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Reading these responses is pretty upsetting. No wonder big tech is so evil. So many talented developers willing to sell their soul for more money. No thought to

Reading these responses is pretty upsetting. No wonder big tech is so evil. So many talented developers willing to sell their soul for more money. No thought to whether what they’re doing is causing harm to the world.

dangus 5y ago
The irony of the article is that Meta isn’t even that hard to get into because so many candidates hard no on them because they know Facebook is evil. I read an article that said how Meta has to pay well above market rates to acquire talent due to their negative perception. It’s basically working for the cigarette company of tech.
- ngokevin 5y ago
  That sums it up. I've told friends and family it'd look poorly on them for going there if they have plenty of options.
- 0des 5y ago
  > It’s basically working for the cigarette company of tech. This is not the first time I've heard this at all and each time it is equally relevant. Unless meta gets everyone goggled up fast I think that there will be so much negative stigma nobody will want to be part of it.
  - danuker 5y ago
    I think you are misjudging the speed it will happen. I think the Metaverse will be a slow death march, eventually ending up teaching others what not to do. Unless the VR experience is flawless, and I mean better than reality, people can't get hooked. If the hardware lags even a bit, the headaches and dizziness become unbearable. Depth-of-field is another disorienting factor, and field-of-view yet another. I believe we do not yet have the technology to offer such an experience, let alone cheaply. As such, Facebook is prematurely investing in it.
    - dangus 5y ago
      I agree. If you check out my comment elsewhere on this thread I explain what I think about it. VR is Meta’s only chance to control a hardware platform. It’s really as simple as that. As long as they don’t control iOS or Android they’re at the mercy of Google and Apple, who have no interest in making life easy for Meta. For Meta, VR has to work to stave off their decline. But unless they’ve got some revolutionary hardware up their sleeve, they’re working with a sweat and nausea-inducing niche.
- oblio 5y ago
  That's just your bubble. Facebook has been paying well since the start, to be able to poach from the "illegally reduced salary cartel members" (Apple, Google, Adobe, etc), 10-15 years ago. And maybe some people say no, but they still get hundreds of people applying. There is an entire cottage industry built around preparing for their interviews.
  - dangus 5y ago
    I certainly understand how my comment was a bit of an exaggeration. Lots of people say they don’t like Facebook but continue to use the product, especially Instagram. This is the article I was vaguely referring to: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-pays-brand-tax-hire-talent-fears-career-black-mark-2021-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-pays-brand-tax-hire...
    - oblio 5y ago
      Facebook makes roughly 1.5 million in revenue for each employee. They can afford that tax, easily.
      - dangus 5y ago
        Absolutely, I mean, I certainly don’t feel bad for them. Since we’re on something of a tangent, it’s interesting to think about what Meta’s idea of the Metaverse actually is. It isn’t the Internet 3.0 or some kind of grand revolutionary vision. No, it’s actually just Facebook’s only chance to control a hardware platform. They can’t control smartphones, they can’t control web browsers, they can’t control smart TVs. It’s not feasible for them to start their own phone OS or web browser. Apple, for example, made privacy policy changes that have cost Facebook $10 billion in lost revenue, and there nothing Facebook can do about it. Facebook’s only chance is to hope VR is the next big social tool after text (blogs, Facebook), images (instagram), and video (TikTok, YouTube, Reels). In my opinion, this won’t really work, unless they truly have some revolutionary hardware up their sleeve. VR will probably forever be a niche: as it stands it’s a sweaty motion sickness-inducing experience. They just don’t have another avenue to explore to try and have a platform where they have full control over data collection. They’re out of options. I give the idea of the metaverse a very slim chance of convincing potential customers that it’s better than hanging out with friends On Discord to play some “pancake games.” I got a lot of these opinions from this video, which really changed my perspective on Meta’s vision for their future: https://youtu.be/b8ouRRev2Nc https://youtu.be/b8ouRRev2Nc
monksy 5y ago
Can you blame them. A lot of the work is very unexciting and you're doing maintence on a business layer or some kind of framework crud work. Who's writing network drivers these days? Who's pushing streaming technologies to the max? Who's designing a cool iot framework/automated driving? Some people are...but most are write a microservice type tasks.
- _moof 5y ago
  > Can you blame them. Yes.
  - FridgeSeal 5y ago
    I agree. A distinction needs to be drawn between understanding an action and consequences/blame. You can understand why someone does something but still blame them for making the choice. Knowledge doesn’t obviate responsibility.
    - jseban 5y ago
      > Knowledge doesn’t obviate responsibility. This is true, but the fact here is that you do not have any responsibility of choosing your employer according to some moral standard of "making the world a better place". This is just your random opinion, in the same way as I can believe that it's everyone's moral responsibility to only buy local produce. It's objectively a "good thing" to do, and you are free to make that choice if you want. But you can't just decide that it's "everyone's" responsibility to suddenly follow your arbitrary moral code. That is the definition of being arrogant and judgemental. This idea of only working for companies that can be proven to not have any negative side effects of their business, is nothing but a virtue signalling trend, that is randomly and unfairly only applied to the tech industry, for some reason. You can choose to live your life according to maximising the virtue signalling points you can score on this trend, if you want, but this is not any responsibility, to act martyr for saving the world.
ngokevin 5y ago
I have to agree. I do understand human desire to put themselves and their families first, and that it's a job at corporations, and that some people view themselves as cogs in capitalism no matter what However when one the pick of the litter, there's a spectrum between getting $1M for a company responsible for polarization, breeding hate, and damaging democracy...to living well comfortably on $200k+ (or even $300k+) to at least try to do something meaningful. It's 8 hours a day of your time, you vote with how you want it to affect the world
- fires10 5y ago
  Some people the money is necessary for survival. Those salaries are not easy to replicate outside of big tech. Making six figures is difficult in a lot of places. When I interviewed for Meta I knew I would accept what they gave me as they were offering remote at the time. I did not get the job, but I do actually need to support a family. Heck, where I live in the US, I would jump for less than $200k right now.
