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I don’t know anyone that works at Meta, so I’m hoping that someone here could answer this for me- What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about

by capyba 1y ago

I don’t know anyone that works at Meta, so I’m hoping that someone here could answer this for me- What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? You're spying on people, no? Surveilling ordinary people, not enemy combatants or foreign militaries? Perhaps a friend of a friend or even a family member? This kind of thing is so creepy and disturbing to me, not that it’s anything new…

kb_dev 1y ago
In principle, I think most people believe their morals would prevent them from working at a company like Meta. On the flip side, how much are morals worth if you have the opportunity to be financially free? There's also the opportunity to work on interesting problems. Anecdotally, of course, I know a Meta engineer at the L7 level (generally staff engineer in these large tech companies). He makes over seven figures a year, 75% of that being from stocks. The money is there.
- godelski 1y ago
  Are the people working on the interesting problems doing most of the spying? I'm sure there's overlap like people working on AR scraping images of people's homes to build better models but they also do a ton of research where they use open datasets. I'm curious what this distribution is. I'm also curious what the answer is for just average programmers. Meta has like 70k employees. Surely a lot of them aren't doing interesting stuff
  - gsky 1y ago
    Nazis too worked on lot of interesting problems.
    - godelski 1y ago
      Sure. There were also a lot of very normal people. There were people trying to take down Nazi from the inside. And there were people that were genocidal maniacs. It's not like one day all of Germany turned evil then a few years later turned good again. Framing things like that is unhelpful. It makes evil seem cut and dry. Trivial to identify. That's what authoritarians thrive on: oversimplification. Everything is easy, it's not your fault, "it's so simple, you just..." All that accomplishes is letting evil flourish. Gives it time to grow and set root. You're just being dehumanizing yourself. Don't help your enemies. Don't emulate your enemies.
- leksak 1y ago
  I am not even sure most people could articulate their morals. It's not just about never having heard about things as moral absolutism or consequentialism. Similar to how atrophied people's understanding of sympathy and empathy is as well.
EMM_386 1y ago
> What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? I got this exact thought IMMEDIATLY (yet again) and posted on it here as well, putting my two cents in. This is totally unacceptable for a software engineer to implement features like this simply because their company told them to, doing what the company tells them to makes them money, so they do it. No apparent thought into whether they are creating is harmful, or caring about it. I've given up on any anger directed towards the company itself. They will make money any way they can. Now, the engineers who actually implement it bothers me, because it is clearly not something that should be built. To me, I don't care how much I'm being paid or how bad it would be to lose my job at that time. I would resign before working on features like this and deal with the consequences.
thatguy0900 1y ago
History suggests there is no shortage of people who will throw all semblance of morality away as long as they are surrounded by people who they believe have done the same. I almost think the people who are not willing to cave in this way are the rare ones.
- ethagnawl 1y ago
  I've heard people justify working there (often to themselves) by saying things like, "If I don't do it, someone else will. So, I may as well do it and make virtuous use of the money." I think some people also tell themselves that they'll be agents of change and fix things from within but that almost always winds up being another self delusion at worst and impossibility at best. There was a certain amount of this on display in Careless People.
potamic 1y ago
There are many industries which are inherently hostile to users, insurance, betting, marketing, etc. If you ask people if they feel good about enabling the kind of things these companies tend to do, you probably won't get an answer. I don't think Meta is an outlier here nor are they the only one. Even across other industries you will find many questionable practices in usual operations. If pushing the boundaries of ethics gives a business an advantage, you can guarantee that someone will be doing it, and eventually most will be doing it. It's simply the natural tendency of any system with competing entities. The question we should rather be asking is, how do we tweak the system. What can be done to disincentivize pushing the boundary like this?
