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This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs. You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for
by jazzpush2 4mo ago
This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs.
You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence.
You made your bed. I hope your organization gets destroyed. I hope you reflect on the damage you've caused the world.
- MAustriaGA 4mo ago[dead]
- throwarayes 4mo agoI think it says more about Metas inability to create new products or make investments. Look at their big growth areas. They acquired instagram and WhatsApp. Threads seems successful(?) but is an extension of instagram. Mostly they’ve just gotten better at weaponizing rage bait. Which I’d argue, long term, will be a losing strategy. If this were a healthy culture, with all the people working there, Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there.
- ribosometronome 4mo ago>Threads ... rage bait The advertisements within Instagram for Threads almost always seem to be fairly thinly disguised engagement & rage bait. Every time it gets me, I feel an increasing desire to move away from the whole ecosystem.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago> Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there I don't understand this either, there are so many clearly advantageous ideas and experiments to be be carried out, that can make discussions better, thinking clearer and help people actually connect. But instead they're only thinking about how to optimize the ad-machine in the end, so depressing to see.
- aantix 4mo agoNever understood why Facebook hasn't implemented the 'Explain this post' type feature that you see on X (@grok). Facebook seems to be the most misinformed audience - an LLM fact checker would be a great addition.
- butlike 4mo agoThe scales are different. FB has far and away more users. Could you imagine the headlines? "AI tool now thought police for articles on Facebook"
- shimman 4mo agoThey won't reflect, these people literally have no morales. The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression. edit: sorry but if you purposely to chose to work at Meta after 2016 you clearly have zero morals and are fine with working at a company that not only willingly exacerbated a genocide but knowingly profited off of it too. These workers can't be condemned enough, some of these devs should be in prison too.
- cindyllm 4mo ago[dead]
- onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago> The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression. You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't? You really think them and only them are the people capable of doing whatever technical things are causing the problems you perceive?
- 98codes 4mo ago"Someone else would be willing to ruin this, so I may as well ruin it and get paid for it" is not a direction everyone wants to, or even is willing to go.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Retric 4mo agoSomeone else isn’t a 1:1 replacement, when people refuse to work for you you’re stuck offering higher wages and or taking worse employees. How well a job is compensated on average very much depends on how willing and able the average person is to do it.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- jlengrand 4mo ago
- 98codes 4mo agoI've held a short list of organizations I wouldn't ever work for, for a long while. Meta is on that list, but so are most of the big tech companies you see in the various anagrams. It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.
- ryandrake 4mo agoI started doing this, but so many companies are bad that it's pretty career-limiting. Ultimately every company is, or one day will be, solely focused on "maximize shareholder value forever" as their one and only imperative. You just have to find the least bad ones.
- freejazz 4mo agoMeta's problem isn't that they "maximize shareholder value" it's how they decided to go about doing it.
- throwaway894345 4mo agoI would love to learn if people have structured approaches for identifying companies that are in that "least bad" band, but yeah, I agree that as long as we have a system based on extreme wealth inequality, it's going to be pretty difficult to find moral work. At the end of the day most of us are working to make billionaires richer--in the best case we do that by genuinely creating value, but frequently it's about taking money away from some middle or lower class person (however indirectly).
- ImPostingOnHN 4mo agoImagine yourself describing to your relatives how the company has made money and see how embarrassed you feel.
- throwaway894345 4mo agoThe difficulty isn't in making the moral assessment, it's in searching through tens of thousands of employers and understanding their business models.
- nine_k 4mo agoTruth be told, the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React. I won't color any large entity uniformly bad at all times and aspects.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago> the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React People created PyTorch and React, they happen to be working at Meta at the time. Maybe it's unlikely they'd create those working elsewhere, but I think it's much more unlikely that someone else at Meta would have created the same thing without those people there.
