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Good for them, thank you! The sooner facebook is controlled and broken up into pieces, the better. They are a massive net negative on civilization. Do you wor
by nakedrobot2 8y ago
Good for them, thank you!
The sooner facebook is controlled and broken up into pieces, the better. They are a massive net negative on civilization.
Do you work at Facebook? Shame on you.
- Jyaif 8y agoI think this is not going far enough. Do you work in the evil tech industry? You should die.
- twtw 8y agoCan't tell if you're serious, so I'll ask on the off chance you are. What does "evil" mean? Or are you just saying that the entire tech industry is evil?
- na85 8y agoGet ready for down votes and/or moderator action. Lots of people here believe that technology is inherently good, and in so doing offshore their ethical considerations. They want their money and don't want to think too hard about the impact of their work. Interrupting the circle jerk is a big no-no.
- chrisseaton 8y ago> Do you work at Facebook? Shame on you. Everyone needs to work somewhere, you know, and not everyone has much of a choice about where. No shame in putting food on the table for your family.
- na85 8y agoThis attitude is very problematic. If you're putting food on the table by actively harming society, there is something wrong with that.
- mooneater 8y agoI totally get this POV. But honestly, if you work at FB, you definitely have options. So no, this POV does not really apply to people at FB.
- chrisseaton 8y agoH1B visa holders for example. To change job you need an entire new visa application which is not guaranteed to win the lottery. Even Facebook employees can have limited options. And it’s not just engineers. Cleaners, cooks, maintenance people.
- criddell 8y agoThe cleaners, cooks, and maintenance people really aren't the problem at Facebook.
- jogjayr 8y ago> To change job you need an entire new visa application which is not guaranteed to win the lottery. Nope - visa transfers when changing employer aren't subject to the visa cap and don't have to go through the lottery. At present premium processing is suspended so it can take up to 6 months, but that's not always the case.
- tpush 8y agoI agree in principle, but if you can work at Facebook, you can probably work at any other(more ethical) tech company.
- nakedrobot2 8y agoI guess it's a bit of a stretch to say that if you can get a job at Facebook, you can't get a job anywhere else... (as if what you describe would even be a valid excuse)
- ukoki 8y agoI have sympathy for those cleaning floors at Facebook HQ, but it's disingenuous to suggest that the engineers (with compensation packages many multiples the local median, getting daily LinkedIn recruiter spam) "have no choice" about where to work.
- Nikaoto 8y agoIf you've ever worked at FB, you can get a job at basically any other tech company very easily. So, no. There is shame in that for FB employees.
- ascendantlogic 8y agoSomehow I doubt those poor Facebook engineers really have their hands tied and are unable to find work anywhere else to feed their families.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 6cd6beb 8y ago>No shame in putting food on the table for your family. Balderdash. Don't construct situations where people just shrug their shoulders and go along with morally inequitable because they're getting paid for it. Besides, no one's throwing up their hands and saying "Gosh, I really messed up this time! I guess the only options left are working at Facebook or sucking dick under a bridge!"
- Skrillex 8y agoI would be willing to choose the latter option for FB money. If it were that lucrative, I'd already be there with my new startup.
- justtopost 8y agoIf you feed your family with your left hand, there is indeed shame.
- djohnston 8y agoI'm glad I can take solace in the righteousness (according to strangers on the internet) of my family's empty bellies then.
- isostatic 8y agoI don't see anything shocking or surprising here, that said I'm glad I don't have shares in facebook Here's one finding > Facebook used Onavo to conduct global surveys of the usage of mobile apps by customers, > and apparently without their knowledge. They used this data to assess not just how many > people had downloaded apps, but how often they used them. This knowledge helped them to > decide which companies to acquire, and which to treat as a threat Here's Onavo's wikipedia page last edited in October > Facebook has leveraged Onavo's analytics platform to monitor the performance of its competitors, > target companies for acquisition, and make other business decisions. > Media outlets classify Onavo as spyware.
