7 ms·

I've taken a hard line with people who work at Facebook. If you're still there and unwilling to represent the failings your company has done to society, then I

I've taken a hard line with people who work at Facebook. If you're still there and unwilling to represent the failings your company has done to society, then I need to hear a justification before moving further in the conversation. I don't think I've ever felt this strongly about a tech company. I know that's tough but it's a matter of ethics. And frankly, Facebook is an amazing technical institution, and I would love to work with the majority of them based on technical chops alone. I've put my money where my mouth is on this sort of thing in the past - I passed on an Uber employee who worked on the "god mode" feature and had no opinions on it making the news or its being abused other than "I was just building the feature". It made the news for abusiveness, at least have a little remorse! So Facebook employees, please understand, if I ever meet you in a technical interview, there will be a five minute section for a hard "liberal arts" question politely lobbed your way :)

just-juan-post 6y ago
Which company do you work for again?
- rajup 6y ago
  I'm interested to know too so I can avoid it like the plague.
  - jentist_retol 6y ago
    We handle large amounts of sensitive personal information, and developers are tightly integrated into the product development process. We have successfully lobbied against products with serious spousal abuse cases. If you can't handle a 5-10 minute question section in which I bring up contemporary criticism about your current employer, in the context of that sensitive information that we handle, then the feeling is mutual.
    - thinkmassive 6y ago
      The people reacting like you have an awful take must have forgotten what story they’re commenting on. Personally I may not spend 5+ minutes on it, but the question will be raised, and only a well considered answer is getting the thumbs up.
      - jentist_retol 6y ago
        I'm not looking for an apology, or remorse, or a sudden revelation. But an understanding of the work they do and WHY it might receive that perception is a "passing" answer, IMO.
        thinkmassive 6y ago
        I’m in agreement with you. On re-reading my earlier comment I realize it could be interpreted either way, but I meant “people reacting as if you have an awful take...” rather than “people like you have an awful take...”
    - dazilcher 6y ago
      Filtering for opinionated developers who proritize their political views and arbitrary moral compass over company policies sure sounds like an interesting strategy when it comes to handling sensitive PII.
      - jentist_retol 6y ago
        I think you're reading into it too much and injecting politics. I don't know how else to describe it without de-anonymizing other than "it was actually bad and the PM who came up with it did a bad job designing the fraud cases".
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- alexbanks 6y ago
  Probably a company with an above-average amount of moral character amongst its development staff.
  - jentist_retol 6y ago
    I hope so. I wish I could give more information but maybe it's best to keep names out considering the context ;)
    - alexbanks 6y ago
      I mean, without knowing anything about you or your company other than what you posted above, it's hard to say. But in my experience the industry could use more morality based hiring standards, as well as morality-based repercussions for bad behavior. Kudos to you.
      - pb7 6y ago
        A little odd patting someone on the back for claims with no substance. It’s easy to make up a story with all sorts of feel-good ingredients to virtue signal in a thread about a bad guy. If it was all unicorns and butterflies, why not name the company so the morally-aligned folk can find safe haven?
        alexbanks 6y ago
        As I said in the other post of mine that you commented on, you're welcome to not agree with me (or anyone, I don't care), that's totally fine with me.
        pb7 6y ago
        You’re welcome to disagree but repeating that doesn’t make for engaging discussion which is kind of the purpose of this forum. If you aren’t willing to defend your support of those who are subliminally attacking others, maybe just don’t post at all. It’s just not interesting and doesn’t add anything.
- orthecreedence 6y ago
  A major one.
captainredbeard 6y ago
> I don't think I've ever felt this strongly I'm sure that your employer loves your personal feelings interfering with hiring talent.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  Exactly why we have interview problems in engineering. I respect engineers for having opinions and ethics and they should lean on them, but to bar one from employment because they were doing their job is wrong, immoral, and potentially illegal.
  - tricolon 6y ago
    > because they were doing their job Where have we heard that one before?
  - glial 6y ago
    After all, they were just following orders.
  - Dystopian 6y ago
    Not to defend the op, since I think they're taking a particularly hard line, but qualifying candidates based on their previous work is just something that happens. I've personally been disqualified because I've worked at a legal, but "vice" based company - I've seen others not hired because their previous company was too "legacy", even though they did very similar work. It's not necessarily right, but companies use the signals available for them - even if they're not 100% agreeable to everyone.
    - jentist_retol 6y ago
      I'd like to emphasize the nature of the answer which was a defensive "I was just following orders". At that point, I was conducting dozens of interviews a year, and I think that sort of question came up... maybe three times? One of those people was from a medical company with a very large and very embarrassing contemporary incident, and the interviewee and I talked about development process problems. In fact, they admitted, it was part of the reason they left! We hired them and I enjoyed working with him.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
li4ick 6y ago
I mean, I believe that there should be a Hippocratic Oath in software, but I'm not sure where your particular cutoff bar stands. My view of software is against the mainstream: most programmers should dedicate their time to build tools for scientists, to solve actual problems and advance our species. Current tech is mostly trash, useless and nobody needs it.
- jentist_retol 6y ago
