9 ms·

Facebook platform is evil and no one doubts it at this point. Amazon is predatory for everyone - merchants, warehouse employees, IT employees, job candidates.

Facebook platform is evil and no one doubts it at this point. Amazon is predatory for everyone - merchants, warehouse employees, IT employees, job candidates. Google screwed the recruitment irrevocably and what's worse every minor shop attempts to copy their processes. Microsoft temporarily plays the nice guy. Then we have this whole dating thing entirely owned by one media hegemon. All together pay minuscle taxes. ...and here we are.

zkid18 6y ago
> Google screwed the recruitment irrevocably and what's worse every minor shop attempts to copy their processes. Can you elaborate on that?
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>Then we have this whole dating thing entirely owned by one media hegemon. This scares the hell out of me that one mega conglomerate with it's algorithms has control over your procreation and deep knowledge of your sex life, all linked to your real identity. Personally, I have no dog in this fight since I gave up on online dating and got good at IRL dating(pre-COVID) but I am aware of plenty of men willing to throw their cash and intimate data at these corporations for the hope of meeting someone. Am I alone here to worry about this or am I just too paranoid? If it were up to me, I would regulate the information dating apps collect to the same standards as patients' national healthcare information is handled(in the EU; I don't know about the US/UK but I heard it's not all rozy there).
- wdr1 6y ago
  > This scares the hell out of me that one mega conglomerate with it's algorithms has control over your procreation and deep knowledge of your sex life, all linked to your real identity. Only if you give it to them?
- durnygbur 6y ago
  Wait until Tinder bans your "account" which is basically a broad fingerprint of your physical device, Google/Apple account (from the play/app store), phone number, and WiFi details. Then you can turn paranoid.
  - Redoubts 6y ago
    It's hard to believe they can do this, but can't even reign in copy & paste profile spammers.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    Yikes to Tinder enforced celibacy!
    - baq 6y ago
      more like status quo ante? IOW nothing to be afraid of.
  - friendlybus 6y ago
    How long until the one drink I had too many at a bar whilst dating turns into a statistically higher insurance premium. Or my church finds out about my in-progress divorce and excommunicates me. The ability for the individual to reveal specific information on their own terms is necessary for social cohesion. Let's not pretend we have transparency on what our information is being used for, nor are we likely to ever get it. The devil's in the details.
    - humanrebar 6y ago
      Why belong to a church and hide major life events like divorces from it? But your broader point is sound. I'd just replace "church" with "nosy extended relative".
      - friendlybus 6y ago
        Getting excommunicated whilst going through a messy divorce with kids is a problem. It could benefit from waiting until the divorce is concluded, particularly for the sake of the kids' stability. Those events can have repercussions for a long time if antagonised. You could pick any situation where a process like divorce is started, proceedings or repair of the relationship has yet to begin and an automated service alerts people without immediate knowledge, who in turn pull the levers behind the scenes. Also the King Henry the 8th parallels are interesting.
- offtop5 6y ago
  >, I would regulate the information dating apps collect to the same standards as patients' national healthcare information is handled(in the EU; I don't know about the US/UK but I heard it's not all rozy there). In the case of Grindr they released user HIV status information which is literally medical data. >Personally, I have no dog in this fight since I gave up on online dating and got good at IRL dating(pre-COVID) but I am aware of plenty of men willing to throw their cash and intimate data at these corporations for the hope of meeting someone. Good for you, it's a giant scam( See FTC Sues Match). I also gave up on these apps and started meeting amazing people in real life. It's also much less stressful to disconnect from the social media matrix. I put vastly less effort into meeting people now and I found myself actually getting approached last year. I've found greater peace. Social Media is a very bad thing for most people. You waste tons of time you could be spending on other things. Doesn't help people tend to be much meaner online. Again , why deal with that. With Corona I've been trying to focus more on learning music , but I'm fairly optimistic next year things will be somewhat normal.
