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The problem when working for Meta is that if you do a good job, you've helped make the world worse... so the real heroes are the people wasting money and reduci
by procaryote 1y ago
The problem when working for Meta is that if you do a good job, you've helped make the world worse... so the real heroes are the people wasting money and reducing efficiency
If you're at all competent, go work somewhere else
- considerdevs 1y agoQuite pessimistic view, but hard to argue against based on available data samples.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- wolvesechoes 1y agoBut isn't that true for every big corp, or even every public company? Even if founders may had some other goals in addition to making money, as the time passes profit becomes the only goal, and usually more profit is being generated while doing bad and malicious things. Problem is systemic.
- keysdev 1y agoDepending on the founder. With Apple it can be reasoned that it only went down after you know who passed away. Yeah its not reliable to count on one charismatic leader to run the whole thing, but that is what the corporate model has being doing and how we ended up here.
- lyu07282 1y ago> its not reliable to count on one charismatic leader to run the whole thing > it only went down after you know who passed away. I mean that's kind of ironic. You believe that Jobs was a great and decent person who led Apple to be roses and rainbows. Outside this cult of personality it was a company that engaged in unethical and monopolistic business practices just as anyone else did, walled-garden lock-in of their platform, intentionally making their devices impossible to repair, planned obsolescence, slave labor conditions in manufacturing, etc. etc. So the point is untrue, its the benevolent dictator delusion, just like there are no benevolent political authoritarian leaders so are there no benevolent CEOs either. Because the system itself is the issue, authoritarianism/capitalism. If you are a conservative/authoritarian you believe in the former if you are a liberal/libertarian/capitalist you believe in the latter.
- anttiharju 1y agoNokia (mostly networking-related things nowadays) touts - or at least used to, haven't kept up to date - itself as one of the most ethical companies around. > But isn't that true for every big corp, or even every public company? So I suppose not really, no. Additionally companies working on carbon-free energy might also serve as evidence. There are some big ones around.
- sylware 1y agoI remember, nokia about to release the first smartphone, full linux with a clean plain and simple C written OS/platform... and... then nothing happened. I recall the user groups being puzzled on what was waiting nokia, they were ready, had it all super open source and LEAN open source, and the iphone happened and they were bought by msft... ??????????
- sim7c00 1y agothe most ethical company still goes for profit and earn shittons.... the most fragrant turd still smells of shit
- gorgoiler 1y agoNokia Siemens Networks provided the Iranian Revolution with their lawful intercept equipment under a special contract. They may have a good overall ethical track record but they don’t have a clean sheet.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago> Additionally companies working on carbon-free energy might also serve as evidence. There are some big ones around. Interesting exemple because the biggest investors in renewable by far are big oil companies. So what should people do? Go or not go? Sadly, the world is never black and white.
- anttiharju 1y agoI think people should do/go where they have a peace of mind, whatever that place may be.
- procaryote 1y agoThere are lots of profit motivated big companies that cause much less collateral damage. Facebook ranges from individualised harm like showing kids makeup ads when they delete a selfie, to macro scale harm like election interference You could take a job designing landmines and you'd have a real hard time causing as much actual harm, as there just aren't enough wars going on to reach the same scale
- ivolimmen 1y agoI think I can say that this wasn't the case with Sun Microsystems. I never worked there but everything I read on tht company was positive. I gate the fact that Oracle (one of the worst) bought them.
- xeonmc 1y agoYou either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
- xxs 1y agoI'd take zstd any time while I have facebook and friends blocked. The world is not black and white.
- atiedebee 1y agozstd can't really be attributed to Facebook. Yann Collet started work on it before joining Facebook, so it was kind of imported. I am sure it made developing and standardizing the algorithm easier, but what makes it such a good (performant) algorithm is the design of the original creator.
- formerly_proven 1y agoOn the other hand, the patent licensing kerfuffle (which I don't think was about any existing patents, just "standard policy") through the relicensing by Facebook was a drag on zstd's momentum.
- roncesvalles 1y agoOne of the better "service to humanity" opportunities for software engineers is to join a company like Meta or TikTok and perform awfully for as long as you can.