  >I'm not sure where your particular cutoff bar stands I'm not sure either! I'm not an ethics expert. I think the Uber example and the Facebook example are real outliers. They're particularly egregious examples of abuse of people's information (letting people zoom in on people's walks of shame at company parties is definitely bad!).
- alexbanks 6y ago
  It's difficult to know what/where the line is for sure, but I think lots of software has shifted away from making people's lives better. Facebook, Amazon, Uber, are doing more negative for humanity than positive I think. Sure, they offer a service that might not've existed before, at least in that iteration or scale, but at what point are the negatives outweighing the positives? Sure, you "connect" people to friends/family they may not be able to see in person or communicate with regularly. You're also verifiably playing god with information and misinformation, as well as spying on your users, selling their data to other people that want to spy on them, paying employees to view toxic content (which results in PTSD), etc. Is all this worth being able to communicate with people you don't really care about, or that don't really care about you?
- IvyMike 6y ago
  There is the ACM Code of Ethics, which includes: > Contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing. > Avoid harm. The document is a lot bigger than the Hippocratic Oath, so includes a lot of points about Professional Responsibilities and Leadership, but at least it's partially aligned with that kind of thinking. https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
newcomputer 6y ago
You sound like an absolutely awful person to work with.
- dang 6y ago
  Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid personal attacks. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
alexbanks 6y ago
I feel this way about lots more than Facebook. BigTech is committing atrocities every day, and the developers that work there are generally complicit in that behavior. I think it's fine to say "I'm not proud but the money was life changing" - that can be true, when most people are faced with that proposition would go with the life changing money. But it seems wild to think that Amazon or Facebook or Google employees should be applauded for their work, or should feel proud - lots of it is actively harmful to me as a human.
vowelless 6y ago
https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ They will be fine.
batmaniam 6y ago
This is an extremely unfair evaluation of software engineers. There's no such thing as a company doing ethical work, they all answer to shareholders and generate profit solely to benefit that class of people. Everyone else is the working class, trying to get by and without any ability to actually change the incentive structure of a company. We all work for someone who is screwing someone else, be it the consumer or your fellow coworker. It's all evil, and we are all doing the devil's work. If you truly want fundamental ethical change, how about empowering the working class, so that we have a platform and the power to speak without reprisals? Then it goes beyond facebook, we can fight back against all types of abuses, ideological ones and the ones in the office. Can you imagine the kind of power we can have if we, in unison, shut down all our development work to fight for societal change? The government and corporations will bow. Start a tech union, and let's see how far you get. That's a better answer than putting the onus on a single developer whose life is literally dependent on the company's continued employment. Just don't be surprised that the company will do everything to shut you down, hard. And then you'll realize how ridiculous the evaluation you wrote above is.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  (1) There are privately held companies who are not answerable to shareholders (certainly not a large group of them), and who may not even operate with profit as their primary goal. (2) There are more nuanced definitions of "working class" which might be useful in this context. As much as I applaud class solidarity, there are ways in which software engineers currently are not subject to the same issues as other people who sell their labor to capital in order to make a living. (3) Empowering the working class has not been a particularly successful strategy when done at scale, from a historical perspective. It seems more effective to focus on empowering people you know, the place you live, organizations that have something to do with you. "The working class" is, at this point in US history, far too amorphous and ill-defined a group, riven by division sown by capital in its own interest, to really be the focus of much empowerment.
  - acephal 6y ago
    Yeah really can't behind this idea software engineers are in any way "working class". Kind of an affront in my book.
Diederich 6y ago
A couple of honest questions coming in. I would very much like to engage in a good faith conversation with you. > ... unwilling to represent the failings your company has done to society, then I need to hear a justification before moving further in the conversation. I'm going to replace 'company' with 'organization'. Do you harbor similar opinions about people who have previously or currently work for a federal government? State government? You mention 'tech company': do you have such opinions about people who have worked for, for example, IBM? I look forward to your response, and I promise I'm not trying to trap or bait you in any way. Thanks.
- jentist_retol 6y ago
  I work in the security org now, and so I deal with a lot of exmilitary and exfederal employees. Considering that the military is a institution in this country that helps a lot of working class kids get education and training... It really comes down to choices and consent for me. If you're in the military, that may have been the option for an 18 year old and certainly I wasn't thinking about ethics when I was 18. But if you're able to work at an organization with a high bar such as Facebook, surely you have other options - unless you're a new grad - the stark reality is that when you get out of college, you take what you get. I would definitely be a little tougher on someone who joined Facebook (or the NSA) in the last few years and already had job experience (senior/staff level) versus a Jr engineer or someone who'd been there since before a lot of these issues came to light (although that raises the question: why are yo u still there?) And, my opinion on Facebook has changed drastically in the past few years. So anyways, it's really contextual and empathetic. I'm not just trying to "GOTCHA" some guy who joined the military out of high school before fully appreciating the ramifications of their actions (I wouldn't have!). But if you have 10 years of experience in software and you go work for the NSA... well, I have some questions. I know there's a lot of gaps, and I'm ashamed to admit I don't really have a strong framework - this is a personal failing, and something I've really been thinking about more recently. edit: i got downvoted. I'd like to know what I can improve on, please reply, thanks. I'm trying to be better!
