facebook's role in this? Do you blame Facebook for not filtering out any potential fake news or did they take an active position in the matter?
  - travellingbuyer 8y ago
    It was a Conspiracy Theory created by a journalist who wrote that non-media companies were sending fake news, with no evidence to show for it. Whatsapp, which is supposed to be E2E encrypted, is the most popular app in Brazil and the government wanted Facebook to censor information, but they said no. Obviously there were false messages about every candidate in the election, not just the one the above guy didn't like. There was even a deepfake video. I can't stress how dangerous it is to ask the government to classify what is true and what is not. This is totally different from the facebook case in America because there it involved ads. Here it was messages from individuals. But sadly the left was advocating for censorship while calling the others fascists.
  - neves 8y ago
    The winner candidate created a well funded structure to disseminate fake news through WhatsApp. There were demands to limit the ability for a individual to spread fake news, but WhatsApp/Facebook had deaf ears. Here are a bunch of links from reputable sourcers: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-latin-america-45769992/fighting-brazil-s-election-on-whatsapp https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-latin-america-45769992/fig... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/opinion/brazil-election-fake-news-whatsapp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/opinion/brazil-election-f... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/18/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-whatsapp-fake-news-campaign https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/18/brazil-jair-bo... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/brazil-election-2018-whatsap-fake-news-presidential-disinformation-a8593741.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/brazil-ele... http://nymag.com/developing/2018/10/whatsapp-too-late-fake-news-brazil-election-bolsonaro.html http://nymag.com/developing/2018/10/whatsapp-too-late-fake-n... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/18/jair-bolsonaro-accused-creating-criminal-network-spread-fake/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/18/jair-bolsonaro-a...
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
Where is it ethical to work? I'm coming to the conclusion, pretty much nowhere is inscrutable and free from scandal in one form or another. However that doesn't give us a pass to be glib and just throw our hands up and say, it's all bad who cares, get money. Nothing positive comes from cynicism. It's especially important to call this out when companies are talking about "making the world better" or otherwise making broad statements about them being a positive force in the world. It's incongruous between reality and their public relations, and that needs to be talked about.
- tomglynch 8y ago
  Totally agree. I think a good example is the tobacco industry.
tenacious 8y ago
> Where is it ethical to work? Oh I don't know, maybe one of those companies that isn't building software that's used to incite genocide? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
Corrado 8y ago
When I was in college and looking for an intern job I declined to interview with RJ Reynolds and several local alcohol producers on moral grounds. I wouldn't have accepted a job there no matter what they offered me. So, I can understand why people wouldn't want to work for a company and believe that there are people in the world that won't compromise their morals for a paycheck.
vehementi 8y ago
> Where is it ethical to work? Working at Netflix, Apple, Salesforce, Oracle, or Microsoft seems to be a category more ethical than Facebook/Google, wouldn't you say? Isn't that a good place to start? At worst, those companies are mainly just screwing over other companies (though depends on if Netflix is up to something behind the scenes)
- yakubin 8y ago
  Oracle? With their approach to IP? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think they care about anything but money in the least.
  - vehementi 8y ago
    No I mean for sure they are pieces of shit to other companies and only care about money, but "who cares" compared to google/facebook level evilness.
- davidcbc 8y ago
  > At worst, those companies are mainly just screwing over other companies (though depends on if Netflix is up to something behind the scenes) Or, you know, profiting from human rights abuses: https://www.newsweek.com/iphone-x-release-human-cost-apples-most-expensive-ever-iphone-699901 https://www.newsweek.com/iphone-x-release-human-cost-apples-...
ionised 8y ago
There are plenty of ethical places to work. You just need to not look only at the richest companies with the most generous compensation, because they tend to be the ones that aren't. It's a simple question you have to ask yourself. Do you value money more than your principles?
martinraag 8y ago
Whataboutism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism] is not really a good defence of Facebook I think.
netcan 8y ago
I’ve been in public service for decades, so I know a thing or two about choosing idealism over money Even here, different people in different situations might see this as either choosing idealism over money or the opposite. I hear the Danish public service is good. Here though (ireland) the public service has a name for meaningless jobs with good conditions. This may be a self fullfiling prophecy. Sometimes the differences can get abstract. I watched an interview while back with coalition soldiers and mercenaries. Soldiers are generally seen as self sacrificing patriots. Mercenaries as greedy assholes. But, both are being paid and they do the same job in the same war and take orders from the same place. Ultimately, a lot of this comes down to perspective.

