And yet they underpay and also use their lobbying muscle/money to change laws to keep engineering pay down.

Note the sheer desperation to keep the pay secret so it doesn't turn into an auction for scarce resources for engineering talent the way it does with lawyers, bankers, MBA's. If you're in it fore the money don't work for facebrick.

payment is relative. to the rest ofnthe world, all of the SV engineers looks grossly over paid.

> to the rest ofnthe world, all of the SV engineers looks grossly over paid.

Only to people who don't understand economics. I know the salaries in NYC are high as well, but I understand the cost of living that drives that.

no, even to people who understand economics.

the only reason the cost of living is so high in SF is because of grossly over paid employees who drive up the cost of living. its a private little island of inflation.

Ive made a lower SV salary after my education in Bern Switzerland. I had to pay way less taxes, had benefits included, and cost of living was lower as well.

Lobbying to keep pay down? To what does this refer?

> open source everything

Sure. Like they open sourced their Blu-Ray cold storage system. Oh, wait, if they do that, people will realize they should be sued for using the word "delete", since you can't remove data from Blu-Ray.

The standard way to do this is to store the data encrypted, and store the key in something modifiable. Then when there's a delete you scramble the key.

So who is auditing Facebook, making sure they actually do that?

Open source is catnip for software engineers.

It's worth remembering that ethics go beyond software rights.