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  The question is how did a social media company end up so shitty it is now compared/it's behavior equated to insurance companies? Insurance companies are required to control payout, and people expect that. The level of stuff Meta does is not required, nor do people think/realize it is as hostile to them as an insurance company. In the past, people aspired to work at cool tech companies. Devs aren't lining up to work at insurance companies. I never worked in the industry I went to school for because the only jobs when I got out of school were for weapons. At this point I feel the same way about social media, I would never work at such a 'make the world as bad as you can get away with' industry.
whstl 1y ago
The sad reality is that this behavior gets normalized in the name of making money. For employees it gets normalized at the first signal that your livelihood might be affected if you don't comply. As someone who's privacy conscious, it's an uphill battle to convince co-workers to actually follow laws instead of trying to find loopholes. I've worked at places who collect every possible data point and distributes it willy nilly in Excel spreadsheets posted in Slack. I raised it to a CISO and the response was "all that information is available for everyone anyway via the interface". I know a German company requires you to "accept" data collection and processing in order to settle a debt. I reported this to their legal department which I personally knew a person and they said they'd "look into it ASAP" two years ago. In the end people just roll along with it. I know this is unpopular, but the only forward I see way to prevent this from happening seems to be using courts and tightened legislation.
- lurking_swe 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - lurk2 1y ago
    > um, what? This is obnoxious.
    - herewulf 1y ago
      It's conversational, emotive, and expressive. I'm sure you hear it all the time out in the real world.
      - lurk2 1y ago
        If someone talked to me this way in the real world it would be the last time I would ever interact with them. It’s a Redditism used to express incredulity that the parent commenter could be so stupid as to have posted what they posted. It adds nothing to the conversation and doesn’t belong here.
bloomca 1y ago
Money, it's just business. I think every big corp is morally bankrupt (otherwise they wouldn't be big). There are some exceptions, of course, if a company found a sustainable way to monetize their output. But the baseline is really bad.
- michaelteter 1y ago
  This is basically it. There are a dozen ways to become huge, and they all are essnetially anti-humanity. There's an expression: normalization of deviance. This is where we are now. People idolize others because of their wealth, and that wealth is always gained by means which are ultimately harmful to the greater population. Even the wealthy philanthropistMS which will remain unnamed acquired their greatness by cheating and stealing. But as long as you make a great show and give it all away eventually (while living lavishly the entire time), you look good.
  - whstl 1y ago
    As a 90s teen growing up with Grunge and in a DYI punk scene, I remember my youth being a lot about authenticity, and it felt weird reading about how the 80s were all about money and fame and how selling out was ok. To me that sounded absolutely absurd and a freaking caricature, something out of "American Psycho". Today I was just discussing with a friend how we're perhaps even more materialistic and cut-throat...
    - prox 1y ago
      A fear of mine is that we are speedrunning Cyberpunk 2077. And that’s not something to expire to. It’s a bleak no-hope hell. Hope is about finding and using that moral compass. To change worse outcomes to better outcomes for everyone. The “I’ll take mine” or “My group needs to win” attitude is poison to yourself and to the world, and if you don’t see that your conscience is blind or broken. This is nothing new, in numerous books on moral philosophy and people who have been in these situations have spoken out on it.
      - 1y ago
blitzar 1y ago
> What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? A big house, a fast car, more money. Where else in SV are you going to go anyway? Every company does the same thing.
- procaryote 1y ago
  Finding a company less bad for the world than Meta isn't very hard. They pay really well to compensate, so people will rationalise working there of course, but "everyone does it" is just a way to dodge responsibility for your own choices If you value money over other people, it's a great place to work though
  - blitzar 1y ago
    Smearing shit on your face every morning is "less bad" than smearing shit all over your whole body every morning. "Everyone does it" is as much of a cope as "less bad". You are still covered in shit.
    - procaryote 1y ago
      That argument could be made against any improvement that isn't an immediate leap to perfection. It's not very useful
- et-al 1y ago
