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FB is the only company I wouldn't accept an offer for, I'd still apply but only use any offers submitted for leverage. I'm surprised no other commenter has bro

FB is the only company I wouldn't accept an offer for, I'd still apply but only use any offers submitted for leverage. I'm surprised no other commenter has brought this up yet but you do realize that short of working for the NSA Facebook is the most unethical job I can think of for a Dev. Every other week they're being blasted on HN for another ethical violation and everyone comments on how their devs must have known what they were doing when "they did X fucked up thing to Y users", etc... I'd take the offer to your current employer or literally anyone else you might be interviewing with and tell Facebook to suck a lemon.

dominotw 7y ago
What does this answer have to do with OP's question. Surely he already knows ethical issues surrounding FB. Its like bots pattern matching the word 'FB' in every single post and posting the same comments over and over. pls don't ruin his post with flamewar tangent.
bookofjoe 7y ago
>short of working for the NSA Facebook is the most unethical job I can think of for a Dev "unethical" — there are many reading your comment who work at the NSA and do not share your point of view, to say the least.
- kuzehanka 7y ago
  That would be congruent with them being unethical. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and a lack of ethics. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks 'geez it's a great day to do some immoral shit.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - neonate 7y ago
    None of us is ethical.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jammygit 7y ago
+1 If you're not troubled by ethical issues, Facebook is probably a great deal. If you are, then you might regret working there in the future. A lot of people mistake the notoriety of people who make these bargains for fame
dymk 7y ago
I'm always so disappointed to read comments like this on HN. People who won't work for Facebook because they think it's actually an evil, unethical corporate machine. There's lots of reasons not to work there, but "they're unethical" does not ring true for me. I used to work there, and I only very, very rarely saw behavior that I truly disagreed with. Leadership's decisions will look weird when viewed through a New York Times lens, but are sensible when you have the whole picture and can ask leadership questions directly. You're giving up the opportunity to work with some of the best minds in the industry, working on actually novel engineering problems that only come up when you're at the sale of billions of users and trillions of datapoints. They're a great place to grow your career when you're just starting out, because you get a peek at how a global scale company is structured, and how the tech was built. There's no shortage of senior engineers who are incentivized to mentor those just starting out. There's literally hundreds of teams to choose from, and switching teams is easy.
- bicubic 7y ago
  Unethical doesn’t ring true for you even as fb faces a multi billion dollar lawsuit over targeted manipulation of individuals in concert with Cambridge Analytica?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dominotw 7y ago
    1. do you agree with iraq war? 2. if no, why didn't you move to canada?
    - elicash 7y ago
      I don't have a dog in this fight, but what a bizarre comment. You think to be consistent OP would have to abandon their family and friends and go to another country? That's the same thing as having ethical concerns regarding which job to take?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
greenyoda 7y ago
Facebook is hardly the only tech company that makes its money by compromising its users' privacy and selling their users to advertisers. And they're hardly the only tech company that violates laws and regulations when it's convenient for them. I'm not at all a fan of Facebook, but singling them out as if they were some kind of unique evil seems a bit unfair to me.
tracer4201 7y ago
What company would you accept an offer from then? This is a serious question - I would appreciate a reply. Are banks more ethical? How about healthcare or insurance companies? Google was supposedly working on a search engine for the Chinese. Would you decline them too? Are the aerospace companies passing your ethics bar? How about fast food companies who pay low wages to staff or WalMart? Would you consider working for energy companies like Chevron or BP? Or how would Tesla? Supposedly, their factory jobs are a real grind. You have an arbitrary ethics bar. Who or what defines if a company is ethical or moral enough? You? Op has a great opportunity. I don’t use FB and certainly don’t agree with Zuckerberg. Being an outsider, I also have limited knowledge. I certainly wouldn’t pretend like I am on some moral pedestal and hand out advice to young grads to skip taking a fantastic opportunity because it conflicts with my biases.
- jammygit 7y ago
  Setting facebook itself, and the OP's specific decision aside for the moment... > Who or what defines if a company is ethical or moral enough? You?" > I certainly wouldn’t pretend like I am on some moral pedestal and hand out advice to young grads to skip taking a fantastic opportunity because it conflicts with my biases. This is like saying that that ethics is equivalent to a category of personal biases, that they are therefore arbitrary and completely personal, and that therefore nobody has any right to use their judgment about the ethical content of the actions of other people. "Are banks more ethical? (...)" This is like qualifying the above by saying that 'not only is everything relative, but let us look at things relative to these other notorious actors. In that light, who indeed could condemn a person for doing X?' Although the contents are drastically different, this sort of argument is logically similar in form to 80-year old nonsense such as: "if all the other restaurants are forbidding black people from entering their premises, who are you to say they are wrong?" While I personally think that there is an ethical way to work for an unethical company, I don't think that pretending there are no issues to carefully consider is an adult behaviour. Its like an hiding your head under the blankets when something unpleasant is happening. ...in other ethics related news, a UN report has recently declared that 1 million species are in danger of extinction. Will we say that concern for this also is a relative, personal bias?
lohszvu 7y ago
What is unethical about working for the NSA as a dev?
- Nullabillity 7y ago
  You're willingly assisting an organization with very unethical goals. It doesn't matter whether you're a cryptographer, janitor, developer, or whatever.
  - lohszvu 7y ago
    >unethical goals What are their goals that you think are unethical? Is gathering intelligence for maintaining the security of the US unethical?
    - SAI_Peregrinus 7y ago
      Mass surveillance and reducing the security of the US by undermining cryptographic standards (eg Dual-EC DRBG) are unethical.
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  I wouldn't say it's necessarily so clear-cut that you could call it "unethical" but it definitely requires a different set of values. The classic hacker ethos involves collaboration, a disregard for artificial boundaries like national borders, and a distaste for secrecy. Working for the NSA involves lots of secrecy, working to undermine the efforts of the crypto community, and buying into some level of American exceptionalism. (For example, it's believed that they knew about Heartbleed but didn't disclose it because they wanted to use it for themselves. Even as a US citizen I'm not sure I'd be comfortable putting the national security interests of the US ahead of the interests of my friends and colleagues around the world.)
buzzwr 7y ago
The original author of this post is here. I respect your ethics but if I will follow your advise then literally I need to leave my current company as well. We also do some unethical things to increase sales. It is hard to find any company which is totally ethical and ideal.