mettamage 6y ago
> Then we have this whole dating thing entirely owned by one media hegemon. Who'd that be? Not familiar with dating apps' company histories. I tried them but I'm experiencing much more success with old-fashioned dating. Tech hasn't disrupted dating for the majority of people, I think. [1] [1] Because I know quite a few people that don't get any success out of it either, while they do get some success with old-fashioned dating.
- pwim 6y ago
  Match Group owns and operates several online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, and PlentyOfFish. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group
  - kace91 6y ago
    are all of those used? I'm not American, but here tinder seems to be the only option whatsoever (aside of the lgtb alternatives).
    - pb7 6y ago
      Yes. People tend to be on multiple platforms simultaneously.
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      They all appeal to slightly different types of users. Like the same company selling different brands of chips.
dhyreueu 6y ago
Yeah, everybody thinks it's evil except for the people who use Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp. It's bizarre to me how many upvotes pretending society isn't still embracing FaceBook gets. And when you say this people parrot tired points about how most people "use it because they have to" as if people who thought it was evil, in the the real way, wouldn't be willing to resist the compulsion. I don't think most HN posters are from tough enough places to know what it looks like when people actually think something is evil.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  Facebook is crack cocaine. Most people aren't informed about the dangers, and by the time they understand, they're addicted. Moreover, it was explicitly and willfully designed to work that way.
  - dhyreueu 6y ago
    They're not addicted to Facebook you just don't like that the social landscape is changing. Calling people was terrible compared to the convenience of social media, sure it was more intimate but most people aren't looking for intimacy in every interaction they have with their friends. A lot of the time they just want to shoot the breeze. People like memes, seeing what trendy garbage with avacado on top their friends ate, and they like having an easy way to coordinate a group meetup without making ten phonecalls. I recognize that some people do get addicted to social media but for most people the only thing they're addicted to if anything is convenience. We're already at a point where many people feel more comfortable giving out their public insta than their phone number to new acquaintances because of how much more control they have if things go badly. Before social media parents were complaining that cell phones were turning their kids into shut-ins who just wanted to text all day instead of having real conversations. The whole dialogue is just another repeat of people feeling like something must be wrong because it's not how they think the world should be.
    - bredren 6y ago
      There are very real reasons to consider Facebook a threat that have nothing to do with projections of "it just isn't for me." Facebook embraced Q Anon and turned it into a gold mine for engagement. Facebook is directly responsible for the growth of that conspiracy and made the United States much worse as a result. Facebook did this by feeding a culture of fear, suspicion and bigotry in the guise of belonging, community and group 'fun' via memes and 'trendy garbage.' Facebook is crack cocaine and the pipe has already blown up in our faces. The United States is on fire like Richard Pryor.
aeyes 6y ago
> Then we have this whole dating thing entirely owned by one media hegemon. Actually, Facebook Dating is a breath of fresh air which doesn't implement features designed to get to your wallet.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  Unlike the others, Facebook can harvest the additional profile data and feed it into their more efficient ad business.
snarf21 6y ago
Exactly. It isn't just Facebook. The SEC and FTC have completely failed us in the last 20 years. Everything is about shareholder return, who cares about how many monopolies it creates. Also, you forgot Disney, Comcast, Apple, AT&T, and many more.
