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How can anyone work at Facebooks nowadays and have a clear conscience. Is it just the salary? It is, isn't it? Just money. How depressing.

by LandR 6y ago

lrvick 6y ago
I know multiple people that have taken jobs at Facebook in recent years that feel it is a net negative in the world but could not resist the paycheck and justify it by committing to either by work hard as user advocates from the inside, or just finding open source work that doesn't directly exploit users to drain their resources on. I for one have taken interviews at Facebook with 0 intention of working for them just because they have a tough process and it is good practice. Wasting some of the time and resources of an organization that inherently evil also makes the world that much better.
- burnthrow 6y ago
  So, they didn't make you an offer.
- simoncarter 6y ago
  How is Facebook inherently evil?
xR63cRyqrL 6y ago
Turns out you got to pay bills even if you are on a moral high horse. Besides if one has to have a clear conscience to match everyone's standard here, one should stop working at FAANG, stop using FAANG products, maybe stop using big oil products, stop using big pharma products, is it ok to pay taxes to a govt if you don't agree with something they did or should one pick up and move too? what else did I miss? HN is so much of a echo chamber lately for some topics, there was a recent discussion about FB head of integrity leaving the company and the top comment and thread was a personal attack on the FB CEO's integrity without even understanding what an integrity team/dept does in these companies. I could just as well have been reading youtube comments. I see threads with some topics now and I can pretty much be sure to not expect to learn anything new or get a good discourse. Just people thinking they are better than others.
- nafizh 6y ago
  You are doing a whataboutism just like many others. Among FAANG, Facebook is distinctly more problematic. If you don't see that, you are just unaware of the scandals upon scandals from the last 5 years.
  - quicfufhrt 6y ago
    True but I am tired of seeing a free pass for the leaders, legislators, board, share holders etc. but bring out moral pitch forks for engineers who perhaps have the least amount of decision making powers in a company as massive as FB/FAANG. I am willing to bet that even the ones here that are in disbelief about how one can work in such a company, I bet uses their products and/or is invested directly or indirectly with these companies and don't complain when their portfolio makes bank.
    - LandR 6y ago
      > least amount of decision making powers in a company as massive as FB/FAANG They have the power to choose not to work there.
      - tqvsgbd737 6y ago
        So one can use FB products to stay in touch with their family or engage with the customers of their business but one should be ashamed to work there. Is one held to this standard if they are a facebook engineer? What about a FB bus driver? house keeping staff? kitchen or security staff, content moderators? contractors? Just trying to gauge the paycheck $ value at which the conscience should awaken. It's like asking the frycook to quit his job because the CxOs lead the company to make very tasty but unhealthy food, it's so good it's almost addictive. Surely the frycook has a conscience, no? Soon all the frycooks in the world will refuse to work there and we would have solved the problem!
        LandR 6y ago
        > So one can use FB products to stay in touch with their family or engage with the customers of their business but one should be ashamed to work there. No, I don't think anyone should use any facebook tools either. It's perfectly doable. The company needs to die.
TameAntelope 6y ago
An effective way to change a culture is to participate in it.
- dyeje 6y ago
  Changing a company's culture is nearly impossible at a startup, let alone a behemoth like FB.
  - Balgair 6y ago
    Google did just vote to unionize, so it's not impossible, but very difficult.
    - pseudalopex 6y ago
      Between 200 and 300 Google employees formed a union. Google didn't vote to unionize.
- lhorie 6y ago
  I could agree if by "participate" you mean come in as the CEO and clean house, like what happened with Uber when Dara took over from Travis. You might possibly be able to do something as a high ranking HR person, but as a L5 engineer, the amount of cultural impact you can realistically impart isn't that big.
izacus 6y ago
Did the current political situation in US (and most of the world) not teach you that it's really really dangerous to think that most people in your environment conform to your morality and agree with the sources you're basing it from?
- enumjorge 6y ago
  You’re taking about the dangers of living in a bubble and from consuming misinformation, right? Two things that FB hasn’t exactly helped with.
paxys 6y ago
Not everyone follows American politics and watches sensationalized American news media all day. Facebook is a great place to work, has some of the best tech in the industry and its products have done a lot of good for the world, especially in developing countries.
- moolcool 6y ago
  Facebook's impact on the world today isn't sensationalized (quite the opposite), nor is it exclusive to American politics.
- rglullis 6y ago
  I really wonder what good they have done. All of their initiatives are self-serving. And at the end of the day, no amount of good they do will ever make up for all the damage they cause to their users. I am not even talking about the American politics, just the amount of psyops tricks to get people engaged and addicted to the platform, manipulation of one's sense of wellbeing, the social anxiety they cause. They make Big Tobacco look like saints. As for "being a great place to work" or "the tech": how much of soul-less drone one has to be to look at all this shit and still think "but the tech is cool and they pay really well!"?
  - nefitty 6y ago
    Cigarette smoking causes about 480,000 deaths per year in the US alone. Does Facebook have a body count?
    - anshumankmr 6y ago
      Yes, when you consider the people killed by its spreading of fake news, anti vax etc. For example, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-destroyed-village-lynchings-rainpada-india https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-de.... However that being said, if I got an opportunity to work at FB, I would.
    - rglullis 6y ago
      Is the best defense for Facebook that they don't have a body count? RIAA/MPAA does not have a body count. Patent trolls do not have a body count. Ballmer's Microsoft did not have a body count. "Not having a body count" is quite a low bar for a moral compass, don't you think?
xtracto 6y ago
