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it's a huge company. not every single project is intrinsically evil (eg, there are lots of FB employees that just work on open source projects). the ones that a

it's a huge company. not every single project is intrinsically evil (eg, there are lots of FB employees that just work on open source projects). the ones that are might be parceled out in a way that makes their impact non-obvious. I can't think of another large tech company with such a terrible public image, but if they wanted to pay me lots of money to work on some open source project that was important to me, I'm not sure I would say no.

PontifexMinimus 5y ago
>It's a huge company. not every single project is intrinsically evil (eg, there are lots of FB employees that just work on open source projects). the ones that are might be parceled out in a way that makes their impact non-obvious. It's not so much that they are evil, it is that FB is optimising for FB's profits, which may conflict with other things that other people value, > I can't think of another large tech company with such a terrible public image Uber is close, if not exceeding FB. I also get the impression that people are a good deal more cynical and hostile towards Google and Apple now than they were 10 years ago (I know I am).
- blunte 5y ago
  Google gets trashed on because it was so bold about "do no evil" for so long, and because it keeps wrongly shutting down people's accounts. Oh, and because of its handling of internal sexual harassment and ethics complaints. Uber took advantage of drivers, misleading them about income and viability of making a good living. They also aggressively ignored local regulations to be able to unfairly compete with local services. As bad as that is, it's still many steps above knowingly facilitating human trafficing. Apple, for its many flaws, seems only to be semi-evil by probably knowingly allowing really bad labor practices at its Chinese factories. They either were knowingly failing to properly oversee, or they were intentionally ignoring. But it seems they have made an effort to improve in this regard.
StevePerkins 5y ago
> "it's a huge company. not every single project is intrinsically evil (eg, there are lots of FB employees that just work on open source projects)." Indeed. I would be very curious how many of the righteous in this thread are busy removing React from their web applications? Relay from their GraphQL API's? PyTorch from their data science projects? RocksDB from the endless number of infrastructure products that incorporate it? How do you hold that developer responsible for human slavery due to his or her work, while you and your shop continue happily exploiting that work yourselves?

PontifexMinimus 5y ago

>It's a huge company. not every single project is intrinsically evil (eg, there are lots of FB employees that just work on open source projects). the ones that are might be parceled out in a way that makes their impact non-obvious. It's not so much that they are evil, it is that FB is optimising for FB's profits, which may conflict with other things that other people value, > I can't think of another large tech company with such a terrible public image Uber is close, if not exceeding FB. I also get the impression that people are a good deal more cynical and hostile towards Google and Apple now than they were 10 years ago (I know I am).

blunte 5y ago
Google gets trashed on because it was so bold about "do no evil" for so long, and because it keeps wrongly shutting down people's accounts. Oh, and because of its handling of internal sexual harassment and ethics complaints. Uber took advantage of drivers, misleading them about income and viability of making a good living. They also aggressively ignored local regulations to be able to unfairly compete with local services. As bad as that is, it's still many steps above knowingly facilitating human trafficing. Apple, for its many flaws, seems only to be semi-evil by probably knowingly allowing really bad labor practices at its Chinese factories. They either were knowingly failing to properly oversee, or they were intentionally ignoring. But it seems they have made an effort to improve in this regard.

StevePerkins 5y ago

> "it's a huge company. not every single project is intrinsically evil (eg, there are lots of FB employees that just work on open source projects)." Indeed. I would be very curious how many of the righteous in this thread are busy removing React from their web applications? Relay from their GraphQL API's? PyTorch from their data science projects? RocksDB from the endless number of infrastructure products that incorporate it? How do you hold that developer responsible for human slavery due to his or her work, while you and your shop continue happily exploiting that work yourselves?