- saagarjha 1y agoYeah I'm making the world a better place by earning 500k a year doing a bad job to slow down this company. Look at how much good I am doing sorry I can't hear you over my paycheck clearing
- komali2 1y agoActivism doesn't require participation in a poverty cult. Any socialist in a nation like the USA or the UK is by someone's lens a champagne socialist. Let's not participate in this tired trope.
- bonoboTP 1y agoWho said anything about socialism? There are many ways to criticize Meta from non-socialist angles.
- saagarjha 1y agoI don't think you need to be poor to protest injustice. I just think that joining Meta so that you can "bring it down from the inside" is unlikely to be effective and very easy to justify to yourself.
- Hammershaft 1y agoI think a better service to humanity is to excel at your job even if you end up at a socially corrosive org like Meta or Tiktok but donate a decent chunk of your paycheck to effective altruist charities that save lives.
- kriops 1y agoA better service to humanity yet is taking that money and spending it on whatever is valuable to yourself, thus providing more people with the opportunity to sustainably work for a living. Capitalism and all that.
- dkiebd 1y agoAh, the Europeans woke up.
- dist-epoch 1y agoProviding a service that billions of people value is making the world worse? Wow What next, go work for TV stations and sabotage them? Go work for McDonalds and make it inneficient? Sabotage manufacturers of combustion-cars?
- lm28469 1y agoProviding fentanyl to addicts is doing God's work then I imagine?
- Auracle 1y agoAs we all know. People regularly overdose on Facebook and die.
- Bigpet 1y agoCould you try to address the obvious point being made instead of trying to obfuscate? There's plenty of bad outcomes besides death. Not all fentanyl users die. If some fent wholesaler were to provide unrefutable evidence that Noone died from his fent you wouldn't go "Oh alright then, nothing wrong with what you're doing".
- ksec 1y agoFacebook seems to have strange relationship with most Americans while the rest of the world is quite happy with it. Including both WhatsApp and Instagram.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoHmm? What value? And for whom?
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoThat’s an extremely reductive view. Whatever you think of Meta core products, they pay a ton of people to work on various open source projects, do R&D on things which are only tangentially related to social media like VR or data center tech. There is worse way to get a paycheck to do what you are interested in.
- Garlef 1y ago"It wasn't all bad. They built the Autobahn"
- wafflemaker 1y agoFew more years and they would've finished Polarbanen. The northern Norway railroad connecting Trondheim to Tromsø, far inside the Arctic Circle. Giving us $50 trains to Tromsø instead of $500 planes. But my enthusiasm diminished after learning that they worked thousands people to death.
- sapiogram 1y ago> Giving us $50 trains to Tromsø instead of $500 planes. It's only $50 if the government pays for the rest of the ticket. $50 per passenger won't even cover track maintenance. Source: My ass, but I still think I'm right.
- procaryote 1y ago> thousands people to death I have some bad news to tell you about the overall number of dead related to that government
- wafflemaker 1y agoYou tell me, I'm from Poland. Talked to many older people, who remember the war. One thing that caught my attention, because it surfaced with every single old person I asked about the war: Germans/Nazis were horrible, but Russians/Soviets were an order of magnitude worse. Funny thing that now many people don't even know that it was Russia and Germany BOTH that started the war. And they were supposed to attack Poland simultaneously, but Stalin, PR animal that he was, delayed Red Army's attack by one week, thereby creating the legend that it wasn't Russia that started the war.
- cedws 1y agoBut Meta’s connecting the world… by keeping them inside doomscrolling.
- redleader55 1y agoI find this kind of comment revolting - if I owe something, I owe it to my family and my parents, so if Meta comes to make me an offer and I accept it, it's my business and no one else's. Strangers on the internet, instead of judging people based on the company they work for, and divide them into "good" and "bad", should get off their high horses and join these companies, if they are capable, and change them from the inside if they think they are doing bad things.
- procaryote 1y agoOr take almost any other job. If you can get a well paying job at meta, you have other options.
- tonyhart7 1y agojohn carmack maybe old but his competency/talent is 100x times bigger than you OP dont shit talk my goat like that
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]