Well, I have never applied to FB and don't plan to in the short term, but I can tell you that I don't see any reason not to. They offer me a service which is quite useful: Keep me in some form of contact with long lost relationships I had while I lived in the UK, Germany and several cities in Mexico. I've done really good friends in those places over the years, and it makes me happy to see what's happening in their lives and even "react" to minor stuff that they post there after months of no interaction with them. Before I had facebook (around 2004) I used to write an email every December to a list of friends I had from different places, just to make sure we had some contact. And I also used to ping them in chat (Windows Messenger), but the problem there was that the conversation was just "what's going on", "nothing here, what's going on there...." , "nothing". Whereas with Facebook, the moment one of my friends opened a tatoo place, I could write some small comment and we would "virtually hug" and exchange thoughts for a minute. Regarding the "conscience" thing, Personally I don't see anything terrible that Facebook is doing. As long as people understand that this is the internet, and whatever you upload in ANY place in the internet is inherently public, all is fine for me.
deeeeplearning 6y ago
>Is it just the salary? It is, isn't it? Just money. How depressing. Of course it is. FAANG is just the 1980s Wall Street of our day. I can only pray that eventually people will realize how predatory and dangerous these companies are and decline to work for them. But Ivy League/Elite Uni grads only care about prestige and so as long as working there is seen as prestigious they will continue to sell their souls.
newbie578 6y ago
You can say that for any FAANG company really. I would rather work for Facebok than for the "cult" and $20 charging bricks..
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
renewiltord 6y ago
They have differing moral foundations. I have no problem with Facebook. (I don't work there though)
fsociety 6y ago
There are many teams trying to fix the negatives of FB - sure you can’t fix everything but overall the intention and effort is there
- teachrdan 6y ago
  Sincere question: How can an outsider like myself believe that Facebook is actually working to "fix the negatives of FB"? This is the same company that, in 2016, let Russian accounts pay for campaign ads in the US in rubles, according to Congressional testimony. Facebook said they'd prevent such errors in the future by creating an election oversight board. Despite the fact that they had four years to prepare, their oversight board took their first case... on December 1st, 2020, conveniently after the presidential election was over--and hundreds of millions of ad dollars were spent. I'm sure that Facebook has teams working on privacy and good governance. This is basically a public relations spend for them. Their business model is collecting as much data on people as they possibly can and then selling ads based on that data. The idea that "overall the intention and effort is there" seems laughable at best. But, as someone who seems to be an insider, do you have any information you could share that contradicts that narrative? https://thehill.com/policy/technology/358102-franken-blasts-facebook-for-accepting-rubles-for-us-election-ads https://thehill.com/policy/technology/358102-franken-blasts-... https://news.yahoo.com/facebooks-oversight-board-announces-1st-152115513.html https://news.yahoo.com/facebooks-oversight-board-announces-1...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - fsociety 6y ago
    I don't have the answers for if Facebook's good outweighs the bad, nor do I want to get into a debate. I'm just clearly laying out - and I understand that you mean well with the question and I hope others who understand this better will answer - that money and clout are not the sole reason people join Facebook.
fb_throwaway123 6y ago
Here's an honest answer * spread of misinformation on the platform/genocide in Myanmar/election integrity - this to me is the scariest thing about FB, but also something the company is dealing with and working on and trying to get right. It's not an easy problem to solve either. * Targeted ads - This really doesn't bother me. Tracking user interests/behavior and using it to serve ads they are way more likely to engage with, is creepy true, but also quite innovative and effective and the reason the company makes billions of dollars. It's hard for me to get worked up about showing users more effective ads. There are some interesting nuances around whether this should be opt in or opt out and giving users control over how their data is used. Some of this will be determined by laws which seems better to me then having it fall on individual companies. FB does give users control btw. * Too much/not enough censorship - this topic is a complete shit show and no one agrees anyway on how much is or isn't enough. FB's stance is basically to remove hate speech and calls to violence and allowing anything else. I'm fine with that. * buying out competitors like IG and What's App - it's normal for companies to do this and for the government to step in when it's too much * Other misc. shady things - there's other things that come up from time to time. I agree that some of it is shady, but imo is standard for what you find in American capitalism: ruthless competition and cutting corners to get ahead as opposed to evil maliciousness towards users and subverting the law. * Leetcode style interview questions - I have no problem with this whatsoever. The goal is not to ask difficult questions that trick candidates. It's to ask medium difficulty questions and hire people who can quickly and effectively solve them. Not everyone who fails the interview is bad, but the people who pass should be decent. * Users getting addicted to FB and IG/it makes them unhappy - I don't have a strong opinion about this topic. I don't really use the products since they don't appeal to me. They do appeal to (a growing) many and I think it's a bit presumptuous to point to those people and say "but really it makes you unhappy." I'm open to studies and scholarship that say otherwise. I'm not sure if I covered everything the OP had in mind, since they were not specific. Probably there are some other objectionable things I missed.
- rglullis 6y ago
  To your last point: the issue here is that Facebook is not interested in making users happy. They are interested in keeping them engaged so that they can sell ads. No studies are needed to show that if users' happiness or well-being gets them in the way of selling more ads, fuck the users. It is no different than Big Tobacco putting all kinds of additives and carcigenic substances on cigarettes to get people more addicted to it.
waynesonfire 6y ago
Nevermind all that.. you'd have to work with PHP. No thank you.
igorstellar 6y ago
Got offers from almost every FAANG last year. Decided to join FB, and it was not about money (in fact it depends on your negotiation skills). The reason I joined was the culture and people who work there as well as growth opportunities. One might say PSC are stressful but that depends on personality. I don't know why I should not have clear conscience. Should kitchen knife company be also upset about people are being killed by it?
- rglullis 6y ago
  Do knife manufacturers make more money by making more lethal knives, the same way that Facebook make more money by getting more eye balls and manipulating more of people's perception of and interactions with society?