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cgoecknerwald 8y ago

> Like we recently ordered a system for abused children journals. A nationwide bidding landing in a 120 million danish or deal, for a piece of software that 30 municipalities build an equivalent of on their own for 2 million danish kr a few years back. Can you give the name of this company / case? I can't find anything in English news of Denmark.

eksemplar 8y ago
The system that won the bidding is called DUBU. https://www.kombit.dk/dubu https://www.kombit.dk/dubu The system that does the same thing DUBU does today, and the next DUBU will, good enough is called sbsys. It’s not a secret, the 120 million might be 128 million though, but it’s not completely unreasonable for what it’s meant to do, the politics involved and so on. It’s just hilarious that communal co-ownership of software did it for 2 million. I mean you could argue that it’s illustrating how silly enterprise software companies are in general, but it is what it is.
- avinium 8y ago
  > I mean you could argue that it’s illustrating how silly enterprise software companies are in general, but it is what it is. Enterprise software companies know exactly what they're doing - fleecing the government for every single dime they can. You can't blame them - they're just acting on their natural capitalist instinct to maximize their return to shareholders. Blame the government for its ridiculously bloated procurement process, uncompetitive career opportunities and a broken management system. Government waste is utterly gobsmacking.
  - eksemplar 8y ago
    I’d say the same thing for enterprise companies though. It’s not like they bank that money. They use it on project management, sales management, key account management, four layers of testing setup that still lets bugs slip into production, and a whole lot of other useless stuff. I mean, the budget is transparent, they spend less than 20% on actual development and makes less than 10% out as profits, so that’s 70% inefficiency, and they only won the contracts because all the big companies are like that. You’re not wrong though, turning it political isn’t really great for building software. My point is just that a big company is almost as political as the public sector, and sometimes they are less adaptive because their political leadership and vision changes slower and has smaller range. The equivalent system sbsys was also build by private sector developers you know, but here the political side handled the project management and codebase leadership, and apparently we’re just a lot better at that.
    - avinium 8y ago
      Oh yeah, companies of substantial size have large/meaningless overheads too. That's the unfortunate consequence of having a lot of people work together with varying opinions/motivations. They also have to spend a lot on warm bodies/lobbying to get those contracts in the first place. I'm not letting the enterprise providers off the hook. Just pointing out (as you note) that true responsibility lies with the project managers. Ineffectual project managers mean overblown budgets and undercooked results.
  - 8y ago

bluntfang 8y ago

They aren't worse. They are different. People want to work on products they relate to, especially when they are young and without dependents. Young people don't relate to facebook anymore, but they relate to google and amazon because they use those services in their home life and career life.

deanmoriarty 8y ago

From my experience, most of this negativity just appears on HN or on channels who have some strong bias (usually business related) against Facebook. All my acquaintances working in tech, which includes people from very wide sociodemographics ranges, consider Facebook an absolutely prestigious employer, with top talent, top challenges, top compensation and top name for building a personal brand. Hell, I interviewed at FB about a year ago and was _thrilled_ to get an offer (which I ultimately didn't accept for other reasons) and I loved the technical challenges that they are working and how they are advancing the state of the art on some really cool scalability problems. I'll be downvoted, but when it comes to Facebook, HN is a broken record.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> Facebook an absolutely prestigious employer Anecdotally, I’m helping several friends, who are each exceptionally capable, employed at Facebook with new jobs. They reached out before this revelation, to their credit, though this threw fuel on the fire. I suspect Facebook will be known for having hired mediocre sell-outs a few years from now.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Jonanin 8y ago
  From your profile: > I trade private equity stakes in technology companies. Former aerospace investment banker and before that, algorithmic equity derivatives trader. You're also the one who submitted this article. Somehow I doubt you are actually helping friends at FB find new jobs. I think it's much more likely that you are short FB. There's a lot of your type out there spreading articles like this as much as possible. Maybe you should spend some time thinking about what contributions you investment banker types are making to society, if there is any. Good riddance...
  - pantaloons 8y ago
    I graduated six years ago, have worked at Microsoft and Dropbox, and anecdotally around a quarter of my friends at either of them wouldn't work at Facebook now. Parent comment is not obviously wrong, and you shouldn't assume bad faith. Your last submission was titled "We're lucky Mark Zuckerberg is in charge" and around half your comment history is devoted to defending Facebook. At least if you're going to question someones motives, you should state yours.

guelo 8y ago

It is their personal moral decision, you can't make it for them. I encourage everybody to try to align their values with their work. Capitalism is wrong that we are all just replaceable cogs that can be put to work on any capitalist's dreams.

htor 8y ago

there are so many ethical things you can use your brain on. first of all, you can start by not investing your talent/intelligence on advertisement. everybody knows ads are bad and they make making people suffer in many ways. we know so well that facebook, google et.al have no good intentions for the planet and are harvesting massive profits. ultra capitalist, maybe? we have many choices as humans, we can choose to organize, work for honest people and take a big shit on evil companies destroying our environment!