  > Where else in SV are you going to go anyway? Every company does the same thing. That's like saying mechanical engineers can only work at Raytheon or Lockheed Martin. Or biotech people can only work at Purdue Pharma. There are companies in SV who are making products for actual users. Just look outside adtech.
gsky 1y ago
Some engineers do anything for money. Check out teamblind.com to know the evil side of engineers
ReptileMan 1y ago
It should be noted that no ethically -trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
palmfacehn 1y ago
Generally employees put the responsibility on management. As everyone has a higher up they answer to, no one feels personally responsible. From the top down, the concerns of how things are actually implemented are often too abstract. Combine these dynamics with institutional echochambers and group-think. Employees just want to make it to the weekend. Execs want to hit their targets. Sales dept. needs their bonuses. The board wants to pump valuations.
- whstl 1y ago
  Not Meta but I once got yelled at not by a real manager, but by a PM because I said I wouldn't let the team do something shady without legal signing off. I'm in Europe so it was GDPR related. The PM tried shopping the task to other teams, but nobody took the bait after I raised it publicly, and both legal and the external law firm sided with me after about three months of delay. In the meantime I raised the topic of yelling with HR but every step of the way the company made me feel like I was the one in the wrong for not complying. I believe if I were meeker I would probably have complied right there.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- fittingopposite 1y ago
  Yes. Was my same first thought. Same thing that happened in Germany: "The banality of evil" how Hannah Arendt described Adolf Eichmann's excuse that he didn't bare any responsibility since he was just doing his job...
- et-al 1y ago
  Eh, software engineers throughout the ZIRP had the choice of working at plenty of companies. People chose to work at Facebook for the money disregarding all other concerns. That's it.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
porridgeraisin 1y ago
Optimization with the objectives we have today, and more generally financialism are all about splitting up end-to-end tasks into pieces and removing redundant common work. This is obviously good...upto a point. It gets bad because morals and a bunch of other stuff also gets split up. Like someone mentioned below, it's unrealistic to expect people to think about second or third or nth order effects of their job. Heck, those effects are not even visible in 90% of cases. To answer your question, the engineer at meta is just building a graph database. It takes a `void* node_data` as argument. Another is just building a kafka-clickhouse data pipeline that can transfer so many millions of `void* message`s a minute. The android engineer is just improving the percentage of requests without location data by using wifi ssids as fallback. The CEO just sees "advertising revenue WoW" in his dashboard. And so on. That it is actually being used for spying is many steps away from each of them -- OK, in the case of meta I'm sure the employees know to an extent. But it's still very different from the feeling they would get if they were doing the end-to-end task themselves. It's the same thing with other questionable products. It's split up sufficiently across the supply chain that no one is actually aware enough of the task end-to-end. In some cases, the same participant in the supply chain will be a supplier for something really good and necessary..but they will also be a supplier for something despicable. In this case, it is easy for everyone involved to sweep the latter under the rug. As far as I have thought about it, there is no way to get rid of this larger problem without also losing the (unfathomably massive) benefits.
sneak 1y ago
Same thing at Google or Apple. Google has everyone’s email and browsing history, Apple has the complete copy of everyone’s iMessage and SMS history (in the non-e2ee iCloud backups, readable by Apple). Anything these companies know, the FBI and CIA can know, without a warrant thanks to FAA702 (did we all forget about PRISM?). The state now has leverage over almost every normal citizen, thanks to what these companies have built. Turnkey tyranny. Built by silicon valley.
msgodel 1y ago
I know it's not so hip here but the answer is money. You go to work for money. It's not to socialize, not for personal growth, and not for charity. If I want those things I have hobbies (including hobby programming.)
- averageRoyalty 1y ago
  Most people would say no if they were offered a full time salary to spy on their friends, steal their data and act in a overtly unethical way every day. But these companies give them an abstraction layer. There are plenty of things you can do for money that are not (or are significantly less) unethical.
laweijfmvo 1y ago
+1 for “money”. how many years until AI makes everyone’s job obsolete? do you really think countries like the US have their citizens’ best interests in mind? i’m guessing Forced Meaningless Labor (like the cartoon prisoners hammering rocks) is more probable than Universal Basic Income.