How can anyone work at Facebooks nowadays and have a clear conscience. Is it just the salary? It is, isn't it? Just money. How depressing.

by LandR 6y ago

How can anyone work at Facebooks nowadays and have a clear conscience. Is it just the salary? It is, isn't it? Just money. How depressing.

lrvick 6y ago

I know multiple people that have taken jobs at Facebook in recent years that feel it is a net negative in the world but could not resist the paycheck and justify it by committing to either by work hard as user advocates from the inside, or just finding open source work that doesn't directly exploit users to drain their resources on. I for one have taken interviews at Facebook with 0 intention of working for them just because they have a tough process and it is good practice. Wasting some of the time and resources of an organization that inherently evil also makes the world that much better.

burnthrow 6y ago
So, they didn't make you an offer.
simoncarter 6y ago
How is Facebook inherently evil?

xR63cRyqrL 6y ago

Turns out you got to pay bills even if you are on a moral high horse. Besides if one has to have a clear conscience to match everyone's standard here, one should stop working at FAANG, stop using FAANG products, maybe stop using big oil products, stop using big pharma products, is it ok to pay taxes to a govt if you don't agree with something they did or should one pick up and move too? what else did I miss? HN is so much of a echo chamber lately for some topics, there was a recent discussion about FB head of integrity leaving the company and the top comment and thread was a personal attack on the FB CEO's integrity without even understanding what an integrity team/dept does in these companies. I could just as well have been reading youtube comments. I see threads with some topics now and I can pretty much be sure to not expect to learn anything new or get a good discourse. Just people thinking they are better than others.