  - shmel 6y ago
    While you have a point about 18yo, it is very difficult to overlook the main job of the military: kill people. NSA flies below the radar or at least used to, but it is very difficult to not notice that the US military mostly come to foreign countries and kill people there. Even if you are a teenager. However, with FB it is less obvious due to their fancy talk about community and shit. I understand your outrage about facebook, but I don't understand you can give a pass to people who essentially say: "I gonna kill people, it is okay, they are probably bad people anyway".
errantspark 6y ago
Nice to see some personal responsibility! :) I feel like one really needs to take a deontological view on things like this. Much like voting, every person who quits their job, refuses to hire an applicant or build a feature on ethical grounds moves society a step in the right direction. Don't forget about your personal agency, if you work in SV you probably have TONS AND TONS of it.
- bzb5 6y ago
  You may be confusing “right direction” with “my direction”.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    There was no detectable point of view in the comment you're replying to, other than that what a person does should be compatible with their own belief system. It's hard to see that as oppression.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
ksenzee 6y ago
This is absolutely fair. When I ask people coming from Amazon why they left, I am very carefully listening to whether they like how Amazon treats its people or not. If I were interviewing an ex-Facebook employee, I'd want to hear some discomfort with Facebook's ethics.
- iliekcomputers 6y ago
  Not sure if it's reasonable to expect people to badmouth their current employer in an interview, especially when you don't know the result of the interview.
  - ksenzee 6y ago
    The last ex-Amazonian I interviewed managed to express his discomfort with Amazon without "badmouthing" anything or anyone. I was impressed with his diplomacy. We hired him.
    - iliekcomputers 6y ago
      So it becomes an interview of diplomacy essentially. Not really sure if that's ideal. I could see many false negatives of people who are technically strong, uncomfortable with their employer's ethics but still avoiding the topic so as not to say too much by mistake.
      - ksenzee 6y ago
        In this particular case it was an engineering manager position. Diplomacy is part of the job description.
        iliekcomputers 6y ago
        That makes sense!
- ghiculescu 6y ago
  In 2021, studying for the interview will not be memorising algorithms, it will be memorising which past jobs to pretend to regret.
Answerawake 6y ago
With all due respect: I think this thinking comes from a massive place of privilege. With the sea of unemployed entry level developers who would kill for a job with FAANG, getting into Facebook for the chance to earn that kind of money and work with such experienced people would probably be a dream come true for many of them. I have even met so many people with years of experience that are on the outside of the FAANG wall looking in with jealousy and longing. You can only act this entitled when you have met your needs career wise. It just seems wrong to cause trouble to others because they may have had this only chance to join the elite FAANG crowd and now they pay for it because of people with your line of thinking.
- jentist_retol 6y ago
  Yeah, I addressed this later on. It's very contextual. You're assuming/inferring there's some strict moral framework, and then I walk into that room and say "fuck you for working at facebook, get out of my face". No! I would never! I would still ask a new grad the question, and maybe I would put more weight on the answer if they had made it to a senior role. >It just seems wrong to cause trouble to others because they may have had this only chance to join the elite FAANG crowd and now they pay for it because of people with your line of thinking. I have never worked at FAANG and I don't intend to, to be honest. I did pass on an offer at A, earlier in my career. >I have even met so many people with years of experience that are on the outside of the FAANG wall looking in with jealousy and longing. Well, if they ever get in and show up in my interview panel, they should be prepared for a softball ethics question. That seems like a small price to pay, tbh
  - filoleg 6y ago
    > they should be prepared for a softball ethics question. > That seems like a small price to pay, tbh I don't think it is the question itself that's the price to pay here. The price to pay here is having to work in a workplace that the imagination usually paints for a company that would think that seriously scoring candidates on their answer to such a question isn't straight up ridiculous. I.e., it isn't the question itself that would bother me. It is imagining what it would be like to work at a workplace where they ask these questions during interviews. If they ask it during interviews, they probably have discussions on this at the office all the time. While it might be desirable to some, there is not enough money in the world to make me tolerate working around people talking all the time about their ideas of morality and political views at work.
secondcoming 6y ago
And if I got your dumb question in an interview I'd walk out. It's obviously a politicised, hostile workplace.
- jentist_retol 6y ago
  If you take offense over a variation of "as you know [your company] made the news for being caught doing [horrible thing]. On your resume you worked on [horrible thing]. How do you feel about that?", then you have a very thin skin and also I would not want to work with you. So it would be mutual.
BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago
FB people just make software that helps people to share thoughts. I don't see how they are responsible that people have wrong thoughts and share them. For example, Samsung makes TVs that are used worldwide to brainwash people and to share wrong thoughts. Would you also abuse former Samsung engineers at the interviews?