pyrrhotech 6y ago
Amazon is not predatory to me. It has greatly improved my life from a convenience and cost perspective. They also recently raised their wages for all warehouse employees such that it's one of the best places to work for unskilled labor in many locations. Amazon has made many small time merchants rich through their platform, and it's software engineers are among the highest paid in the industry, so I have to strongly disagree about the zon, but the rest of it agree wholeheartedly.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- durnygbur 6y ago
  Amazon from Europe's perspective: - IT - an average employer at best including salaries, extremely competitive workplace, offices in most expensive cities, I don't think they offer any equity - warehouses - they were wrecked by German unions and opened 4 warehouses in Poland serving exclusively German market and burdening the brand new EU-funded highways, as if they were shunning from complying with the German labor code and German wages (the market is too lucrative to abandon it)
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    if having a warehouse in germany is so unattractive that it's better to put them in poland and ship everything across the border, isn't that more of a problem with germany than amazon? edit: okay, that was a bit glib. but isn't complaining about this sort of thing at odds with the idea of an integrated european economy?
    - durnygbur 6y ago
      > isn't that more of a problem with germany than amazon? On top of unions and a desperate neighbour, Germany has saturated retail market including world's 5th biggest Schwarz Gruppe who certainly are not happy with a new foreign competitor, but that's a topic for many dissertations.
    - jasonv 6y ago
kemiller2002 6y ago
Personally, I think we should rephrase this. Facebook is not evil in and of itself. Facebook's management is evil. Amazon's management is predatory. Microsoft is good (at the moment), because they have leaders at the helm that are taking notice of how to do things in a more ethical manner. We need to start assigning blame to people to start correcting the problem. It's too easy to just pass of blame and say "Well, the machine is evil, no fixing that." Management should not get to hide behind the organization. We need to start sending a message that it's easy to fix what they are doing. Change out the people in charge, and change out the members of the board.
- bart_spoon 6y ago
  I think that you'd be hard pressed to make the argument that the Facebook platform itself, not just the management, is a purely net negative influence on society. Perhaps its original form, where people simply connect with their friends and share updates and photos, is, on paper fine, but it hasn't really resembled anything like that. It is entirely engineered around hacking people's attention spans in order to push advertising, and the methods it uses for doing so involve intense data collection and destroying user privacy. It has greatly contributed to the breakdown of political discourse in the US and around the world and by nature of its construction promotes extreme views and hyperbolic clickbait. The same criticism applies to Twitter. You can at least make some kind of defense of the products and services that Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple provide. Probably Google as well, though perhaps their case is weaker. But in my opinion, there isn't a defense to be made at this point regarding the virtue of Facebook or Twitter, neither as corporations, nor as platforms. The world is worse off because of their existence.
- zrth 6y ago
  > Facebook is not evil in and of itself. Facebook's management is evil. Sarcastically this make me want to reply that John the ripper was not evil. John the ripper's brain was evil.
  - kyuudou 6y ago
    Hah. John the Ripper[0] was a pretty useful piece of code back in the day. Now Jack the Ripper... I'd say if stories are true, he and his brain were evil, yes. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Ripper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Ripper Hmm it looks like it's still being maintained.
x87678r 6y ago
Actually FB pays a lot of tax, last year $6B on $24B profits. Amazon never makes money so doesn't pay tax. Google is good at not paying.
- bhupy 6y ago
