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 n

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.