dominotw 7y ago

What does this answer have to do with OP's question. Surely he already knows ethical issues surrounding FB. Its like bots pattern matching the word 'FB' in every single post and posting the same comments over and over. pls don't ruin his post with flamewar tangent.

bookofjoe 7y ago

>short of working for the NSA Facebook is the most unethical job I can think of for a Dev "unethical" — there are many reading your comment who work at the NSA and do not share your point of view, to say the least.

kuzehanka 7y ago
That would be congruent with them being unethical. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and a lack of ethics. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks 'geez it's a great day to do some immoral shit.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- neonate 7y ago
  None of us is ethical.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jammygit 7y ago

+1 If you're not troubled by ethical issues, Facebook is probably a great deal. If you are, then you might regret working there in the future. A lot of people mistake the notoriety of people who make these bargains for fame

dymk 7y ago

I'm always so disappointed to read comments like this on HN. People who won't work for Facebook because they think it's actually an evil, unethical corporate machine. There's lots of reasons not to work there, but "they're unethical" does not ring true for me. I used to work there, and I only very, very rarely saw behavior that I truly disagreed with. Leadership's decisions will look weird when viewed through a New York Times lens, but are sensible when you have the whole picture and can ask leadership questions directly. You're giving up the opportunity to work with some of the best minds in the industry, working on actually novel engineering problems that only come up when you're at the sale of billions of users and trillions of datapoints. They're a great place to grow your career when you're just starting out, because you get a peek at how a global scale company is structured, and how the tech was built. There's no shortage of senior engineers who are incentivized to mentor those just starting out. There's literally hundreds of teams to choose from, and switching teams is easy.