- pcan77 4mo agoTotally agree. And who cares, the internet, computers and web apps worked before and will work after those go away. It's not like React is some irreplaceable genius invention, it's just a framework like Ember, Angular, etc etc. The people who made them are no doubt amazing, but what I'm saying is we're not "in debt" to Meta for these tools at all.
- esafak 4mo agoMeta assigned hundreds of engineers to work PyTorch. That is only going to happen at a handful of companies. You are very much in debt to Meta if you use it. "We’ve committed hundreds of engineers to the framework ..." https://ai.meta.com/blog/pytorch-foundation/ https://ai.meta.com/blog/pytorch-foundation/
- embedding-shape 4mo ago> You are very much in debt to Meta if you use it What kind of mindset is this, telling people to feel like they're indebted to a nameless for-profit corporation? That's bananas. Send the responsible people who actually created the projects and wrote the code a thankful email if you feel like it, no one is indebted to any companies here because they use FOSS software, especially not companies like Meta who take from the world more than they give.
- lelanthran 4mo ago> You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. One day, when there is no job for you, you will look back on this moment and chide your past self. There is no organisation that has their hands clean. Not even the one you work for.
- kevincrane 4mo agoAlmost all organizations have hands cleaner than Meta lol
- Hamuko 4mo agoI imagine the stupid enterprise business software I make is way less bad than "our algo is making teenage girls kill themselves".
- serf 4mo agoyeah except that isn't how it's presented. social media boards don't go creating slides and mission statements that mentions those second order effects. most go something like: "Connecting people and souls through the technologies that empower every day life." rather than "Let's get Susie to jump off a bridge for yuks."
- Hamuko 4mo ago>“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.” >“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues. >Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed. I don’t know, seems like they do go around creating slides that mention them.
- 4mo ago
- neutronicus 4mo agoIf you were remote and LCOL or MCOL you've also made significant inroads towards retirement after just a couple years at Meta. Like, you can go be a middle school teacher and probably be fine if you stuffed the sack while the stuffing was good.
- jacques_chester 4mo agoAs I learned while burning through all my savings in the 2023-2024 timeframe: You are free to have principles, but principles aren't free. I am ashamed I worked there.
- ActorNightly 4mo agoIf you worked at Meta and couldn't find a job for a year, its not because of Meta.
- jacques_chester 4mo agoI was unemployed before Meta.
- pokstad 4mo agoThat’s a choice. This isn’t a story about someone poor who needs to work at McDonalds to make ends meet to feed their family. We are talking about the top earners in the world who made a decision to make more money than working at a competitor (Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc) where they would still be in the top 1% of earners.
- jacques_chester 4mo agoIt was a choice. I chose it and I wish it was never a choice I considered.
- slibhb 4mo agoThe idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating. When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.
- techblueberry 4mo ago> The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating. True, none of us are innocent. > When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there. WTF?
- bla15e 4mo agoit's not a perfect exampe of scape-goating of the goat is still alive
- ben_w 4mo agoOff the top of my head, a genocide, albeit by being careless people rather than malicious: The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a "determining role" in the Rohingya genocide.[98] Facebook has been accused of enabling the spread of Islamophobic content which targets the Rohingya people.[99] The United Nations Human Rights Council has called the platform "a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate".[100] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_controversies#Incitement_of_human_rights_abuses_in_Myanmar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_co...
- gr_norm 4mo agoI am completely willing to forgive Meta (and Palantir etc) employees who quit their job and donate their blood money (all wages above some low multiplier of median US SWE salary, adjusted for cost of living) to a reputable charity of their choice. Preferably one focused on repairing the incredible harm inflicted on other humans to which they have been a proactive and willing accomplice. Anything less than that does not constitute genuine remorse; we do not let millionaire criminals keep their illicit earnings because they apologized on the stand. That nearly none will do this (I suspect most would be irritated at even the suggestion) tells you all you need to know about them. edit: The disagreement is unsurprising, but I'd like to hear the reasoning against this. If you truly believed you'd wronged humanity at a job you voluntarily took for its high pay over all the others you could have easily gotten, keeping the exorbitant excesses of money should be unpalatable to you. That's how having a conscience works. Anything else is just a vacuous attempt to regain social standing.