  It's also misleading to look purely at the taxes paid on corporate profits. That's not the only way that corporations are taxed. In 2019 Amazon paid $2.4b in federal payroll taxes and customs duties and $1.6b in state and local taxes. So they actually handed to federal and state tax authorities over $4b of their $13.9b reported pre tax revenue, while also collecting $9b in sales taxes on their behalf. Also, Amazon as a corporation is largely just comprised of its executives and employees and shareholders, and they all pay taxes on their income and realized capital gains (if any).
loudmax 6y ago
Microsoft only appears to play the nice guy if you assume large swaths of the computing market are a natural monopoly. Enterprise level desktop software and the Office suite are still locked into a single vendor.
cryptica 6y ago
Facebook is not evil at all. Their mission to connect the world. Sometimes it means making unpopular decisions but they're doing what's right for the long term.
- jmole 6y ago
  In practice, this means monopolizing identity. Facebook wants to become the source of truth for identity on the social web. This is why you can't use their products without an account, now including Oculus, which you can't use without a Facebook account that has a "Real Name" policy.
chroma 6y ago
OK, now judge governments by those same standards. I don't see Facebook invading Iraq on false pretenses, or imprisoning people for the crime of smoking marijuana, or shooting an unarmed guy for failing to follow conflicting commands.[1] Hopefully now you understand where the libertarians and ancaps are coming from. It's not that corporations are good. It's that governments are so much worse. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver
- kyuudou 6y ago
  Not sure why you're getting downvoted (well, I do, but...) but governments are what enable corporations to be the bad actors they are. They would not get so large, powerful and unwieldy in a free market where corporations have as much or more rights as human beings, i.e. corporate personhood.
Mc_Big_G 6y ago
No one?! HN is full of Facebook supporters and deniers.
bena 6y ago
I've been through Google's process 2.5 times. I made it to the on-site twice, hiring committee once but ultimately was rejected; one time I was setting up for a phone screen when the whole COVID thing thinged and I think I got dropped when they froze hiring. My current job was acquired by essentially my current employer buying me out of a contract with my former employer. I was doing contract work and they wanted me full-time. My former employer, the consultancy my current employer contracted with, acquired me when they knew I was unhappy with the place I was at, another place they contracted with, prior to them. The place I was with prior, I was hired via a standard "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" type of interview. No assessment of my skills was made. I made claims, they took them at face value. So I've been through several processes for getting jobs. > Google screwed the recruitment irrevocably and what's worse every minor shop attempts to copy their processes. And this one is eh. Yes, their process is certainly rigorous and probably overkill. But the old style interview wasn't much better. The place where I work has gone through a couple of developers. Both were hired through more conventional means as we're not a software shop, we're a company that happens to need bespoke software. Both were able to produce something in terms of software. None of it was excellent and the internals were just bad. I don't know another way to cut it. Neither were fired. Both quit for other jobs. We obviously need some sort of standard here. We do need to assess whether or not someone can solve problems. We do need to assess whether or not someone can code sufficiently. Variable naming, indentation proclivities, clarity, etc. However, we cannot get caught up in testing whether they know the OTBS or the difference between systems and apps Hungarian or if they can solve trick questions. I'm going to be responsible for essentially building a team for my department of the building. And I'll tell you now, I'm going to be making a process closer to Google's rather than the one I went through to get where I am. Not to lock the door behind me, but to make sure we don't repeat the same mistakes. It's essentially 1 for 3 (maybe, I could be garbage as well to be honest). What's wrong with a skills assessment with regards to hiring? Or what's wrong with the way Google performs skills assessment with regards to hiring?

