At $JOB-1, my boss (only good boss in the whole company, TBH) got fired soon after I left. As a knee-jerk reaction by upper mgmt. (poorly run company.) His replacement knows 1/10 of what he knows, and hails from Uber.

depends who's evaluating it and what their values are. If their values are aligned with Uber's values, then no. If their values are opposed to Uber's values, then yes. I'm squarely of the latter. Uber would be a major negative to me. But everyone is different. Some people might view it positively.

I think Uber is a bad thing. If you work for Uber, you have helped create a bad thing. At that point, I do not trust your judgement, and I do not want to work with people whose judgement I do not trust.

Should we bar military veterans from these development jobs because the Military Industrial Complex has a toxic culture of killing millions around the world for profit?

I think that would be enough to get you blacklisted in certain California crowds.

It doesn't help FB that Trump is associated with them and that he's in hot water already.

[1] https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...

So the normal rules of ethics that would lead to conclusions about immoral behaviour don't apply here. Privacy isn't something that should be forced on someone. It's their life, their decisions, their information. They can do what they want with it. In reality virtually no users care about privacy and will happily upload their lives or even broadcast it to the whole world given the slightest chance.

As such, it's hard to conclude what exactly Facebook employees are supposed to have done wrong here.

That leaves "OMG YOU GOT TRUMP ELECTED", which isn't going to convince the roughly 50% of Americans who voted for him. After all, they won't believe that Trump voters were mindlessly reprogrammed into voting for Trump against their will by social media. And a lot of Clinton voters won't believe that either.

I expect a whole lot of virtue signalling from the same Silicon Valley types who foam at the mouth if someone says there aren't many women coders because on average they choose to be teachers instead. And not much else.

The modern understanding of consent is that it can be withdrawn at any time. Sometimes even retrospectively

You may lose a small amount of jobs that would come your way, but you'd still likely have dozens of offers to choose from from companies that don't view you as 'tainted'.

Software engineering doesn't have the same ethical consequences and motivations as other fields (medicine, law, etc.). It doesn't make much sense to punish the engineers when you invent ethical standards after-the-fact.

It doesn't, but it doesn't look great if those accomplishments end up having a negative impact on society. Do you really want to have "I wrote an novel algorithm to track people" on your resume?

> Software engineering doesn't have the same ethical consequences and motivations as other fields (medicine, law, etc.). It doesn't make much sense to punish the engineers when you invent ethical standards after-the-fact.

I'll have to disagree with you there. Software engineers should have to deal with the ethical consequences of the work they've done. And these ethical standards are hardly "after-the-fact": the idea of a right to privacy has been around for a long time.

The great thing about writing resumes is that you can leave things off.

>Software engineers should have to deal with the ethical consequences of the work they've done.

Give us legal protections and resources to stand up and to and report unethical behavior by companies then. You're arguing correctly on a moral ground, but you don't have good industry ethics without good legal precedents.

Otherwise the best chance you've got is to get media attention and now you're fighting the company's PR.

When you can point to "Defendant can no longer work in software development because of an ethical failure" cases, you will have a much stronger argument to get engineers to follow ethical guidelines (we're assuming those have been written down on something other than a Github-feelgood repo for that case).

I think Engineers who carry water for unethical companies probably get paid more. Your next employer would much rather hire you if you kept your head down during the PR Nightmare than if you made noise and created a problem for management.

Sure, but then you're diminishing the value of what you did. If someone asks you want you did at Facebook, it would be odd if you said "I'd rather not say", as would it if you had five years of blank in your resume.

> Give us legal protections and resources to stand up and to and report unethical behavior by companies then.

I do agree that this is an issue that should be addressed.

I guess if you only worked on creepy and unsavory things, you'd be in a tough spot. Assuming you can't weasel-word your way out of the creepiness and make it more palatable.

If someone ultimately thinks that, you're back to "move on to the next company". And the consequences are paid then and there. But again, you can lean on the market's health to make those consequences really small.

You're assuming all employers (a) believe in and (b) care about Cambridge Analytica. That likely isn't the case.