nafizh 6y ago
You are doing a whataboutism just like many others. Among FAANG, Facebook is distinctly more problematic. If you don't see that, you are just unaware of the scandals upon scandals from the last 5 years.
- quicfufhrt 6y ago
  True but I am tired of seeing a free pass for the leaders, legislators, board, share holders etc. but bring out moral pitch forks for engineers who perhaps have the least amount of decision making powers in a company as massive as FB/FAANG. I am willing to bet that even the ones here that are in disbelief about how one can work in such a company, I bet uses their products and/or is invested directly or indirectly with these companies and don't complain when their portfolio makes bank.
  - LandR 6y ago
    > least amount of decision making powers in a company as massive as FB/FAANG They have the power to choose not to work there.
    - tqvsgbd737 6y ago
      So one can use FB products to stay in touch with their family or engage with the customers of their business but one should be ashamed to work there. Is one held to this standard if they are a facebook engineer? What about a FB bus driver? house keeping staff? kitchen or security staff, content moderators? contractors? Just trying to gauge the paycheck $ value at which the conscience should awaken. It's like asking the frycook to quit his job because the CxOs lead the company to make very tasty but unhealthy food, it's so good it's almost addictive. Surely the frycook has a conscience, no? Soon all the frycooks in the world will refuse to work there and we would have solved the problem!
      - LandR 6y ago
        > So one can use FB products to stay in touch with their family or engage with the customers of their business but one should be ashamed to work there. No, I don't think anyone should use any facebook tools either. It's perfectly doable. The company needs to die.

TameAntelope 6y ago

An effective way to change a culture is to participate in it.

dyeje 6y ago
Changing a company's culture is nearly impossible at a startup, let alone a behemoth like FB.
- Balgair 6y ago
  Google did just vote to unionize, so it's not impossible, but very difficult.
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    Between 200 and 300 Google employees formed a union. Google didn't vote to unionize.
lhorie 6y ago
I could agree if by "participate" you mean come in as the CEO and clean house, like what happened with Uber when Dara took over from Travis. You might possibly be able to do something as a high ranking HR person, but as a L5 engineer, the amount of cultural impact you can realistically impart isn't that big.

izacus 6y ago

Did the current political situation in US (and most of the world) not teach you that it's really really dangerous to think that most people in your environment conform to your morality and agree with the sources you're basing it from?

enumjorge 6y ago
You’re taking about the dangers of living in a bubble and from consuming misinformation, right? Two things that FB hasn’t exactly helped with.

paxys 6y ago

Not everyone follows American politics and watches sensationalized American news media all day. Facebook is a great place to work, has some of the best tech in the industry and its products have done a lot of good for the world, especially in developing countries.

moolcool 6y ago
Facebook's impact on the world today isn't sensationalized (quite the opposite), nor is it exclusive to American politics.
rglullis 6y ago
I really wonder what good they have done. All of their initiatives are self-serving. And at the end of the day, no amount of good they do will ever make up for all the damage they cause to their users. I am not even talking about the American politics, just the amount of psyops tricks to get people engaged and addicted to the platform, manipulation of one's sense of wellbeing, the social anxiety they cause. They make Big Tobacco look like saints. As for "being a great place to work" or "the tech": how much of soul-less drone one has to be to look at all this shit and still think "but the tech is cool and they pay really well!"?
- nefitty 6y ago
  Cigarette smoking causes about 480,000 deaths per year in the US alone. Does Facebook have a body count?
  - anshumankmr 6y ago
    Yes, when you consider the people killed by its spreading of fake news, anti vax etc. For example, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-destroyed-village-lynchings-rainpada-india https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-de.... However that being said, if I got an opportunity to work at FB, I would.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    Is the best defense for Facebook that they don't have a body count? RIAA/MPAA does not have a body count. Patent trolls do not have a body count. Ballmer's Microsoft did not have a body count. "Not having a body count" is quite a low bar for a moral compass, don't you think?

xtracto 6y ago

Well, I have never applied to FB and don't plan to in the short term, but I can tell you that I don't see any reason not to. They offer me a service which is quite useful: Keep me in some form of contact with long lost relationships I had while I lived in the UK, Germany and several cities in Mexico. I've done really good friends in those places over the years, and it makes me happy to see what's happening in their lives and even "react" to minor stuff that they post there after months of no interaction with them. Before I had facebook (around 2004) I used to write an email every December to a list of friends I had from different places, just to make sure we had some contact. And I also used to ping them in chat (Windows Messenger), but the problem there was that the conversation was just "what's going on", "nothing here, what's going on there...." , "nothing". Whereas with Facebook, the moment one of my friends opened a tatoo place, I could write some small comment and we would "virtually hug" and exchange thoughts for a minute. Regarding the "conscience" thing, Personally I don't see anything terrible that Facebook is doing. As long as people understand that this is the internet, and whatever you upload in ANY place in the internet is inherently public, all is fine for me.

deeeeplearning 6y ago

>Is it just the salary? It is, isn't it? Just money. How depressing. Of course it is. FAANG is just the 1980s Wall Street of our day. I can only pray that eventually people will realize how predatory and dangerous these companies are and decline to work for them. But Ivy League/Elite Uni grads only care about prestige and so as long as working there is seen as prestigious they will continue to sell their souls.

newbie578 6y ago

You can say that for any FAANG company really. I would rather work for Facebok than for the "cult" and $20 charging bricks..