- thepryz 4mo agoSorry, but your rant comes from a place of naive privilege when you assume meta engineers all had options. I know a number of people that accepted roles with companies they vowed never to work for after being laid off and unemployed for a year. The reality is that when you look at tech in abroad context, there really are very few ethical and/or noble companies.
- fzeroracer 4mo agoThere are plenty of options. I for example am one of those unemployed engineers that has been looking for a job for about a year now. Meta recruiters have came to me trying to poach me, and I've said no every time. The reality is that more engineers need to be able to grow a spine, have longer term thinking and actually stand their ground when it comes to these companies. You could not pay me enough money to work at Meta or Palantir and while it's true there are very few ethical or noble companies, working for Meta is more akin to completely throwing out your ethical compass.
- gulugawa 4mo agoWhat options?
- spencerflem 4mo agoI was considering pretty heavily getting a teaching license
- spencerflem 4mo agoDownvoters are wrong. Everything here is true. As someone who compromised their morals (not Facebook but other big tech) after being laid off, it was a choice
- sleepybrett 4mo agolabor solidarity, in america... we could only hope.
- thepryz 4mo ago
- pjmlp 4mo agoYou mean like React? Agreed, what a damage to the world.
- gulugawa 4mo agoReact is an overcomplicated mess made popular by manufactured consent.
- solid_fuel 4mo agoNo kidding, the damage react has done to front end engineering will be felt for decades. Bloated, slow applications that don’t conform to system conventions and burn power like crazy have been the norm ever since React caught on.
- b212 4mo agoWhat alternatives to React do you propose? I found Angular even worse…
- gulugawa 4mo agoAs someone who quit their corporate tech job to focus on community building work, I don't think finding better job is that simple. Nowadays, when I look at job listings, practically all of them are for companies that are ethically compromised in some way. They are overusing generative AI or building products that are having a negative impact on society. One of the worst examples I saw was a software engineer job posting from my previous employeer that builds cloud-based physical security systems for buildings.The job requires the use of AI. I wouldn't trust a security system that randomly decides to unlock the front door to my house because of a hallucination.
- alpha-male-swe 4mo agoyou shouldnt feel bad for them because they are smart and could get a job at meta (unlike you)
- jazzpush2 4mo agoI work for a frontier lab, lol.
- ActorNightly 4mo agoId honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it And you would be stupid not to. One one hand, you can be that guy that says you declined a Meta job, and be stuck at your current salary level, watching people make more money around you, and realize that even people who are make less than you truly absolutely just DGAF that you declined a Meta job - sure, they will tell you its a good thing, but its not like you get rewarded for it with having more friends or social support, in the end you are just still another person to them. On another hand, you can make enough money to secure a good life for yourself, create new accounts on social media websites if you want to talk about Meta in a more positive light, and find new friend groups that are easily accessible with having more salaries (just buy a BMW a show up to any BMW meetup and bam, new friends right out of the gate). The 2024 election should be a clear indicator that people just simply DGAF about each other as much as people think.
- spencerflem 4mo agoI mean, you Can, but I like my friends and myself. I feel gross about the place I’m at and I don’t want to lose that feeling.
- spinningslate 4mo ago> Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it Not OP but I can say with 100% truth and certainty that it wouldn’t matter how much money they offered - I would not work for meta. Some things matter more than money.
- gr_norm 4mo agoNope, sorry, I have absolutely had the option to do something similar and emphatically declined. I generally don't care to tell anyone this, either, outside the rare instances when it organically comes up as it did here. I want to see myself as a good person with a positive effect (as much as feasible) on the world, and taking such jobs is deeply incompatible with that.