zkid18 6y ago

> Google screwed the recruitment irrevocably and what's worse every minor shop attempts to copy their processes. Can you elaborate on that?

ChuckNorris89 6y ago

>Then we have this whole dating thing entirely owned by one media hegemon. This scares the hell out of me that one mega conglomerate with it's algorithms has control over your procreation and deep knowledge of your sex life, all linked to your real identity. Personally, I have no dog in this fight since I gave up on online dating and got good at IRL dating(pre-COVID) but I am aware of plenty of men willing to throw their cash and intimate data at these corporations for the hope of meeting someone. Am I alone here to worry about this or am I just too paranoid? If it were up to me, I would regulate the information dating apps collect to the same standards as patients' national healthcare information is handled(in the EU; I don't know about the US/UK but I heard it's not all rozy there).

wdr1 6y ago
> This scares the hell out of me that one mega conglomerate with it's algorithms has control over your procreation and deep knowledge of your sex life, all linked to your real identity. Only if you give it to them?
durnygbur 6y ago
Wait until Tinder bans your "account" which is basically a broad fingerprint of your physical device, Google/Apple account (from the play/app store), phone number, and WiFi details. Then you can turn paranoid.
- Redoubts 6y ago
  It's hard to believe they can do this, but can't even reign in copy & paste profile spammers.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  Yikes to Tinder enforced celibacy!
  - baq 6y ago
    more like status quo ante? IOW nothing to be afraid of.
- friendlybus 6y ago
  How long until the one drink I had too many at a bar whilst dating turns into a statistically higher insurance premium. Or my church finds out about my in-progress divorce and excommunicates me. The ability for the individual to reveal specific information on their own terms is necessary for social cohesion. Let's not pretend we have transparency on what our information is being used for, nor are we likely to ever get it. The devil's in the details.
  - humanrebar 6y ago
    Why belong to a church and hide major life events like divorces from it? But your broader point is sound. I'd just replace "church" with "nosy extended relative".
    - friendlybus 6y ago
      Getting excommunicated whilst going through a messy divorce with kids is a problem. It could benefit from waiting until the divorce is concluded, particularly for the sake of the kids' stability. Those events can have repercussions for a long time if antagonised. You could pick any situation where a process like divorce is started, proceedings or repair of the relationship has yet to begin and an automated service alerts people without immediate knowledge, who in turn pull the levers behind the scenes. Also the King Henry the 8th parallels are interesting.
offtop5 6y ago
>, I would regulate the information dating apps collect to the same standards as patients' national healthcare information is handled(in the EU; I don't know about the US/UK but I heard it's not all rozy there). In the case of Grindr they released user HIV status information which is literally medical data. >Personally, I have no dog in this fight since I gave up on online dating and got good at IRL dating(pre-COVID) but I am aware of plenty of men willing to throw their cash and intimate data at these corporations for the hope of meeting someone. Good for you, it's a giant scam( See FTC Sues Match). I also gave up on these apps and started meeting amazing people in real life. It's also much less stressful to disconnect from the social media matrix. I put vastly less effort into meeting people now and I found myself actually getting approached last year. I've found greater peace. Social Media is a very bad thing for most people. You waste tons of time you could be spending on other things. Doesn't help people tend to be much meaner online. Again , why deal with that. With Corona I've been trying to focus more on learning music , but I'm fairly optimistic next year things will be somewhat normal.

mettamage 6y ago

> Then we have this whole dating thing entirely owned by one media hegemon. Who'd that be? Not familiar with dating apps' company histories. I tried them but I'm experiencing much more success with old-fashioned dating. Tech hasn't disrupted dating for the majority of people, I think. [1] [1] Because I know quite a few people that don't get any success out of it either, while they do get some success with old-fashioned dating.

pwim 6y ago
Match Group owns and operates several online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, and PlentyOfFish. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group
- kace91 6y ago
  are all of those used? I'm not American, but here tinder seems to be the only option whatsoever (aside of the lgtb alternatives).
  - pb7 6y ago
    Yes. People tend to be on multiple platforms simultaneously.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    They all appeal to slightly different types of users. Like the same company selling different brands of chips.

dhyreueu 6y ago

Yeah, everybody thinks it's evil except for the people who use Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp. It's bizarre to me how many upvotes pretending society isn't still embracing FaceBook gets. And when you say this people parrot tired points about how most people "use it because they have to" as if people who thought it was evil, in the the real way, wouldn't be willing to resist the compulsion. I don't think most HN posters are from tough enough places to know what it looks like when people actually think something is evil.

ethbr0 6y ago
Facebook is crack cocaine. Most people aren't informed about the dangers, and by the time they understand, they're addicted. Moreover, it was explicitly and willfully designed to work that way.
- dhyreueu 6y ago
  They're not addicted to Facebook you just don't like that the social landscape is changing. Calling people was terrible compared to the convenience of social media, sure it was more intimate but most people aren't looking for intimacy in every interaction they have with their friends. A lot of the time they just want to shoot the breeze. People like memes, seeing what trendy garbage with avacado on top their friends ate, and they like having an easy way to coordinate a group meetup without making ten phonecalls. I recognize that some people do get addicted to social media but for most people the only thing they're addicted to if anything is convenience. We're already at a point where many people feel more comfortable giving out their public insta than their phone number to new acquaintances because of how much more control they have if things go badly. Before social media parents were complaining that cell phones were turning their kids into shut-ins who just wanted to text all day instead of having real conversations. The whole dialogue is just another repeat of people feeling like something must be wrong because it's not how they think the world should be.
  - bredren 6y ago
    There are very real reasons to consider Facebook a threat that have nothing to do with projections of "it just isn't for me." Facebook embraced Q Anon and turned it into a gold mine for engagement. Facebook is directly responsible for the growth of that conspiracy and made the United States much worse as a result. Facebook did this by feeding a culture of fear, suspicion and bigotry in the guise of belonging, community and group 'fun' via memes and 'trendy garbage.' Facebook is crack cocaine and the pipe has already blown up in our faces. The United States is on fire like Richard Pryor.