- pmart123 8y agoHmm, looking at this with a glance, I am surprised the coverage around Onavo hasn't been bigger. If I am following this correctly, it would be similar to Google creating a Firefox extension to enable "extra privacy," but secretly pumping the data back to Google? Or if Windows Defender sent all your web usage data and keystrokes to Microsoft? I'm not sure how this doesn't fit the definition of Spyware?
- disgruntledphd2 8y agoGoogle got all of this data first-party, as search logs are very informative about which websites/services are popular. I'm sure that things like that factored into the decision to buy YouTube, for example. Onavo was a company that tried to sell VPN access to reduce data costs, found out that didn't make money and pivoted to selling reports to publishers and advertisers. Then FB bought them, and treated them like an internal survey organisation. It's a shame really, Onavo could have been the Neilsen of the mobile age, in another timeline. But yeah, people use data (especially private data) to make decisions about their business and others. News at 11.
- pmart123 8y agoHasn't AppAnnie accomplished being "the Neilsen of the mobile age" in some ways? I'm not sure how AppAnnie collects its data. My guess would be that it is buying data from Foursquare, etc. I don't have much of a problem with that. I suppose I'm more opposed to a large company offering an app that promises privacy yet delivers the exact opposite of privacy.
- wolco 8y agoLet's not shame workers at facebook. If you do you have to shame anyone who works at any big tech form for the decisions of the leaders. Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle included.
- soziawa 8y ago> Let's not shame workers at facebook. If you work for Facebook and don't just clean the offices you had the choice.
- wolco 8y agoThen everyone including the cleaners,anyone using facebook as a user, investors, goverment officials and every American as the government officials are decided by them. Include the press for promoting them through stories or by setting the discussion points for each election. Shame on everyone.
- empath75 8y ago> If you do you have to shame anyone who works at any big tech form for the decisions of the leaders. Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle included. And? If you're not proud of the impact your work is having on the world, than you shouldn't be doing it. You only have one life. Why waste it on making the world a worse place? I had an easy and well paying job working on an IT project at DHS. I left after the child separation thing started, even though I wasn't working on anything related to that. It just disgusted me to go to work every day.
- CaptainZapp 8y agoI had an easy and well paying job working on an IT project at DHS. I left after the child separation thing started, even though I wasn't working on anything related to that. It just disgusted me to go to work every day. Thank you!
- strict9 8y agoThis is clearly intended for actual staff, not support position like building support and maintenance. They aren't employees, in fact they rarely are anywhere anymore. It's all outsourced to maintenance companies which are cheaper and not held to the same level of scrutiny for how they treat their employees. It's garbage. Companies should employ them and pay a fair wage, but they don't.
- fantunes 8y ago> Do you work at Facebook? Shame on you. Does it apply to the people using its products, softwares, services? What's the ethical threshold for using reactjs for example in this scenario?
- josefx 8y agoDidn't they try to push some rather questionable licensing terms on react or do I confuse it with a different open source library? If it was then its users almost became another victim of facebook trying out where it can get away with abusing its position.
- iaml 8y agoThey did have a license with a clause allowing them to sue or restrict access to it legally, but they changed it to a more permissive one. Also, even if they did try to do anything, no one was stopping you from replacing react with inferno or preact, they have compatible APIs.
- amelius 8y agoBy using reactjs you are supporting their R&D. It improves their attractiveness for top researchers.
- djohnston 8y agowould you hire a fb engineer?
