8 ms·

I find it shocking that Facebook would still be considered as a peer to these other companies in terms of desirability as an employer. I would only accept a po

• kasey_junk 8y ago
  Cash
  • jethro_tell 8y ago
    I have a number of friends who moved over recently because they were getting their salaries doubled. I cant wrap my mind around it, but money talks.
• decebalus1 8y ago
  > Why would anyone be willing to work there if they had offers from companies that make products that help people and don't treat society with contempt? I have someone who just went there. Because of money, basically.
  • anxman 8y ago
    You own someone?
    • acpetrov 8y ago
      No, no, he sold to Facebook for a big exit
    • anticensor 8y ago
      He missed the main verb.
• nevir 8y ago
  They treat their employees relatively well - and for many people, that is more important than the company's external /social behavior
• ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  Probably an equal mix of cash and people who don't have the same values or perspective as you?
• m0zg 8y ago
  >> fundamentally destructive product That's just, like, your opinion, a random HN reader. And the vast majority of FB users do not share it.
  • 51lver 8y ago
    Ex FB user here checking in. FB free since `11. There's a ton of us.
    • m0zg 8y ago
      Nevertheless, you are a small minority outside the HN bubble.
      • yuy910616 8y ago
        I agreed...I think net effect of FB on humanity is positive. We all live in the moment, and FB is having a bad moment right now. I mean...HN is pretty Toxic sometimes. HN is amazing sometimes. Is it good? Is it bad?
        • m0zg 8y ago
          I could argue HN is pretty bad for my productivity, and that of many others. :-) But sometimes I unearth the kinds of things here that save me months of work. As bad as SNR is here, it's worse elsewhere.
        • thanatropism 8y ago
          Have you ever been to the "job rumors" forums like econjobrumors and PSR? It's like HN on steroids. Polite because it's semiprofessional and everyone's pseudonymous but can get easily outed from details (I mean come on how many people have been in strategy consulting and done graduate work on symplectic manifolds?) but also everyone's mean and competitive. HN is less toxic than PSJR because the field it covers is much larger and positive-sum; academic job rumor forums are much more fish-eat-fish.
      • MeltySmelty 8y ago
• azhenley 8y ago
  They have some really interesting projects going on. For example, they have recruited some top researchers in program analysis and compilers (among many other areas).
  • djcapelis 8y ago
    That’s a really bad take. You can work on interesting problems in organizations that aren’t causing harm. And should, if you have the option.
    • Jach 8y ago
      > And should, if you have the option. There's the kicker, no? A lot of human technological progress was made under unfortunate (to put it mildly) harm-filled circumstances, and a lot of that wouldn't have been made at all otherwise because the option to make it with a cleaner conscience simply wasn't there. However if you do ever take such a role, despite its context, even if you have a clear conscience, I'd ask to try to have your work expand and live beyond the patron so that it can one day benefit all humanity. There is so much still buried behind the walls of corporate research that's worthwhile to a much broader group, but efforts need to be made to bring it out. Even more so if there aren't many other vertices of the company trying to pull in a better direction. (Ed: And I'd like to add that despite everything, Facebook engineers seem to be doing remarkably well at this. I won't ever join them but I'm not going to blacklist any interactions with them or worse aggressively target them.)
      • djcapelis 8y ago
        > There's the kicker, no? Not really, for almost everyone who works there. I know a few exceptions. A rare few. Look, I'm not arguing that we go string up all facebook engineers from the nearest tree. I'm merely saying that it is in fact quite reasonable to say that you shouldn't work for a company that is actively causing harm. And that there is "cool work" being done there does not obviate that. And yes, good research is sometimes done in bad places. That isn't a justification for joining bad places so you can do good research. Your logic is all messed up there. It's better to instead do good research at a good place. The simple matter is most of the people who work there, are there because of the relatively high compensation, and have plenty of other better options to do equally exciting work at more ethical organizations. But maybe not quite as well paid. So. Let's stop sugar coating that. Look, selling out is a thing humans do from time to time. Sometimes people are even in places where making that choice is totally justifiable. But don't tell me someone isn't doing it when they are. And you shouldn't let them tell you that either. Because if we don't let them tell us that, maybe they'll have more trouble telling themselves that, and honestly, that's what's really going to be important in the end.