bicubic 7y ago
Unethical doesn’t ring true for you even as fb faces a multi billion dollar lawsuit over targeted manipulation of individuals in concert with Cambridge Analytica?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dominotw 7y ago
  1. do you agree with iraq war? 2. if no, why didn't you move to canada?
  - elicash 7y ago
    I don't have a dog in this fight, but what a bizarre comment. You think to be consistent OP would have to abandon their family and friends and go to another country? That's the same thing as having ethical concerns regarding which job to take?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

greenyoda 7y ago

Facebook is hardly the only tech company that makes its money by compromising its users' privacy and selling their users to advertisers. And they're hardly the only tech company that violates laws and regulations when it's convenient for them. I'm not at all a fan of Facebook, but singling them out as if they were some kind of unique evil seems a bit unfair to me.

tracer4201 7y ago

What company would you accept an offer from then? This is a serious question - I would appreciate a reply. Are banks more ethical? How about healthcare or insurance companies? Google was supposedly working on a search engine for the Chinese. Would you decline them too? Are the aerospace companies passing your ethics bar? How about fast food companies who pay low wages to staff or WalMart? Would you consider working for energy companies like Chevron or BP? Or how would Tesla? Supposedly, their factory jobs are a real grind. You have an arbitrary ethics bar. Who or what defines if a company is ethical or moral enough? You? Op has a great opportunity. I don’t use FB and certainly don’t agree with Zuckerberg. Being an outsider, I also have limited knowledge. I certainly wouldn’t pretend like I am on some moral pedestal and hand out advice to young grads to skip taking a fantastic opportunity because it conflicts with my biases.

jammygit 7y ago
Setting facebook itself, and the OP's specific decision aside for the moment... > Who or what defines if a company is ethical or moral enough? You?" > I certainly wouldn’t pretend like I am on some moral pedestal and hand out advice to young grads to skip taking a fantastic opportunity because it conflicts with my biases. This is like saying that that ethics is equivalent to a category of personal biases, that they are therefore arbitrary and completely personal, and that therefore nobody has any right to use their judgment about the ethical content of the actions of other people. "Are banks more ethical? (...)" This is like qualifying the above by saying that 'not only is everything relative, but let us look at things relative to these other notorious actors. In that light, who indeed could condemn a person for doing X?' Although the contents are drastically different, this sort of argument is logically similar in form to 80-year old nonsense such as: "if all the other restaurants are forbidding black people from entering their premises, who are you to say they are wrong?" While I personally think that there is an ethical way to work for an unethical company, I don't think that pretending there are no issues to carefully consider is an adult behaviour. Its like an hiding your head under the blankets when something unpleasant is happening. ...in other ethics related news, a UN report has recently declared that 1 million species are in danger of extinction. Will we say that concern for this also is a relative, personal bias?

lohszvu 7y ago

What is unethical about working for the NSA as a dev?

Nullabillity 7y ago
You're willingly assisting an organization with very unethical goals. It doesn't matter whether you're a cryptographer, janitor, developer, or whatever.
- lohszvu 7y ago
  >unethical goals What are their goals that you think are unethical? Is gathering intelligence for maintaining the security of the US unethical?
  - SAI_Peregrinus 7y ago
    Mass surveillance and reducing the security of the US by undermining cryptographic standards (eg Dual-EC DRBG) are unethical.
brianpgordon 7y ago
I wouldn't say it's necessarily so clear-cut that you could call it "unethical" but it definitely requires a different set of values. The classic hacker ethos involves collaboration, a disregard for artificial boundaries like national borders, and a distaste for secrecy. Working for the NSA involves lots of secrecy, working to undermine the efforts of the crypto community, and buying into some level of American exceptionalism. (For example, it's believed that they knew about Heartbleed but didn't disclose it because they wanted to use it for themselves. Even as a US citizen I'm not sure I'd be comfortable putting the national security interests of the US ahead of the interests of my friends and colleagues around the world.)

buzzwr 7y ago

The original author of this post is here. I respect your ethics but if I will follow your advise then literally I need to leave my current company as well. We also do some unethical things to increase sales. It is hard to find any company which is totally ethical and ideal.