adolph 1y ago
> What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? Would someone explain in plain language what is wrong with an app listening on a port for messages from the browser? It seems like a helpful asynchronous method to maintain state between browser and app.
grumpymuppet 1y ago
I'm nearly certain it's the dopamine response of "solving problems" coupled with the fear of losing a paycheck. Morality isn't a consideration.
doctorpangloss 1y ago
Nobody is stopping you from making whatever you want and putting it out there in the world. If you believe strongly in a different order of things, go for it!
inquirerGeneral 1y ago
[dead]
greatwhitenorth 1y ago
[flagged]
mcculley 1y ago
It is the same process whereby websites deploy Google Analytics. They are getting value by harming their users. They easily rationalize and justify it.
bluesnowmonkey 1y ago
You start with small moral compromises. That prepares you for big ones.
dagmx 1y ago
Meta pays a lot. Most people there don’t work on the shady stuff and don’t pay attention to what else is going on. That’s generally the case for everyone I know who works there. Many of them are even quite liberal and will join protests for things that Meta has actively and negatively played a part in, so they’re in effect protesting their own workplace indirectly. But will continue to work there because they can compartmentalize this.
Workaccount2 1y ago
No snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche - "I didn't write it, I just had the idea" - "I didn't implement it, I just made the prototype" - "It wasn't my product, I just fixed some bugs with it" - "I can't track everything in these implementation updates, I just work with what I am given" - "I didn't collect the data, I just deal with what is in the dataset"
- bigyabai 1y ago
  The snowflakes don't run the company. If you work somewhere that is designing a really big gun and the CEO uses it to commit an awful crime, you don't share the blame for one person's irresponsibility. It's not a satisfying answer, but it really is up to executives to decide where they draw the line. Nobody else in the business can say 'no'. Likewise, when we blame IBM for supplying the Nazis during WWII, we're not decrying the enthusiastic early database workers. They aren't the problem; executives without morals are.
  - defrost 1y ago
    > we're not decrying the enthusiastic early database workers. Well, you're not. However: Black reports that every Nazi concentration camp maintained its own Hollerith-Abteilung (Hollerith Department), assigned with keeping tabs on inmates through use of IBM's punchcard technology. from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust suggest that a good number of these "early database workers" were working directly with Hollerith codes on human flesh and tasked with the identification of Jews, Roma, and other ethnic groups deemed undesirable by the regime, along with military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity. You might argue they are no more responsible for concentration camps than concentration camp guards, but these are the people punching holes in cards and filtering them with knitting needles while looking out the window at piles of shoes and gold teeth to tabulate.
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      With different executives, that might not have happened. With different tabulators I don't think anything would have changed. You're not really disproving my point by emphasizing that the end operators of these machines were typically Nazis.
Fairburn 1y ago
Doubtful someone from Meta would admit to anything.
lazyeye 1y ago
Here's a senior ex-Facebook exec detailing how the company would betray users in the US to the CCP to help gain access to the Chinese market:- https://youtu.be/f3DAnORfgB8 https://youtu.be/f3DAnORfgB8 amongst other things...
akomtu 1y ago
The same reason people eat meat. The reality of what happens behind the scenes to produce meat or their paycheck is carefully hidden from their sight, and when it's hidden, it's easy to convince ourselves that we aren't some monsters who run concentration camps with cows and pigs in them, but decent humans who have taste for medium rare steaks. What Meta does to society is more insidious: it gets people addicted to content so it can make them eat a poison for their minds, so-called ads. Surveillance is just method of making the ads more invasive, tailored to each user individually.
NBJack 1y ago
You may find the book Careless People a good read. The culture there is...troubling. From the top down.
shadowgovt 1y ago
It's hard to feel you're doing something wrong when the people are literally handing you their private data to sift through. That's the onramp to normalization: "If the users didn't like this, they'd stop us."
1718627440 1y ago
Pretty sure, that if they use a Meta product, they are also deploying the spyware to themselves.

