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This is a mean spirited comment that doesn't belong on HN. Not going to argue but I don't feel that comments like these add anything of value to the discussion.

swarnie 5y ago
How much is Zuck paying you to post this? How many lives was it worth? People on this forum NEED to look at what they contribute to the world, i imagine some of them wont want to.
- dang 5y ago
  Attacking another user like that is against the rules here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to them in the future, we'd appreciate it. Also, could you please stop posting flamewar/flamebait comments generally? We're hoping for a different sort of forum.
sofixa 5y ago
I disagree. Meta is a big tech company which is up there with Rio Tinto in "purely evil how the heck do they still exist" land. Tech people should be able to discuss how terrible they are. And one of the only possible ways to influence them from the outside is to shame those selling their morals for money.
- blacksmith_tb 5y ago
  That doesn't seem too hyperbolic to me, though to be fair to Rio Tinto they don't just poison rivers and blow up cultural heritage, they actually produce needed materials in the process. I'd say working for adtech is closer to a job with a defense contractor making landmines, maybe not quite so gruesome, sure, but so negative that the positives are awfully hard to see...
- hamburglar 5y ago
  I think an interesting thing here is that even if we all can agree that Meta is bad in the extreme, it's still fairly easy to hook engineers who want to solve non-evil problems on a massive, massive scale. They can tell themselves they're not working on a specific feature or service that participates in the evil, they're just using their talents to ... make an absolutely massive chat system, or incredible optimizations to network topology, or SSL termination at a mind-boggling scale. These aren't directly evil projects, and there are very, very few places where you get the opportunity to work on them at facebook scale. I think this is how people justify it to themselves. It's probably how I'd justify it to myself if I went there. I personally don't ever plan to work there and the bigger and more evil they get, the weaker that justification becomes, but hey, it's a real thing.

swarnie 5y ago

How much is Zuck paying you to post this? How many lives was it worth? People on this forum NEED to look at what they contribute to the world, i imagine some of them wont want to.

dang 5y ago
Attacking another user like that is against the rules here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to them in the future, we'd appreciate it. Also, could you please stop posting flamewar/flamebait comments generally? We're hoping for a different sort of forum.

sofixa 5y ago

I disagree. Meta is a big tech company which is up there with Rio Tinto in "purely evil how the heck do they still exist" land. Tech people should be able to discuss how terrible they are. And one of the only possible ways to influence them from the outside is to shame those selling their morals for money.

blacksmith_tb 5y ago
That doesn't seem too hyperbolic to me, though to be fair to Rio Tinto they don't just poison rivers and blow up cultural heritage, they actually produce needed materials in the process. I'd say working for adtech is closer to a job with a defense contractor making landmines, maybe not quite so gruesome, sure, but so negative that the positives are awfully hard to see...
hamburglar 5y ago
I think an interesting thing here is that even if we all can agree that Meta is bad in the extreme, it's still fairly easy to hook engineers who want to solve non-evil problems on a massive, massive scale. They can tell themselves they're not working on a specific feature or service that participates in the evil, they're just using their talents to ... make an absolutely massive chat system, or incredible optimizations to network topology, or SSL termination at a mind-boggling scale. These aren't directly evil projects, and there are very, very few places where you get the opportunity to work on them at facebook scale. I think this is how people justify it to themselves. It's probably how I'd justify it to myself if I went there. I personally don't ever plan to work there and the bigger and more evil they get, the weaker that justification becomes, but hey, it's a real thing.