  - tnel77 5y ago
    Less than $200k? Might as well off yourself. Just kidding. It shouldn’t need to be said, but don’t actually off yourself.
    - germinalphrase 5y ago
      Then don’t say it?
      - germinalphrase 5y ago
        Edit for sensitivities: then (choose) not to say it (because you identified that you may be causing harm to someone for no more benefit than an ounce of mirth)?
  - alistairSH 5y ago
    You do realize that $200k is a massive salary damn near anywhere in the world, right? That’s nearly double the median household in San Jose CA. And 40% above the median household in Sunnyvale. Somewhere near the top-5% nationally.
tnel77 5y ago
It’s sad, but I don’t see the world getting better anytime soon. I am trying to earn and invest as much as I can for the sake of my children and grandchildren. I hope I’m wrong, but I feel like they will be financially devastated otherwise.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
wayne-li2 5y ago
Reading judgmental comments like this also upsets me. It’s not selling your soul. It’s called being disillusioned with your impact on the world, a feeling that more and more people are feeling. Long gone are the days where you believed an individual could make a difference. At big corp, you are a small cog in the big machine. You are replaceable. I’ve volunteered on political campaigns. I’ve volunteered for non profits as a developer. I’ve worked at startups that align closely with my moral views. Guess what? It’s all rotten. Nothing of meaning ever gets done, and the pay is pennies to boot. In the case of my volunteerism, pay equates to the pay of my full time colleagues that worked for those organizations. So when faced with the choice of doing nothing on something you believe in for very little versus doing nothing on something you don’t for a lot, the choice is extremely easy. The choice is even easier if you factor in the level of privilege it takes to turn down generational money for someone else’s moral compass. I’ve tried my best not to pass judgment onto you, but ask yourself — what kind of privilege affords you to think that the twenty year old second generation immigrants of today with no family wealth or financial lifeboat should give up their chance of securing generational (not even multigenerational) wealth in the richest country in the world just to achieve the same impact but feel better about themselves?
- djcapelis 5y ago
  Because not everyone is a twenty year old second generation immigrant with no family wealth who needs a lifeboat. Are you under the impression the blog post author is? Look if people need money I don’t think many of us are passing judgement on that. But if you’re privileged and your sole criteria for a new job is accruing capital, you bet I pass judgement on it. And honestly once you get over 200k a year I think the immigrant straw person everyone points out whether they are one or not can probably start getting picky too. (If you wanna wait until after 300k/yr I’m cool with that too. But at some point you’re accruing enough capital that you can start thinking about what you spend your time on in your day job, and have a moral obligation to do so. When this kicks in is totally relative to a person’s situation.)
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    The author elaborates on their motivations here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30963856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30963856
DeathArrow 5y ago
>No wonder big tech is so evil. Big businesses have no ideology, even if some people would like to think otherwise. They will do everything they can to get more money. Anything resembling some kind of ideology or politics is done because it is helping the company to get more money. Corporations aren't good or evil. They do good or evil (whatever someone might deem like so) as a side effect.
- ako 5y ago
  Some corporations are evil: selling wapons to dictators, lying to your own employees (enron), deliberately making your product more addictive to sell more even if you know it destroys the health of your customers (sigarette companies).
  - humanrebar 5y ago
    ...surveillance as a business model, anticompetitive practices to ensure customers never get better options...
- alistairSH 5y ago
  Corporations aren't good or evil. Corporations are just a group of people. Corporations do evil because some of the people in them are evil (and the rest are ambivalent). The problem is we, as a society, tend to hand-wave away corporate malfeasance as some sort of unsolvable problem. It’s not - when a company does evil, we need to hold the leaders responsible. Yes, proving those individual actions/decisions is hard work, but it’s work that needs to be done.
- VictorPath 5y ago
  > Anything resembling some kind of ideology or politics is done because it is helping the company to get more money. This is one of the main points of Marx's Capital.
schwartzworld 5y ago
On the other hand, if someone could make enough money for 5 years, they could probably retire and make software that DOES benefit the world.
Zababa 5y ago
On the other hand, isn't it evil too to ask people to sell time of their life for less than they could have? Nobody has unlimited time on this planet. At some point you have to sell hours of your life.
mmarq 5y ago
You haven’t considered that many talented developers have to send kids to nursery or buy a home without help from their parents.
VictorPath 5y ago
I am a wage slave. I look at every corporation as being negative, as they exploit the wage slaves who work there. One way being how much surplus value they expropriate from workers. If I am being paid a lot at one place, and very little at another place, I might feel more of my surplus labor time is expropriated from the lower paying place. If I program, and one place pays more, it is an indicator (although just one, and not a solid one) that they exploit their workforce once. A handful of companies might be even more distasteful than the other ones, but I look at all of them as exploitive - so I may bypass a few companies, but all corporations employing people are exploitative, and I am a wage slave. The concept of anything changing due to individual choice does not add up to me. Things happen due to mass action, not some individual choice with some liberal moral reasoning. Amazon exploits their factory workers, but the factory workers who organized and voted to join a union in Staten Island have improved the lot of all Amazon workers, and other workers by their organizing and mass action. Some individual moral liberal reasoning to not join Amazon would not have been better. I'm sure most joined because it was the best and highest paying job they could find. Also, I don't see the work I do at a corporation as being something that is not causing harm in the world. It is inherently exploitative. The notion of a woke corporation doing good in the world is a contradiction. If I am doing something good it is when I am not working - organizing, educating and agitating. Primarily so that workers have more control over their labor.