aeyes 6y ago

> Then we have this whole dating thing entirely owned by one media hegemon. Actually, Facebook Dating is a breath of fresh air which doesn't implement features designed to get to your wallet.

ethbr0 6y ago
Unlike the others, Facebook can harvest the additional profile data and feed it into their more efficient ad business.

snarf21 6y ago

Exactly. It isn't just Facebook. The SEC and FTC have completely failed us in the last 20 years. Everything is about shareholder return, who cares about how many monopolies it creates. Also, you forgot Disney, Comcast, Apple, AT&T, and many more.

pyrrhotech 6y ago

Amazon is not predatory to me. It has greatly improved my life from a convenience and cost perspective. They also recently raised their wages for all warehouse employees such that it's one of the best places to work for unskilled labor in many locations. Amazon has made many small time merchants rich through their platform, and it's software engineers are among the highest paid in the industry, so I have to strongly disagree about the zon, but the rest of it agree wholeheartedly.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
durnygbur 6y ago
Amazon from Europe's perspective: - IT - an average employer at best including salaries, extremely competitive workplace, offices in most expensive cities, I don't think they offer any equity - warehouses - they were wrecked by German unions and opened 4 warehouses in Poland serving exclusively German market and burdening the brand new EU-funded highways, as if they were shunning from complying with the German labor code and German wages (the market is too lucrative to abandon it)
- leetcrew 6y ago
  if having a warehouse in germany is so unattractive that it's better to put them in poland and ship everything across the border, isn't that more of a problem with germany than amazon? edit: okay, that was a bit glib. but isn't complaining about this sort of thing at odds with the idea of an integrated european economy?
  - durnygbur 6y ago
    > isn't that more of a problem with germany than amazon? On top of unions and a desperate neighbour, Germany has saturated retail market including world's 5th biggest Schwarz Gruppe who certainly are not happy with a new foreign competitor, but that's a topic for many dissertations.
  - jasonv 6y ago

kemiller2002 6y ago

Personally, I think we should rephrase this. Facebook is not evil in and of itself. Facebook's management is evil. Amazon's management is predatory. Microsoft is good (at the moment), because they have leaders at the helm that are taking notice of how to do things in a more ethical manner. We need to start assigning blame to people to start correcting the problem. It's too easy to just pass of blame and say "Well, the machine is evil, no fixing that." Management should not get to hide behind the organization. We need to start sending a message that it's easy to fix what they are doing. Change out the people in charge, and change out the members of the board.

bart_spoon 6y ago
I think that you'd be hard pressed to make the argument that the Facebook platform itself, not just the management, is a purely net negative influence on society. Perhaps its original form, where people simply connect with their friends and share updates and photos, is, on paper fine, but it hasn't really resembled anything like that. It is entirely engineered around hacking people's attention spans in order to push advertising, and the methods it uses for doing so involve intense data collection and destroying user privacy. It has greatly contributed to the breakdown of political discourse in the US and around the world and by nature of its construction promotes extreme views and hyperbolic clickbait. The same criticism applies to Twitter. You can at least make some kind of defense of the products and services that Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple provide. Probably Google as well, though perhaps their case is weaker. But in my opinion, there isn't a defense to be made at this point regarding the virtue of Facebook or Twitter, neither as corporations, nor as platforms. The world is worse off because of their existence.
zrth 6y ago
> Facebook is not evil in and of itself. Facebook's management is evil. Sarcastically this make me want to reply that John the ripper was not evil. John the ripper's brain was evil.
- kyuudou 6y ago
  Hah. John the Ripper[0] was a pretty useful piece of code back in the day. Now Jack the Ripper... I'd say if stories are true, he and his brain were evil, yes. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Ripper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Ripper Hmm it looks like it's still being maintained.