just-juan-post 6y ago

Which company do you work for again?

rajup 6y ago
I'm interested to know too so I can avoid it like the plague.
- jentist_retol 6y ago
  We handle large amounts of sensitive personal information, and developers are tightly integrated into the product development process. We have successfully lobbied against products with serious spousal abuse cases. If you can't handle a 5-10 minute question section in which I bring up contemporary criticism about your current employer, in the context of that sensitive information that we handle, then the feeling is mutual.
  - thinkmassive 6y ago
    The people reacting like you have an awful take must have forgotten what story they’re commenting on. Personally I may not spend 5+ minutes on it, but the question will be raised, and only a well considered answer is getting the thumbs up.
    - jentist_retol 6y ago
      I'm not looking for an apology, or remorse, or a sudden revelation. But an understanding of the work they do and WHY it might receive that perception is a "passing" answer, IMO.
      - thinkmassive 6y ago
        I’m in agreement with you. On re-reading my earlier comment I realize it could be interpreted either way, but I meant “people reacting as if you have an awful take...” rather than “people like you have an awful take...”
  - dazilcher 6y ago
    Filtering for opinionated developers who proritize their political views and arbitrary moral compass over company policies sure sounds like an interesting strategy when it comes to handling sensitive PII.
    - jentist_retol 6y ago
      I think you're reading into it too much and injecting politics. I don't know how else to describe it without de-anonymizing other than "it was actually bad and the PM who came up with it did a bad job designing the fraud cases".
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
alexbanks 6y ago
Probably a company with an above-average amount of moral character amongst its development staff.
- jentist_retol 6y ago
  I hope so. I wish I could give more information but maybe it's best to keep names out considering the context ;)
  - alexbanks 6y ago
    I mean, without knowing anything about you or your company other than what you posted above, it's hard to say. But in my experience the industry could use more morality based hiring standards, as well as morality-based repercussions for bad behavior. Kudos to you.
    - pb7 6y ago
      A little odd patting someone on the back for claims with no substance. It’s easy to make up a story with all sorts of feel-good ingredients to virtue signal in a thread about a bad guy. If it was all unicorns and butterflies, why not name the company so the morally-aligned folk can find safe haven?
      - alexbanks 6y ago
        As I said in the other post of mine that you commented on, you're welcome to not agree with me (or anyone, I don't care), that's totally fine with me.
        pb7 6y ago
        You’re welcome to disagree but repeating that doesn’t make for engaging discussion which is kind of the purpose of this forum. If you aren’t willing to defend your support of those who are subliminally attacking others, maybe just don’t post at all. It’s just not interesting and doesn’t add anything.
orthecreedence 6y ago
A major one.