dangus 5y ago

The irony of the article is that Meta isn’t even that hard to get into because so many candidates hard no on them because they know Facebook is evil. I read an article that said how Meta has to pay well above market rates to acquire talent due to their negative perception. It’s basically working for the cigarette company of tech.

ngokevin 5y ago
That sums it up. I've told friends and family it'd look poorly on them for going there if they have plenty of options.
0des 5y ago
> It’s basically working for the cigarette company of tech. This is not the first time I've heard this at all and each time it is equally relevant. Unless meta gets everyone goggled up fast I think that there will be so much negative stigma nobody will want to be part of it.
- danuker 5y ago
  I think you are misjudging the speed it will happen. I think the Metaverse will be a slow death march, eventually ending up teaching others what not to do. Unless the VR experience is flawless, and I mean better than reality, people can't get hooked. If the hardware lags even a bit, the headaches and dizziness become unbearable. Depth-of-field is another disorienting factor, and field-of-view yet another. I believe we do not yet have the technology to offer such an experience, let alone cheaply. As such, Facebook is prematurely investing in it.
  - dangus 5y ago
    I agree. If you check out my comment elsewhere on this thread I explain what I think about it. VR is Meta’s only chance to control a hardware platform. It’s really as simple as that. As long as they don’t control iOS or Android they’re at the mercy of Google and Apple, who have no interest in making life easy for Meta. For Meta, VR has to work to stave off their decline. But unless they’ve got some revolutionary hardware up their sleeve, they’re working with a sweat and nausea-inducing niche.
oblio 5y ago
That's just your bubble. Facebook has been paying well since the start, to be able to poach from the "illegally reduced salary cartel members" (Apple, Google, Adobe, etc), 10-15 years ago. And maybe some people say no, but they still get hundreds of people applying. There is an entire cottage industry built around preparing for their interviews.
- dangus 5y ago
  I certainly understand how my comment was a bit of an exaggeration. Lots of people say they don’t like Facebook but continue to use the product, especially Instagram. This is the article I was vaguely referring to: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-pays-brand-tax-hire-talent-fears-career-black-mark-2021-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-pays-brand-tax-hire...
  - oblio 5y ago
    Facebook makes roughly 1.5 million in revenue for each employee. They can afford that tax, easily.
    - dangus 5y ago
      Absolutely, I mean, I certainly don’t feel bad for them. Since we’re on something of a tangent, it’s interesting to think about what Meta’s idea of the Metaverse actually is. It isn’t the Internet 3.0 or some kind of grand revolutionary vision. No, it’s actually just Facebook’s only chance to control a hardware platform. They can’t control smartphones, they can’t control web browsers, they can’t control smart TVs. It’s not feasible for them to start their own phone OS or web browser. Apple, for example, made privacy policy changes that have cost Facebook $10 billion in lost revenue, and there nothing Facebook can do about it. Facebook’s only chance is to hope VR is the next big social tool after text (blogs, Facebook), images (instagram), and video (TikTok, YouTube, Reels). In my opinion, this won’t really work, unless they truly have some revolutionary hardware up their sleeve. VR will probably forever be a niche: as it stands it’s a sweaty motion sickness-inducing experience. They just don’t have another avenue to explore to try and have a platform where they have full control over data collection. They’re out of options. I give the idea of the metaverse a very slim chance of convincing potential customers that it’s better than hanging out with friends On Discord to play some “pancake games.” I got a lot of these opinions from this video, which really changed my perspective on Meta’s vision for their future: https://youtu.be/b8ouRRev2Nc https://youtu.be/b8ouRRev2Nc