by capyba 1y ago

kb_dev 1y ago

In principle, I think most people believe their morals would prevent them from working at a company like Meta. On the flip side, how much are morals worth if you have the opportunity to be financially free? There's also the opportunity to work on interesting problems. Anecdotally, of course, I know a Meta engineer at the L7 level (generally staff engineer in these large tech companies). He makes over seven figures a year, 75% of that being from stocks. The money is there.

godelski 1y ago
Are the people working on the interesting problems doing most of the spying? I'm sure there's overlap like people working on AR scraping images of people's homes to build better models but they also do a ton of research where they use open datasets. I'm curious what this distribution is. I'm also curious what the answer is for just average programmers. Meta has like 70k employees. Surely a lot of them aren't doing interesting stuff
- gsky 1y ago
  Nazis too worked on lot of interesting problems.
  - godelski 1y ago
    Sure. There were also a lot of very normal people. There were people trying to take down Nazi from the inside. And there were people that were genocidal maniacs. It's not like one day all of Germany turned evil then a few years later turned good again. Framing things like that is unhelpful. It makes evil seem cut and dry. Trivial to identify. That's what authoritarians thrive on: oversimplification. Everything is easy, it's not your fault, "it's so simple, you just..." All that accomplishes is letting evil flourish. Gives it time to grow and set root. You're just being dehumanizing yourself. Don't help your enemies. Don't emulate your enemies.
leksak 1y ago
I am not even sure most people could articulate their morals. It's not just about never having heard about things as moral absolutism or consequentialism. Similar to how atrophied people's understanding of sympathy and empathy is as well.

EMM_386 1y ago

> What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? I got this exact thought IMMEDIATLY (yet again) and posted on it here as well, putting my two cents in. This is totally unacceptable for a software engineer to implement features like this simply because their company told them to, doing what the company tells them to makes them money, so they do it. No apparent thought into whether they are creating is harmful, or caring about it. I've given up on any anger directed towards the company itself. They will make money any way they can. Now, the engineers who actually implement it bothers me, because it is clearly not something that should be built. To me, I don't care how much I'm being paid or how bad it would be to lose my job at that time. I would resign before working on features like this and deal with the consequences.

thatguy0900 1y ago

History suggests there is no shortage of people who will throw all semblance of morality away as long as they are surrounded by people who they believe have done the same. I almost think the people who are not willing to cave in this way are the rare ones.

ethagnawl 1y ago
I've heard people justify working there (often to themselves) by saying things like, "If I don't do it, someone else will. So, I may as well do it and make virtuous use of the money." I think some people also tell themselves that they'll be agents of change and fix things from within but that almost always winds up being another self delusion at worst and impossibility at best. There was a certain amount of this on display in Careless People.

potamic 1y ago

There are many industries which are inherently hostile to users, insurance, betting, marketing, etc. If you ask people if they feel good about enabling the kind of things these companies tend to do, you probably won't get an answer. I don't think Meta is an outlier here nor are they the only one. Even across other industries you will find many questionable practices in usual operations. If pushing the boundaries of ethics gives a business an advantage, you can guarantee that someone will be doing it, and eventually most will be doing it. It's simply the natural tendency of any system with competing entities. The question we should rather be asking is, how do we tweak the system. What can be done to disincentivize pushing the boundary like this?