captainredbeard 6y ago

> I don't think I've ever felt this strongly I'm sure that your employer loves your personal feelings interfering with hiring talent.

gabereiser 6y ago
Exactly why we have interview problems in engineering. I respect engineers for having opinions and ethics and they should lean on them, but to bar one from employment because they were doing their job is wrong, immoral, and potentially illegal.
- tricolon 6y ago
  > because they were doing their job Where have we heard that one before?
- glial 6y ago
  After all, they were just following orders.
- Dystopian 6y ago
  Not to defend the op, since I think they're taking a particularly hard line, but qualifying candidates based on their previous work is just something that happens. I've personally been disqualified because I've worked at a legal, but "vice" based company - I've seen others not hired because their previous company was too "legacy", even though they did very similar work. It's not necessarily right, but companies use the signals available for them - even if they're not 100% agreeable to everyone.
  - jentist_retol 6y ago
    I'd like to emphasize the nature of the answer which was a defensive "I was just following orders". At that point, I was conducting dozens of interviews a year, and I think that sort of question came up... maybe three times? One of those people was from a medical company with a very large and very embarrassing contemporary incident, and the interviewee and I talked about development process problems. In fact, they admitted, it was part of the reason they left! We hired them and I enjoyed working with him.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

li4ick 6y ago

I mean, I believe that there should be a Hippocratic Oath in software, but I'm not sure where your particular cutoff bar stands. My view of software is against the mainstream: most programmers should dedicate their time to build tools for scientists, to solve actual problems and advance our species. Current tech is mostly trash, useless and nobody needs it.

jentist_retol 6y ago
>I'm not sure where your particular cutoff bar stands I'm not sure either! I'm not an ethics expert. I think the Uber example and the Facebook example are real outliers. They're particularly egregious examples of abuse of people's information (letting people zoom in on people's walks of shame at company parties is definitely bad!).
alexbanks 6y ago
It's difficult to know what/where the line is for sure, but I think lots of software has shifted away from making people's lives better. Facebook, Amazon, Uber, are doing more negative for humanity than positive I think. Sure, they offer a service that might not've existed before, at least in that iteration or scale, but at what point are the negatives outweighing the positives? Sure, you "connect" people to friends/family they may not be able to see in person or communicate with regularly. You're also verifiably playing god with information and misinformation, as well as spying on your users, selling their data to other people that want to spy on them, paying employees to view toxic content (which results in PTSD), etc. Is all this worth being able to communicate with people you don't really care about, or that don't really care about you?
IvyMike 6y ago
There is the ACM Code of Ethics, which includes: > Contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing. > Avoid harm. The document is a lot bigger than the Hippocratic Oath, so includes a lot of points about Professional Responsibilities and Leadership, but at least it's partially aligned with that kind of thinking. https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

newcomputer 6y ago

You sound like an absolutely awful person to work with.

dang 6y ago
Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid personal attacks. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

alexbanks 6y ago

I feel this way about lots more than Facebook. BigTech is committing atrocities every day, and the developers that work there are generally complicit in that behavior. I think it's fine to say "I'm not proud but the money was life changing" - that can be true, when most people are faced with that proposition would go with the life changing money. But it seems wild to think that Amazon or Facebook or Google employees should be applauded for their work, or should feel proud - lots of it is actively harmful to me as a human.