monksy 5y ago

Can you blame them. A lot of the work is very unexciting and you're doing maintence on a business layer or some kind of framework crud work. Who's writing network drivers these days? Who's pushing streaming technologies to the max? Who's designing a cool iot framework/automated driving? Some people are...but most are write a microservice type tasks.

_moof 5y ago
> Can you blame them. Yes.
- FridgeSeal 5y ago
  I agree. A distinction needs to be drawn between understanding an action and consequences/blame. You can understand why someone does something but still blame them for making the choice. Knowledge doesn’t obviate responsibility.
  - jseban 5y ago
    > Knowledge doesn’t obviate responsibility. This is true, but the fact here is that you do not have any responsibility of choosing your employer according to some moral standard of "making the world a better place". This is just your random opinion, in the same way as I can believe that it's everyone's moral responsibility to only buy local produce. It's objectively a "good thing" to do, and you are free to make that choice if you want. But you can't just decide that it's "everyone's" responsibility to suddenly follow your arbitrary moral code. That is the definition of being arrogant and judgemental. This idea of only working for companies that can be proven to not have any negative side effects of their business, is nothing but a virtue signalling trend, that is randomly and unfairly only applied to the tech industry, for some reason. You can choose to live your life according to maximising the virtue signalling points you can score on this trend, if you want, but this is not any responsibility, to act martyr for saving the world.

ngokevin 5y ago

I have to agree. I do understand human desire to put themselves and their families first, and that it's a job at corporations, and that some people view themselves as cogs in capitalism no matter what However when one the pick of the litter, there's a spectrum between getting $1M for a company responsible for polarization, breeding hate, and damaging democracy...to living well comfortably on $200k+ (or even $300k+) to at least try to do something meaningful. It's 8 hours a day of your time, you vote with how you want it to affect the world

fires10 5y ago
Some people the money is necessary for survival. Those salaries are not easy to replicate outside of big tech. Making six figures is difficult in a lot of places. When I interviewed for Meta I knew I would accept what they gave me as they were offering remote at the time. I did not get the job, but I do actually need to support a family. Heck, where I live in the US, I would jump for less than $200k right now.
- tnel77 5y ago
  Less than $200k? Might as well off yourself. Just kidding. It shouldn’t need to be said, but don’t actually off yourself.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    Then don’t say it?
    - germinalphrase 5y ago
      Edit for sensitivities: then (choose) not to say it (because you identified that you may be causing harm to someone for no more benefit than an ounce of mirth)?
- alistairSH 5y ago
  You do realize that $200k is a massive salary damn near anywhere in the world, right? That’s nearly double the median household in San Jose CA. And 40% above the median household in Sunnyvale. Somewhere near the top-5% nationally.