- PavlovsCat 8y agoFacebook and other companies are more like bacteria that infect the wound of digital illiteracy. I think it's time we start seeing that as a wound, not as an unavoidable or even desirable state of things. An information age requires digital literacy, otherwise you will have a priest caste, and that will abuse its power. I see no way around it, and criticizing priests for being bad priests to me enforces the idea that there even should be a priest caste. I can't quite tell you what digital literacy is, but I know that responses along the line of "do you know how a modern microprocessor works in detail?" are silly, because many people can read and write without being historians or etymologists. And even people who can't read or write often can speak and understand a whole lot. Contrast that with some priests mumbling in Latin, with people being subject to things they aren't allowed to understand. So maybe knowing what files are, what memory is, what a program is, having their own webspace and email, stuff like that would be a great start. And the start to that is to stop pretending that's unattainable, or that "people don't want that". If they knew what it entails in the long run, most of them would want that. And people do much more complicated things than running a website. People raise children, they drive cars, they raise and train dogs, they work in the garden, they remember all sorts of stuff about sports, and so on. Most jobs require a lot of complicated edge-case knowledge, too. So knowing what an URL or a file is, and maybe some HTML, is trivial compared to that. If people could get 20% off on all T-Shirts for the rest of their life if they had their own website, most people on this planet would have a website before the end of the year. I exaggerate, but by how much I'm really not sure.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- notacoward 8y agoYes, I do work at Facebook. I'm not going to get into some protracted argument about whether that makes me a bad person, or already was, but I'd like to give you something to think about. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we can neatly divide tech workers into good and bad. Likewise for companies. All categories are non-empty, and certain to remain so. What's the optimal assignment of workers to companies? Is it never beneficial for a good person to work at a bad company, perhaps making it less bad? Is it never harmful for a bad person to work at a good company, perhaps making it less good? Is it better to have all of the bad people concentrated at a few companies, or distributed throughout the industry? Once you start thinking about it, I think you'll see that the Manichaean "entirely and immutably good or entirely and immutably bad" model just isn't very useful. Maybe we should talk about good vs. bad behaviors instead of demonizing (or for that matter idolizing) people - especially large groups of people in aggregate.
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoI'd say the HN response is, no, you can't be good and work at FB.
- notacoward 8y agoPretty sure you're right, but I figure at least a few people might be able to realize that "you should be ashamed" just doesn't lead in any productive direction. What if I was ashamed? Would leaving be the only positive reaction to that? As great as I think I am, I don't think Facebook would miss me. They'd just replace me. I'd just carry the taint to my next company, while my replacement also becomes tainted. Good job. Big thumbs up. In that hypothetical, is it not even possible that somebody could do more good by staying?
- gbear605 8y agoLeaving is by definition going to hurt them - if it wouldn’t, they would have already replaced you. It’ll either cost them (interviews, higher pay for someone else), leave them with a marginally worse developer, or both.
- lordnacho 8y ago> Do you work at Facebook? Shame on you. I think that's a bit harsh. You may think Facebook is terrible, but it's not so clear that everyone ought to agree with you. If someone was working for organised crime, everyone should agree that's real social ill and should be discouraged. There's enough evidence on the table, over many years, about it. The FB story is still unfolding. We're still in the process of hearing exactly what was done, and arguments about how good or bad it was. Changing jobs is a somewhat big decision. Let people have a little think about things before you shame them for not making the leap when you - a guy with no skin in that game - decide FB is untouchable.
- spunker540 8y agoI believe 99.99...% of interactions on Facebook are positive. They are friends and family keeping in touch, posting life updates, organizing events, hobby/support communities etc. Most ads are normal ads from legitimate businesses including a lot of small and local businesses who find it very valuable for reaching their customers and growing their business. The recent rhetoric and news coverage acts as if Facebook is entirely full of fake news and echo chambers and political manipulation when the truth is while that stuff is happening it's a minuscule percentage of the billions of posts per day.
- creaghpatr 8y ago>I believe 99.99...% of interactions on Facebook are positive Ah, the old Sundar Pichai maneuver: >"Yet, a little more than a week later, Google CEO Sundar Pichai attempted to invoke an engineering defense by arguing that Google would not need to censor 'well over 99 percent' of queries."
- bytematic 8y agoBreak it up how? Like whatsapp and Instagram?
- adjkant 8y agoYes. The acquisition of these companies frankly should have triggered anti-trust laws if they were actually written to their purposes.