_DeadFred_ 1y ago
The question is how did a social media company end up so shitty it is now compared/it's behavior equated to insurance companies? Insurance companies are required to control payout, and people expect that. The level of stuff Meta does is not required, nor do people think/realize it is as hostile to them as an insurance company. In the past, people aspired to work at cool tech companies. Devs aren't lining up to work at insurance companies. I never worked in the industry I went to school for because the only jobs when I got out of school were for weapons. At this point I feel the same way about social media, I would never work at such a 'make the world as bad as you can get away with' industry.

whstl 1y ago

The sad reality is that this behavior gets normalized in the name of making money. For employees it gets normalized at the first signal that your livelihood might be affected if you don't comply. As someone who's privacy conscious, it's an uphill battle to convince co-workers to actually follow laws instead of trying to find loopholes. I've worked at places who collect every possible data point and distributes it willy nilly in Excel spreadsheets posted in Slack. I raised it to a CISO and the response was "all that information is available for everyone anyway via the interface". I know a German company requires you to "accept" data collection and processing in order to settle a debt. I reported this to their legal department which I personally knew a person and they said they'd "look into it ASAP" two years ago. In the end people just roll along with it. I know this is unpopular, but the only forward I see way to prevent this from happening seems to be using courts and tightened legislation.

lurking_swe 1y ago
[flagged]
- lurk2 1y ago
  > um, what? This is obnoxious.
  - herewulf 1y ago
    It's conversational, emotive, and expressive. I'm sure you hear it all the time out in the real world.
    - lurk2 1y ago
      If someone talked to me this way in the real world it would be the last time I would ever interact with them. It’s a Redditism used to express incredulity that the parent commenter could be so stupid as to have posted what they posted. It adds nothing to the conversation and doesn’t belong here.

bloomca 1y ago

Money, it's just business. I think every big corp is morally bankrupt (otherwise they wouldn't be big). There are some exceptions, of course, if a company found a sustainable way to monetize their output. But the baseline is really bad.

michaelteter 1y ago
This is basically it. There are a dozen ways to become huge, and they all are essnetially anti-humanity. There's an expression: normalization of deviance. This is where we are now. People idolize others because of their wealth, and that wealth is always gained by means which are ultimately harmful to the greater population. Even the wealthy philanthropistMS which will remain unnamed acquired their greatness by cheating and stealing. But as long as you make a great show and give it all away eventually (while living lavishly the entire time), you look good.
- whstl 1y ago
  As a 90s teen growing up with Grunge and in a DYI punk scene, I remember my youth being a lot about authenticity, and it felt weird reading about how the 80s were all about money and fame and how selling out was ok. To me that sounded absolutely absurd and a freaking caricature, something out of "American Psycho". Today I was just discussing with a friend how we're perhaps even more materialistic and cut-throat...
  - prox 1y ago
    A fear of mine is that we are speedrunning Cyberpunk 2077. And that’s not something to expire to. It’s a bleak no-hope hell. Hope is about finding and using that moral compass. To change worse outcomes to better outcomes for everyone. The “I’ll take mine” or “My group needs to win” attitude is poison to yourself and to the world, and if you don’t see that your conscience is blind or broken. This is nothing new, in numerous books on moral philosophy and people who have been in these situations have spoken out on it.
    - 1y ago

blitzar 1y ago

> What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? A big house, a fast car, more money. Where else in SV are you going to go anyway? Every company does the same thing.

procaryote 1y ago
Finding a company less bad for the world than Meta isn't very hard. They pay really well to compensate, so people will rationalise working there of course, but "everyone does it" is just a way to dodge responsibility for your own choices If you value money over other people, it's a great place to work though
- blitzar 1y ago
  Smearing shit on your face every morning is "less bad" than smearing shit all over your whole body every morning. "Everyone does it" is as much of a cope as "less bad". You are still covered in shit.
  - procaryote 1y ago
    That argument could be made against any improvement that isn't an immediate leap to perfection. It's not very useful
et-al 1y ago
> Where else in SV are you going to go anyway? Every company does the same thing. That's like saying mechanical engineers can only work at Raytheon or Lockheed Martin. Or biotech people can only work at Purdue Pharma. There are companies in SV who are making products for actual users. Just look outside adtech.

gsky 1y ago

Some engineers do anything for money. Check out teamblind.com to know the evil side of engineers