Karrot_Kream 8y ago

> Are they worse than google or amazon? What about people who work for Coca-Cola? What about the people who make mobile games and loot boxes for Blizzard? The recent Times article indicates that they are dirtier than Google and Apple, so yes.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

zandl 8y ago

If you can link the fall of democracy to misinformation being spread on their platform, genocide and mob murders, yes I’d say not all tech companies are that bad.

eksemplar 8y ago
I think poor education, stagnation of living standards and rising inequality is a lot worse in that area than Facebook. Granted, I think angrymob-media would be a much more fitting description than social-media, but it’s not like humanity wasn’t perfectly capable of making really shitty decisions long before the internet.

Voloskaya 8y ago

The point is that these peoples in the article have leverage. Companies are competing for them not the other way around, so it's natural for them to consider ethics because it will not affect their standard of living. If I have the choice between working for Palantir or Facebook, I choose Facebook. If have to choose to between Facebook and Apple I choose Apple. Whatever I choose I will still live extremely comfortably. And yes not all those companies have an equally bad impact on society. In both of your examples it's fair to say that you (or CS grads in Denmark) probably don't have that kind of leverage, because this is not the Silicon Valley. If you have to choose between working for FB at 150k$/year or public service for a third of that, then yes, choosing ethics has a big negative impacts on your life and it's hard to blame anyone for choosing FB. They don't have this problem.

eksemplar 8y ago
Danish CS degrees are in high regard, and we’re all fairly good at English. There are a lot of Danes in Silicon Valley, I mean, C++, C# and Ruby were made by Danes, so it’s not like Murica isn’t open for us. You can make a lot of money in IT anywhere though. I manage 70 people, in a muniplacity that is well paid. I’ve been headhunted for much higher salaries throughout my career though, but I’ve always preferred public service. The fact that I could be home at 15:00 on a Friday, with my kids picked up and the groceries done helped a lot in my younger years as well of course.
- Voloskaya 8y ago
  "Danish CS degrees are in high regard, and we’re all fairly good at English. There are a lot of Danes in Silicon Valley, I mean, C++, C# and Ruby were made by Danes, so it’s not like Murica isn’t open for us." That is my point. Many of them move to the SV because they can get better conditions (caused by more leverage) there than if they stay in Denmark because there is a magnitude more tech companies there than in DK. I'm pretty sure they don't just move to avoid the rain :)
- anoncake 8y ago
  Yukihiro Matsumoto is Danish?

aglavine 8y ago

I still like Facebook, but I get all the hate. It is an annoying product and can be addictive. And it used to be less annoying, more about persons and not products, and they don't care about not being addictive. They seems to be trying to cope with thinks like fake news, though. It is part of being a totally new product. But yes, the reaction is exaggerated.

stevenicr 8y ago

yes, they are worse than all those. Perhaps loot box companies are close and only less so because of current scale and not because of less sinister intent. Google is not fbook, (not that I am a fan of big G - it's evil in other ways more so than fbook) - Where is ethical in my mind is more shades of grey rather than place A is and Place B is not.. I think many people do not understand the immense power the fbook wields to truly get how damaging it is and can be. Some of us may not get sucked in by our evolving news feed, but that does not mean that it is not indeed sucking people in and keeping them hooked for it's benefit and to the detriment of other's lives.

hinkley 8y ago

> where is it ethical to work? Possibly these companies: https://bcorporation.net/directory https://bcorporation.net/directory

CobrastanJorji 8y ago

Neither Amazon nor Google hired a PR team to push alt-right narratives about how "George Soros is out to get you." Facebook has.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

neves 8y ago

Yes, it is a lot worse. I live in Brazil, where a Facebook company, was used in a plot to spread fake news to elect a far right president. They are really against doing anything that may affect their bottom line. No other tech company is this bad.