• gamblor956 8y ago
  There are plenty of people who feel the same way about all the useless startups in SV that exist solely to take VC money. At least Facebook actually provides something of value to the hundreds of millions people who use it.
  • gamma-male 8y ago
    This
  • ForrestN 8y ago
    There is a robust debate about whether or not facebook provides negative value to its users. In my opinion, it's charitable to say that the question of whether Facebook harms its users is open to debate. There seems to be a clear correlation between use of facebook and negative mental health outcomes. The fact that people use a product is absolutely not evidence that it provides value to its consumers, especially when addiction is involved. Whatever "value" someone got out of cigarettes when they first started smoking, most addicts wouldn't say they smoke because they get something out of it beyond the assuaging of cravings.
    • gfodor 8y ago
      I like this analogy and I'll steal it if you don't mind. (Assuming that customer value is the same as product use, with cigarettes being a brain dead obvious counterexample.)
    • citrablue 8y ago
      This assumes that FB is harmful to everyone, instead of a subset of people. I don't think that's very well proven. The mental health studies also have a bit of a correlation issue, similar to drug use. I think sugar is a more apt analogy than smoking. Facebook, like sugars, provides a source of a required human input. (Calories/human connection). Overdone, both are harmful. Tobacco is a much more charged analogy, and is more extreme in terms of positive/negative balance. I think it reveals more about the biases of the person making the statement than it does about social media.
• la6470 8y ago
  which company can you say does something totally ethically? Trump hotels or golf resorts?
• SamReidHughes 8y ago
  Because Facebook makes one of the most useful pieces of software for everyday people. It's not a "destructive" product.
  • randcraw 8y ago
    Many in Myanmar and Philippines might disagree. Facebook Admits It Was Used to Incite Violence in Myanmar https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebook.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo... What Happens When the Government Uses Facebook as a Weapon? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodri...
    • SamReidHughes 8y ago
      It's a communication platform. You want a censored internet.
      • seppin 8y ago
        > It's a communication platform. You want a censored internet. It's a communication platform designed to enflame and enrage, because outrage gets the higher engagement metrics therefore higher AD revenues. Facebook designed themselves out of any legitimate argument they are merely a benign platform.
      • TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
        FB is the censored Internet. Covert user activity tracking, links to outfits like Cambridge Analytica, troll farms, "disappeared" groups, and all under the pretext of targeted ads - in what sense is any of that a clean, free-range Internet?
        • Gigablah 8y ago
          3 out of your 4 examples don’t have anything to do with censorship, not even remotely. You’re being disingenuous. Not to mention “clean” and “free-range” are diametrically opposite.
• gamma-male 8y ago
  Pretty much because for most people who are not on HN facebook is a cool company.
  • freyr 8y ago
    Or maybe it’s not? It’s an uncool company, an uncool eponymous social network, and a cool photo sharing app. https://engineering.berkeley.edu/2018/11/i-dont-really-want-work-facebook https://engineering.berkeley.edu/2018/11/i-dont-really-want-... https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/comment/is-facebook-simply-not-cool-any-more-1.718863 https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/comment/is-facebook-... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/16/parents-killed-it-facebook-losing-teenage-users https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/16/parents-k...
• woolvalley 8y ago
  Love, you just don't realize how the other tech companies are like. They are all about equal if you dig in. Not as bad as media makes you think, and in some ways not as good as the media totally misses the mark on other things. As far as pay, interesting things to work on and work environment, FB is in the top 3 of the world.
  • freyr 8y ago
    You don’t need to follow the media or read the headlines to know that Facebook is net destructive. I’m sure the pay and work environment make it easier to ignore that.
• mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
  Facebook's stock is probably more oversold than any of them. That plus the fact that they tend to offer very generous compensation packages to begin with would make them my preferred company if I had to choose to between those six.
• pascalxus 8y ago
  It might just be a resume booster, for the earlier years of a career?
• drngdds 8y ago
  1. Money. 2. As you can see among other replies, people can find ways to justify anything. It doesn't matter that you deliberately create an addictive product and aid authoritarian leaders; if people use your product, that must mean what you're doing is good for them and for society.
• debatem1 8y ago
  I recently considered a role there, on a security team no less. I've never had a Facebook account and agree that the product as-is is fundamentally destructive. However, there's some value in "running towards the fire" so to speak. Facebook does not seem to me to be fundamentally evil, just willfully blind to the problems it causes. It's probably worth a few years of someone's life to try to steer that ship in a better direction. In the end I didn't take the job because the position eventually offered was too low to do what I described above effectively. But I bet there are other folks here who might get better positioned if they took the time to interview.