vowelless 6y ago

https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ They will be fine.

batmaniam 6y ago

This is an extremely unfair evaluation of software engineers. There's no such thing as a company doing ethical work, they all answer to shareholders and generate profit solely to benefit that class of people. Everyone else is the working class, trying to get by and without any ability to actually change the incentive structure of a company. We all work for someone who is screwing someone else, be it the consumer or your fellow coworker. It's all evil, and we are all doing the devil's work. If you truly want fundamental ethical change, how about empowering the working class, so that we have a platform and the power to speak without reprisals? Then it goes beyond facebook, we can fight back against all types of abuses, ideological ones and the ones in the office. Can you imagine the kind of power we can have if we, in unison, shut down all our development work to fight for societal change? The government and corporations will bow. Start a tech union, and let's see how far you get. That's a better answer than putting the onus on a single developer whose life is literally dependent on the company's continued employment. Just don't be surprised that the company will do everything to shut you down, hard. And then you'll realize how ridiculous the evaluation you wrote above is.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
(1) There are privately held companies who are not answerable to shareholders (certainly not a large group of them), and who may not even operate with profit as their primary goal. (2) There are more nuanced definitions of "working class" which might be useful in this context. As much as I applaud class solidarity, there are ways in which software engineers currently are not subject to the same issues as other people who sell their labor to capital in order to make a living. (3) Empowering the working class has not been a particularly successful strategy when done at scale, from a historical perspective. It seems more effective to focus on empowering people you know, the place you live, organizations that have something to do with you. "The working class" is, at this point in US history, far too amorphous and ill-defined a group, riven by division sown by capital in its own interest, to really be the focus of much empowerment.
- acephal 6y ago
  Yeah really can't behind this idea software engineers are in any way "working class". Kind of an affront in my book.

Diederich 6y ago

A couple of honest questions coming in. I would very much like to engage in a good faith conversation with you. > ... unwilling to represent the failings your company has done to society, then I need to hear a justification before moving further in the conversation. I'm going to replace 'company' with 'organization'. Do you harbor similar opinions about people who have previously or currently work for a federal government? State government? You mention 'tech company': do you have such opinions about people who have worked for, for example, IBM? I look forward to your response, and I promise I'm not trying to trap or bait you in any way. Thanks.

jentist_retol 6y ago
I work in the security org now, and so I deal with a lot of exmilitary and exfederal employees. Considering that the military is a institution in this country that helps a lot of working class kids get education and training... It really comes down to choices and consent for me. If you're in the military, that may have been the option for an 18 year old and certainly I wasn't thinking about ethics when I was 18. But if you're able to work at an organization with a high bar such as Facebook, surely you have other options - unless you're a new grad - the stark reality is that when you get out of college, you take what you get. I would definitely be a little tougher on someone who joined Facebook (or the NSA) in the last few years and already had job experience (senior/staff level) versus a Jr engineer or someone who'd been there since before a lot of these issues came to light (although that raises the question: why are yo u still there?) And, my opinion on Facebook has changed drastically in the past few years. So anyways, it's really contextual and empathetic. I'm not just trying to "GOTCHA" some guy who joined the military out of high school before fully appreciating the ramifications of their actions (I wouldn't have!). But if you have 10 years of experience in software and you go work for the NSA... well, I have some questions. I know there's a lot of gaps, and I'm ashamed to admit I don't really have a strong framework - this is a personal failing, and something I've really been thinking about more recently. edit: i got downvoted. I'd like to know what I can improve on, please reply, thanks. I'm trying to be better!
- shmel 6y ago
  While you have a point about 18yo, it is very difficult to overlook the main job of the military: kill people. NSA flies below the radar or at least used to, but it is very difficult to not notice that the US military mostly come to foreign countries and kill people there. Even if you are a teenager. However, with FB it is less obvious due to their fancy talk about community and shit. I understand your outrage about facebook, but I don't understand you can give a pass to people who essentially say: "I gonna kill people, it is okay, they are probably bad people anyway".