ReptileMan 1y ago

It should be noted that no ethically -trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

palmfacehn 1y ago

Generally employees put the responsibility on management. As everyone has a higher up they answer to, no one feels personally responsible. From the top down, the concerns of how things are actually implemented are often too abstract. Combine these dynamics with institutional echochambers and group-think. Employees just want to make it to the weekend. Execs want to hit their targets. Sales dept. needs their bonuses. The board wants to pump valuations.

whstl 1y ago
Not Meta but I once got yelled at not by a real manager, but by a PM because I said I wouldn't let the team do something shady without legal signing off. I'm in Europe so it was GDPR related. The PM tried shopping the task to other teams, but nobody took the bait after I raised it publicly, and both legal and the external law firm sided with me after about three months of delay. In the meantime I raised the topic of yelling with HR but every step of the way the company made me feel like I was the one in the wrong for not complying. I believe if I were meeker I would probably have complied right there.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
fittingopposite 1y ago
Yes. Was my same first thought. Same thing that happened in Germany: "The banality of evil" how Hannah Arendt described Adolf Eichmann's excuse that he didn't bare any responsibility since he was just doing his job...
et-al 1y ago
Eh, software engineers throughout the ZIRP had the choice of working at plenty of companies. People chose to work at Facebook for the money disregarding all other concerns. That's it.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

porridgeraisin 1y ago

Optimization with the objectives we have today, and more generally financialism are all about splitting up end-to-end tasks into pieces and removing redundant common work. This is obviously good...upto a point. It gets bad because morals and a bunch of other stuff also gets split up. Like someone mentioned below, it's unrealistic to expect people to think about second or third or nth order effects of their job. Heck, those effects are not even visible in 90% of cases. To answer your question, the engineer at meta is just building a graph database. It takes a `void* node_data` as argument. Another is just building a kafka-clickhouse data pipeline that can transfer so many millions of `void* message`s a minute. The android engineer is just improving the percentage of requests without location data by using wifi ssids as fallback. The CEO just sees "advertising revenue WoW" in his dashboard. And so on. That it is actually being used for spying is many steps away from each of them -- OK, in the case of meta I'm sure the employees know to an extent. But it's still very different from the feeling they would get if they were doing the end-to-end task themselves. It's the same thing with other questionable products. It's split up sufficiently across the supply chain that no one is actually aware enough of the task end-to-end. In some cases, the same participant in the supply chain will be a supplier for something really good and necessary..but they will also be a supplier for something despicable. In this case, it is easy for everyone involved to sweep the latter under the rug. As far as I have thought about it, there is no way to get rid of this larger problem without also losing the (unfathomably massive) benefits.

sneak 1y ago

Same thing at Google or Apple. Google has everyone’s email and browsing history, Apple has the complete copy of everyone’s iMessage and SMS history (in the non-e2ee iCloud backups, readable by Apple). Anything these companies know, the FBI and CIA can know, without a warrant thanks to FAA702 (did we all forget about PRISM?). The state now has leverage over almost every normal citizen, thanks to what these companies have built. Turnkey tyranny. Built by silicon valley.

msgodel 1y ago

I know it's not so hip here but the answer is money. You go to work for money. It's not to socialize, not for personal growth, and not for charity. If I want those things I have hobbies (including hobby programming.)

averageRoyalty 1y ago
Most people would say no if they were offered a full time salary to spy on their friends, steal their data and act in a overtly unethical way every day. But these companies give them an abstraction layer. There are plenty of things you can do for money that are not (or are significantly less) unethical.

laweijfmvo 1y ago

+1 for “money”. how many years until AI makes everyone’s job obsolete? do you really think countries like the US have their citizens’ best interests in mind? i’m guessing Forced Meaningless Labor (like the cartoon prisoners hammering rocks) is more probable than Universal Basic Income.