x87678r 6y ago

Actually FB pays a lot of tax, last year $6B on $24B profits. Amazon never makes money so doesn't pay tax. Google is good at not paying.

bhupy 6y ago
It's also misleading to look purely at the taxes paid on corporate profits. That's not the only way that corporations are taxed. In 2019 Amazon paid $2.4b in federal payroll taxes and customs duties and $1.6b in state and local taxes. So they actually handed to federal and state tax authorities over $4b of their $13.9b reported pre tax revenue, while also collecting $9b in sales taxes on their behalf. Also, Amazon as a corporation is largely just comprised of its executives and employees and shareholders, and they all pay taxes on their income and realized capital gains (if any).

loudmax 6y ago

Microsoft only appears to play the nice guy if you assume large swaths of the computing market are a natural monopoly. Enterprise level desktop software and the Office suite are still locked into a single vendor.

cryptica 6y ago

Facebook is not evil at all. Their mission to connect the world. Sometimes it means making unpopular decisions but they're doing what's right for the long term.

jmole 6y ago
In practice, this means monopolizing identity. Facebook wants to become the source of truth for identity on the social web. This is why you can't use their products without an account, now including Oculus, which you can't use without a Facebook account that has a "Real Name" policy.

chroma 6y ago

OK, now judge governments by those same standards. I don't see Facebook invading Iraq on false pretenses, or imprisoning people for the crime of smoking marijuana, or shooting an unarmed guy for failing to follow conflicting commands.[1] Hopefully now you understand where the libertarians and ancaps are coming from. It's not that corporations are good. It's that governments are so much worse. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver

kyuudou 6y ago
Not sure why you're getting downvoted (well, I do, but...) but governments are what enable corporations to be the bad actors they are. They would not get so large, powerful and unwieldy in a free market where corporations have as much or more rights as human beings, i.e. corporate personhood.

Mc_Big_G 6y ago

No one?! HN is full of Facebook supporters and deniers.

bena 6y ago

I've been through Google's process 2.5 times. I made it to the on-site twice, hiring committee once but ultimately was rejected; one time I was setting up for a phone screen when the whole COVID thing thinged and I think I got dropped when they froze hiring. My current job was acquired by essentially my current employer buying me out of a contract with my former employer. I was doing contract work and they wanted me full-time. My former employer, the consultancy my current employer contracted with, acquired me when they knew I was unhappy with the place I was at, another place they contracted with, prior to them. The place I was with prior, I was hired via a standard "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" type of interview. No assessment of my skills was made. I made claims, they took them at face value. So I've been through several processes for getting jobs. > Google screwed the recruitment irrevocably and what's worse every minor shop attempts to copy their processes. And this one is eh. Yes, their process is certainly rigorous and probably overkill. But the old style interview wasn't much better. The place where I work has gone through a couple of developers. Both were hired through more conventional means as we're not a software shop, we're a company that happens to need bespoke software. Both were able to produce something in terms of software. None of it was excellent and the internals were just bad. I don't know another way to cut it. Neither were fired. Both quit for other jobs. We obviously need some sort of standard here. We do need to assess whether or not someone can solve problems. We do need to assess whether or not someone can code sufficiently. Variable naming, indentation proclivities, clarity, etc. However, we cannot get caught up in testing whether they know the OTBS or the difference between systems and apps Hungarian or if they can solve trick questions. I'm going to be responsible for essentially building a team for my department of the building. And I'll tell you now, I'm going to be making a process closer to Google's rather than the one I went through to get where I am. Not to lock the door behind me, but to make sure we don't repeat the same mistakes. It's essentially 1 for 3 (maybe, I could be garbage as well to be honest). What's wrong with a skills assessment with regards to hiring? Or what's wrong with the way Google performs skills assessment with regards to hiring?