errantspark 6y ago

Nice to see some personal responsibility! :) I feel like one really needs to take a deontological view on things like this. Much like voting, every person who quits their job, refuses to hire an applicant or build a feature on ethical grounds moves society a step in the right direction. Don't forget about your personal agency, if you work in SV you probably have TONS AND TONS of it.

bzb5 6y ago
You may be confusing “right direction” with “my direction”.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  There was no detectable point of view in the comment you're replying to, other than that what a person does should be compatible with their own belief system. It's hard to see that as oppression.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

ksenzee 6y ago

This is absolutely fair. When I ask people coming from Amazon why they left, I am very carefully listening to whether they like how Amazon treats its people or not. If I were interviewing an ex-Facebook employee, I'd want to hear some discomfort with Facebook's ethics.

iliekcomputers 6y ago
Not sure if it's reasonable to expect people to badmouth their current employer in an interview, especially when you don't know the result of the interview.
- ksenzee 6y ago
  The last ex-Amazonian I interviewed managed to express his discomfort with Amazon without "badmouthing" anything or anyone. I was impressed with his diplomacy. We hired him.
  - iliekcomputers 6y ago
    So it becomes an interview of diplomacy essentially. Not really sure if that's ideal. I could see many false negatives of people who are technically strong, uncomfortable with their employer's ethics but still avoiding the topic so as not to say too much by mistake.
    - ksenzee 6y ago
      In this particular case it was an engineering manager position. Diplomacy is part of the job description.
      - iliekcomputers 6y ago
        That makes sense!
ghiculescu 6y ago
In 2021, studying for the interview will not be memorising algorithms, it will be memorising which past jobs to pretend to regret.

Answerawake 6y ago

With all due respect: I think this thinking comes from a massive place of privilege. With the sea of unemployed entry level developers who would kill for a job with FAANG, getting into Facebook for the chance to earn that kind of money and work with such experienced people would probably be a dream come true for many of them. I have even met so many people with years of experience that are on the outside of the FAANG wall looking in with jealousy and longing. You can only act this entitled when you have met your needs career wise. It just seems wrong to cause trouble to others because they may have had this only chance to join the elite FAANG crowd and now they pay for it because of people with your line of thinking.

jentist_retol 6y ago
Yeah, I addressed this later on. It's very contextual. You're assuming/inferring there's some strict moral framework, and then I walk into that room and say "fuck you for working at facebook, get out of my face". No! I would never! I would still ask a new grad the question, and maybe I would put more weight on the answer if they had made it to a senior role. >It just seems wrong to cause trouble to others because they may have had this only chance to join the elite FAANG crowd and now they pay for it because of people with your line of thinking. I have never worked at FAANG and I don't intend to, to be honest. I did pass on an offer at A, earlier in my career. >I have even met so many people with years of experience that are on the outside of the FAANG wall looking in with jealousy and longing. Well, if they ever get in and show up in my interview panel, they should be prepared for a softball ethics question. That seems like a small price to pay, tbh
- filoleg 6y ago
  > they should be prepared for a softball ethics question. > That seems like a small price to pay, tbh I don't think it is the question itself that's the price to pay here. The price to pay here is having to work in a workplace that the imagination usually paints for a company that would think that seriously scoring candidates on their answer to such a question isn't straight up ridiculous. I.e., it isn't the question itself that would bother me. It is imagining what it would be like to work at a workplace where they ask these questions during interviews. If they ask it during interviews, they probably have discussions on this at the office all the time. While it might be desirable to some, there is not enough money in the world to make me tolerate working around people talking all the time about their ideas of morality and political views at work.

secondcoming 6y ago

And if I got your dumb question in an interview I'd walk out. It's obviously a politicised, hostile workplace.

jentist_retol 6y ago
If you take offense over a variation of "as you know [your company] made the news for being caught doing [horrible thing]. On your resume you worked on [horrible thing]. How do you feel about that?", then you have a very thin skin and also I would not want to work with you. So it would be mutual.

BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago

FB people just make software that helps people to share thoughts. I don't see how they are responsible that people have wrong thoughts and share them. For example, Samsung makes TVs that are used worldwide to brainwash people and to share wrong thoughts. Would you also abuse former Samsung engineers at the interviews?