adolph 1y ago

> What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? Would someone explain in plain language what is wrong with an app listening on a port for messages from the browser? It seems like a helpful asynchronous method to maintain state between browser and app.

grumpymuppet 1y ago

I'm nearly certain it's the dopamine response of "solving problems" coupled with the fear of losing a paycheck. Morality isn't a consideration.

doctorpangloss 1y ago

Nobody is stopping you from making whatever you want and putting it out there in the world. If you believe strongly in a different order of things, go for it!

inquirerGeneral 1y ago

[dead]

greatwhitenorth 1y ago

[flagged]

mcculley 1y ago

It is the same process whereby websites deploy Google Analytics. They are getting value by harming their users. They easily rationalize and justify it.

bluesnowmonkey 1y ago

You start with small moral compromises. That prepares you for big ones.

dagmx 1y ago

Meta pays a lot. Most people there don’t work on the shady stuff and don’t pay attention to what else is going on. That’s generally the case for everyone I know who works there. Many of them are even quite liberal and will join protests for things that Meta has actively and negatively played a part in, so they’re in effect protesting their own workplace indirectly. But will continue to work there because they can compartmentalize this.

Workaccount2 1y ago

No snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche - "I didn't write it, I just had the idea" - "I didn't implement it, I just made the prototype" - "It wasn't my product, I just fixed some bugs with it" - "I can't track everything in these implementation updates, I just work with what I am given" - "I didn't collect the data, I just deal with what is in the dataset"

bigyabai 1y ago
The snowflakes don't run the company. If you work somewhere that is designing a really big gun and the CEO uses it to commit an awful crime, you don't share the blame for one person's irresponsibility. It's not a satisfying answer, but it really is up to executives to decide where they draw the line. Nobody else in the business can say 'no'. Likewise, when we blame IBM for supplying the Nazis during WWII, we're not decrying the enthusiastic early database workers. They aren't the problem; executives without morals are.
- defrost 1y ago
  > we're not decrying the enthusiastic early database workers. Well, you're not. However: Black reports that every Nazi concentration camp maintained its own Hollerith-Abteilung (Hollerith Department), assigned with keeping tabs on inmates through use of IBM's punchcard technology. from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust suggest that a good number of these "early database workers" were working directly with Hollerith codes on human flesh and tasked with the identification of Jews, Roma, and other ethnic groups deemed undesirable by the regime, along with military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity. You might argue they are no more responsible for concentration camps than concentration camp guards, but these are the people punching holes in cards and filtering them with knitting needles while looking out the window at piles of shoes and gold teeth to tabulate.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    With different executives, that might not have happened. With different tabulators I don't think anything would have changed. You're not really disproving my point by emphasizing that the end operators of these machines were typically Nazis.

Fairburn 1y ago

Doubtful someone from Meta would admit to anything.

lazyeye 1y ago

Here's a senior ex-Facebook exec detailing how the company would betray users in the US to the CCP to help gain access to the Chinese market:- https://youtu.be/f3DAnORfgB8 https://youtu.be/f3DAnORfgB8 amongst other things...

akomtu 1y ago

The same reason people eat meat. The reality of what happens behind the scenes to produce meat or their paycheck is carefully hidden from their sight, and when it's hidden, it's easy to convince ourselves that we aren't some monsters who run concentration camps with cows and pigs in them, but decent humans who have taste for medium rare steaks. What Meta does to society is more insidious: it gets people addicted to content so it can make them eat a poison for their minds, so-called ads. Surveillance is just method of making the ads more invasive, tailored to each user individually.

NBJack 1y ago

You may find the book Careless People a good read. The culture there is...troubling. From the top down.

shadowgovt 1y ago

It's hard to feel you're doing something wrong when the people are literally handing you their private data to sift through. That's the onramp to normalization: "If the users didn't like this, they'd stop us."

1718627440 1y ago

Pretty sure, that if they use a Meta product, they are also deploying the spyware to themselves.