hanspeter 8y ago
Can you elaborate? What was Facebook's role in this? Do you blame Facebook for not filtering out any potential fake news or did they take an active position in the matter?
- travellingbuyer 8y ago
  It was a Conspiracy Theory created by a journalist who wrote that non-media companies were sending fake news, with no evidence to show for it. Whatsapp, which is supposed to be E2E encrypted, is the most popular app in Brazil and the government wanted Facebook to censor information, but they said no. Obviously there were false messages about every candidate in the election, not just the one the above guy didn't like. There was even a deepfake video. I can't stress how dangerous it is to ask the government to classify what is true and what is not. This is totally different from the facebook case in America because there it involved ads. Here it was messages from individuals. But sadly the left was advocating for censorship while calling the others fascists.
- neves 8y ago
  The winner candidate created a well funded structure to disseminate fake news through WhatsApp. There were demands to limit the ability for a individual to spread fake news, but WhatsApp/Facebook had deaf ears. Here are a bunch of links from reputable sourcers: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-latin-america-45769992/fighting-brazil-s-election-on-whatsapp https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-latin-america-45769992/fig... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/opinion/brazil-election-fake-news-whatsapp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/opinion/brazil-election-f... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/18/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-whatsapp-fake-news-campaign https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/18/brazil-jair-bo... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/brazil-election-2018-whatsap-fake-news-presidential-disinformation-a8593741.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/brazil-ele... http://nymag.com/developing/2018/10/whatsapp-too-late-fake-news-brazil-election-bolsonaro.html http://nymag.com/developing/2018/10/whatsapp-too-late-fake-n... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/18/jair-bolsonaro-accused-creating-criminal-network-spread-fake/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/18/jair-bolsonaro-a...

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

Where is it ethical to work? I'm coming to the conclusion, pretty much nowhere is inscrutable and free from scandal in one form or another. However that doesn't give us a pass to be glib and just throw our hands up and say, it's all bad who cares, get money. Nothing positive comes from cynicism. It's especially important to call this out when companies are talking about "making the world better" or otherwise making broad statements about them being a positive force in the world. It's incongruous between reality and their public relations, and that needs to be talked about.

tomglynch 8y ago
Totally agree. I think a good example is the tobacco industry.

tenacious 8y ago

> Where is it ethical to work? Oh I don't know, maybe one of those companies that isn't building software that's used to incite genocide? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

Corrado 8y ago

When I was in college and looking for an intern job I declined to interview with RJ Reynolds and several local alcohol producers on moral grounds. I wouldn't have accepted a job there no matter what they offered me. So, I can understand why people wouldn't want to work for a company and believe that there are people in the world that won't compromise their morals for a paycheck.

vehementi 8y ago

> Where is it ethical to work? Working at Netflix, Apple, Salesforce, Oracle, or Microsoft seems to be a category more ethical than Facebook/Google, wouldn't you say? Isn't that a good place to start? At worst, those companies are mainly just screwing over other companies (though depends on if Netflix is up to something behind the scenes)

yakubin 8y ago
Oracle? With their approach to IP? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think they care about anything but money in the least.
- vehementi 8y ago
  No I mean for sure they are pieces of shit to other companies and only care about money, but "who cares" compared to google/facebook level evilness.
davidcbc 8y ago
> At worst, those companies are mainly just screwing over other companies (though depends on if Netflix is up to something behind the scenes) Or, you know, profiting from human rights abuses: https://www.newsweek.com/iphone-x-release-human-cost-apples-most-expensive-ever-iphone-699901 https://www.newsweek.com/iphone-x-release-human-cost-apples-...

ionised 8y ago

There are plenty of ethical places to work. You just need to not look only at the richest companies with the most generous compensation, because they tend to be the ones that aren't. It's a simple question you have to ask yourself. Do you value money more than your principles?

martinraag 8y ago

Whataboutism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism] is not really a good defence of Facebook I think.

netcan 8y ago

I’ve been in public service for decades, so I know a thing or two about choosing idealism over money Even here, different people in different situations might see this as either choosing idealism over money or the opposite. I hear the Danish public service is good. Here though (ireland) the public service has a name for meaningless jobs with good conditions. This may be a self fullfiling prophecy. Sometimes the differences can get abstract. I watched an interview while back with coalition soldiers and mercenaries. Soldiers are generally seen as self sacrificing patriots. Mercenaries as greedy assholes. But, both are being paid and they do the same job in the same war and take orders from the same place. Ultimately, a lot of this comes down to perspective.