tnel77 5y ago

It’s sad, but I don’t see the world getting better anytime soon. I am trying to earn and invest as much as I can for the sake of my children and grandchildren. I hope I’m wrong, but I feel like they will be financially devastated otherwise.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

wayne-li2 5y ago

Reading judgmental comments like this also upsets me. It’s not selling your soul. It’s called being disillusioned with your impact on the world, a feeling that more and more people are feeling. Long gone are the days where you believed an individual could make a difference. At big corp, you are a small cog in the big machine. You are replaceable. I’ve volunteered on political campaigns. I’ve volunteered for non profits as a developer. I’ve worked at startups that align closely with my moral views. Guess what? It’s all rotten. Nothing of meaning ever gets done, and the pay is pennies to boot. In the case of my volunteerism, pay equates to the pay of my full time colleagues that worked for those organizations. So when faced with the choice of doing nothing on something you believe in for very little versus doing nothing on something you don’t for a lot, the choice is extremely easy. The choice is even easier if you factor in the level of privilege it takes to turn down generational money for someone else’s moral compass. I’ve tried my best not to pass judgment onto you, but ask yourself — what kind of privilege affords you to think that the twenty year old second generation immigrants of today with no family wealth or financial lifeboat should give up their chance of securing generational (not even multigenerational) wealth in the richest country in the world just to achieve the same impact but feel better about themselves?

djcapelis 5y ago
Because not everyone is a twenty year old second generation immigrant with no family wealth who needs a lifeboat. Are you under the impression the blog post author is? Look if people need money I don’t think many of us are passing judgement on that. But if you’re privileged and your sole criteria for a new job is accruing capital, you bet I pass judgement on it. And honestly once you get over 200k a year I think the immigrant straw person everyone points out whether they are one or not can probably start getting picky too. (If you wanna wait until after 300k/yr I’m cool with that too. But at some point you’re accruing enough capital that you can start thinking about what you spend your time on in your day job, and have a moral obligation to do so. When this kicks in is totally relative to a person’s situation.)
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  The author elaborates on their motivations here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30963856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30963856

DeathArrow 5y ago

>No wonder big tech is so evil. Big businesses have no ideology, even if some people would like to think otherwise. They will do everything they can to get more money. Anything resembling some kind of ideology or politics is done because it is helping the company to get more money. Corporations aren't good or evil. They do good or evil (whatever someone might deem like so) as a side effect.

ako 5y ago
Some corporations are evil: selling wapons to dictators, lying to your own employees (enron), deliberately making your product more addictive to sell more even if you know it destroys the health of your customers (sigarette companies).
- humanrebar 5y ago
  ...surveillance as a business model, anticompetitive practices to ensure customers never get better options...
alistairSH 5y ago
Corporations aren't good or evil. Corporations are just a group of people. Corporations do evil because some of the people in them are evil (and the rest are ambivalent). The problem is we, as a society, tend to hand-wave away corporate malfeasance as some sort of unsolvable problem. It’s not - when a company does evil, we need to hold the leaders responsible. Yes, proving those individual actions/decisions is hard work, but it’s work that needs to be done.
VictorPath 5y ago
> Anything resembling some kind of ideology or politics is done because it is helping the company to get more money. This is one of the main points of Marx's Capital.

schwartzworld 5y ago

On the other hand, if someone could make enough money for 5 years, they could probably retire and make software that DOES benefit the world.

Zababa 5y ago

On the other hand, isn't it evil too to ask people to sell time of their life for less than they could have? Nobody has unlimited time on this planet. At some point you have to sell hours of your life.

mmarq 5y ago

You haven’t considered that many talented developers have to send kids to nursery or buy a home without help from their parents.

VictorPath 5y ago

I am a wage slave. I look at every corporation as being negative, as they exploit the wage slaves who work there. One way being how much surplus value they expropriate from workers. If I am being paid a lot at one place, and very little at another place, I might feel more of my surplus labor time is expropriated from the lower paying place. If I program, and one place pays more, it is an indicator (although just one, and not a solid one) that they exploit their workforce once. A handful of companies might be even more distasteful than the other ones, but I look at all of them as exploitive - so I may bypass a few companies, but all corporations employing people are exploitative, and I am a wage slave. The concept of anything changing due to individual choice does not add up to me. Things happen due to mass action, not some individual choice with some liberal moral reasoning. Amazon exploits their factory workers, but the factory workers who organized and voted to join a union in Staten Island have improved the lot of all Amazon workers, and other workers by their organizing and mass action. Some individual moral liberal reasoning to not join Amazon would not have been better. I'm sure most joined because it was the best and highest paying job they could find. Also, I don't see the work I do at a corporation as being something that is not causing harm in the world. It is inherently exploitative. The notion of a woke corporation doing good in the world is a contradiction. If I am doing something good it is when I am not working - organizing, educating and agitating. Primarily so that workers have more control over their labor.