  • gfodor 8y ago
    What does it mean for a company to be "fundamentally" evil or not? The "fix things on the inside" argument for going to working at a place that you think is harming people has always struck me as based upon a mostly unfalsifiable assumption: that the organization has the capacity to change and that you can actually bring about that change. This is especially unknowable until you've actually worked at an organization for a long enough period of time to understand all of its internal pathologies and the motivations and character of the people involved in them. There's no reason to believe that as a job seeker you can have some insight for a given company into how impactful your actions may or may not have on the things they are doing that you consider harmful. An honest assessment I'd argue should assume your impact will be minimal if not zero given a large enough organization, unless you are coming in as a high level manager. As such it's hard to not take it as a self-rationalization given the incentives to create cognitive dissonance on the part of job seekers in order to take a high paying job working on interesting technical problems despite the potential negative effects it has on others. This doesn't mean there aren't good reasons to go work at such a place, it just means that if you're telling yourself that you're able to look past any ethical concerns you might have since you think you can be an influencer towards correcting them, I think it's worth reflecting on if you're not actually going to be put into a real position of power to do so. The challenge with Facebook specifically on this front is that power is extremely centralized onto one person, so even if you were joining Facebook as, say, a VP, it's hard to know in advance just how much influence you're going to have over the direction of the company before you've learned where the boundaries of that influence are.
• OxO4 8y ago
  All of those companies are problematic to a certain degree. Personally, whether I'd have an issue with working for one of those companies also depends on what I am working on. Let's say that one of those companies pays you to work on an open source project. Would that really be that bad ethically? What if you worked on Facebook's security team securing the users' data? Is that really worse than working for LinkedIn implementing some new dark pattern to get the users to receive more email spam? At the end of the day, you'll have to make compromises, unfortunately.
  • thisisweirdok 8y ago
    Facebook is very clearly ethically bad from the top down. It's less clear with the others.
    • thisisweirdok 8y ago
      Lots of downvotes but no one wants to tell me why that the social network started by some angry teenager who wanted to rate women isn't ethically bad?
• kevintb 8y ago
  Yup - agreed 100%.
• AmericanChopper 8y ago
  >Facebook, which seems to be building a fundamentally destructive product while going out of its way to behave unethically You could say the same thing about google, who are better at invading people’s privacy, and controlling the information they consume. The rest of them could also be seen as ethically objectionable in one way or another. If you’re considering the sophistication of their engineering, and the benefits and remuneration you receive, then they’re very comparable. If you’re evaluating them ethically, then which ones are better will come down entirely to what you value as an individual, because each of them could receive some perfectly valid criticisms.
• matz1 8y ago
  Simply not all people share the same concern, I certainly do not. I honestly care more about the money/benefit.
• samstave 8y ago
  In my short contract stint at facebook, my experience was that everyone I interacted with was overly territorial and wanted to be the "big swinging dick" as it were - their unwritten ethos on how to manage projects was bullshit, and after following my managers requirements to a tee - I was let go "because I was to engaged in the social events" (I literally played dogeball once. Never went to any other events) -- but I caught a VP in a baldface lie inadvertantly - and when I reported that his office project status was behind schedule he flipped his lid, and I believe had me fired. He wanted to ONLY have all project status come from him - but he went on vacation, and I was required to get project status from the team involved - and when I did, I factually represented what I was told - that they were behind schedule - and I was let go. Showing any interest in any area outside of my primary role was frowned upon heavily.
• wholien 8y ago
  Heres a case for Facebook, also on Vox: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/1/16/18183686/facebook-social-media-grief-grieving-widow https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/1/16/18183686/facebook...
• QML 8y ago
  No offense, but that’s because you lack perspective — and maybe that’s because of the bubble that entrapped HN and SV alike. There are tons of people who would take a six-figure job at FB, people who make less and people who others wouldn’t take chances on.
• stale2002 8y ago
  That is a good question! And the answer to your question is that Facebook pays a whole lot of money. They pay at the top end of all of the top tech companies, and this is impressive.
• mikelyons 8y ago
  If it shocks you, then you haven't been paying attention. How do you think the USA behaves in general to the rest of the world. Have you seen who's president?