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

renewiltord 6y ago

They have differing moral foundations. I have no problem with Facebook. (I don't work there though)

fsociety 6y ago

There are many teams trying to fix the negatives of FB - sure you can’t fix everything but overall the intention and effort is there

teachrdan 6y ago
Sincere question: How can an outsider like myself believe that Facebook is actually working to "fix the negatives of FB"? This is the same company that, in 2016, let Russian accounts pay for campaign ads in the US in rubles, according to Congressional testimony. Facebook said they'd prevent such errors in the future by creating an election oversight board. Despite the fact that they had four years to prepare, their oversight board took their first case... on December 1st, 2020, conveniently after the presidential election was over--and hundreds of millions of ad dollars were spent. I'm sure that Facebook has teams working on privacy and good governance. This is basically a public relations spend for them. Their business model is collecting as much data on people as they possibly can and then selling ads based on that data. The idea that "overall the intention and effort is there" seems laughable at best. But, as someone who seems to be an insider, do you have any information you could share that contradicts that narrative? https://thehill.com/policy/technology/358102-franken-blasts-facebook-for-accepting-rubles-for-us-election-ads https://thehill.com/policy/technology/358102-franken-blasts-... https://news.yahoo.com/facebooks-oversight-board-announces-1st-152115513.html https://news.yahoo.com/facebooks-oversight-board-announces-1...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- fsociety 6y ago
  I don't have the answers for if Facebook's good outweighs the bad, nor do I want to get into a debate. I'm just clearly laying out - and I understand that you mean well with the question and I hope others who understand this better will answer - that money and clout are not the sole reason people join Facebook.

fb_throwaway123 6y ago

Here's an honest answer * spread of misinformation on the platform/genocide in Myanmar/election integrity - this to me is the scariest thing about FB, but also something the company is dealing with and working on and trying to get right. It's not an easy problem to solve either. * Targeted ads - This really doesn't bother me. Tracking user interests/behavior and using it to serve ads they are way more likely to engage with, is creepy true, but also quite innovative and effective and the reason the company makes billions of dollars. It's hard for me to get worked up about showing users more effective ads. There are some interesting nuances around whether this should be opt in or opt out and giving users control over how their data is used. Some of this will be determined by laws which seems better to me then having it fall on individual companies. FB does give users control btw. * Too much/not enough censorship - this topic is a complete shit show and no one agrees anyway on how much is or isn't enough. FB's stance is basically to remove hate speech and calls to violence and allowing anything else. I'm fine with that. * buying out competitors like IG and What's App - it's normal for companies to do this and for the government to step in when it's too much * Other misc. shady things - there's other things that come up from time to time. I agree that some of it is shady, but imo is standard for what you find in American capitalism: ruthless competition and cutting corners to get ahead as opposed to evil maliciousness towards users and subverting the law. * Leetcode style interview questions - I have no problem with this whatsoever. The goal is not to ask difficult questions that trick candidates. It's to ask medium difficulty questions and hire people who can quickly and effectively solve them. Not everyone who fails the interview is bad, but the people who pass should be decent. * Users getting addicted to FB and IG/it makes them unhappy - I don't have a strong opinion about this topic. I don't really use the products since they don't appeal to me. They do appeal to (a growing) many and I think it's a bit presumptuous to point to those people and say "but really it makes you unhappy." I'm open to studies and scholarship that say otherwise. I'm not sure if I covered everything the OP had in mind, since they were not specific. Probably there are some other objectionable things I missed.

rglullis 6y ago
To your last point: the issue here is that Facebook is not interested in making users happy. They are interested in keeping them engaged so that they can sell ads. No studies are needed to show that if users' happiness or well-being gets them in the way of selling more ads, fuck the users. It is no different than Big Tobacco putting all kinds of additives and carcigenic substances on cigarettes to get people more addicted to it.

waynesonfire 6y ago

Nevermind all that.. you'd have to work with PHP. No thank you.

igorstellar 6y ago

Got offers from almost every FAANG last year. Decided to join FB, and it was not about money (in fact it depends on your negotiation skills). The reason I joined was the culture and people who work there as well as growth opportunities. One might say PSC are stressful but that depends on personality. I don't know why I should not have clear conscience. Should kitchen knife company be also upset about people are being killed by it?

rglullis 6y ago
Do knife manufacturers make more money by making more lethal knives, the same way that Facebook make more money by getting more eye balls and manipulating more of people's perception of and interactions with society?