It requires quite a leap to begin with, to believe that CA could actually "influence elections". But this is just the latest iteration of a very, very biased political viewpoint emanating from Dems-in-Denial. Back in Obama's time it was "elections can be bought with campaign spending", then it became "elections can be controlled with Twitter spam" and now it's "elections can be controlled through some vaguely specified process involving years-old data from Facebook profiles". The mechanism keeps changing but the underlying belief that voters who don't vote left-wing are just marionnettes on string remains.

If you don't believe that, and believe / know that voters make up their own minds consciously, based on the information they have, then this entire Facebook story would make no impact on your hiring decisions because the idea that Facebook is some sort of sordid unethical power broker seems ridiculous to begin with.

The vast majority of people do not consider advertising unethical. Nor do they consider social networks to be unethical.

I always struggle to figure out what classical rules of ethics Facebook (or Google) are supposed to have violated, but nobody can ever give me one. Instead there's a lot of begging the question.

If the algorithm is truly novel then yes, absolutely.

"I wrote software that took advantage of addictive behavior in new ways" "My new flagging mechanism, tailored to prevent users from leaving the platform, led to someone committing suicide after being unable to block an abuser" "My relevancy algorithm, based on what had the most engagement, led to a genocide"

I've made these purposefully extreme, but these are all based on reality. Making something "novel" isn't always a good thing.

I wouldn't put any of those on my resume, because they're ridiculous and don't represent the way people report their achievements. However, I would put the technology I developed on my resume that enabled any one of those things.

Personally, I'd be proud to have had significant involvement in the development of Facebook's data analysis and ingestion platform. I would not be proud of the Cambridge Analytica mistake in of itself, but that's because I don't conflate the underlying technology with a particularly grievous mistake that was happened because of the technology's existence.

Moreover, I contest your use of examples which are cartoonishly evil. I disagree with the fundamental premise that the technology is innately bad, or that your examples even remotely constitute an accurate portrayal of the internal culture at Facebook. I believe there are clear failures in Facebook's data analysis processes, but it's intellectually lazy and dishonest to misrepresent those failures using the obviously biased language in your examples. It's also unfair to mischaracterize the majority of people who work there as lacking in ethics.

You are correct that it doesn't. But our field also carries a lot less prestige, with most of it tied to the employer as opposed to our profession and skillsets.

This board often laments this fact.

I think adopting an Eichmann defense here is a big mistake and hurts our profession as a whole. We'd be indirectly surrendering a huge amount of autonomy. How can we have ownership over the positive outcome of what we create without also be willing to accept some of the responsibility for negative outcomes? When we wash our hands of these externaliities, to an outsider, it just looks like developers are nothing more than cogs in a machine, following orders. It just moves the glory up the food chain.

All occupations have the same ethical concerns, they're just a function of how much money can be made.

I think that's too strong of a word. It doesn't take a "sociopath" for a company to get to a bad place; merely the efforts of many engineers each doing something slightly immoral. Hopefully there are less of these now that they see what can happen to a company where such engineers work.

They are equal opportunity data vacuums!

Of course, they accept the data of all kinds of people.

They are very diverse in they data collection efforts.

They can still, and certainly will, virtue signal!

Depends on what you’re doing. I wouldn’t want a former Facebook employee near anything remotely customer data related, or anything with political or PR sensitivity.

The people working on the political and PR areas at Facebook are badass. They come from places like the Obama administration. They now have a front-row seat in the negotiations for how governments around the world are negotiating with Facebook.

After the dust settles, these people will start charging $1k/hour to consult on "political or PR" sensitive business areas.

I frequently see people try this when their employers start burning in political and criminal crosshairs. It’s a tough and treacherous strategy. It is likely just an easier thing to tell oneself than “I need this job for the pay cheque, the next 10 years be damned.”

Unless you leverage the crisis into deep relationships with regulators and politicos who remain relevant afterwards, you walk away weaker. Low-touch Facebook PR folks saw their best days when they worked in the last administration.

I can understand it if you're in a situation where the bottom can kind of dictate the company direction in a "hey, with this data, we could make the company a killing, our shareholders happy, etc." sort of way. Perhaps avoid the upper level employees, but engineering talent is probably safe.

> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I wouldn't hold experience at Uber or FB against any applicant.

But I wouldn't hold working at Facebook against anyone, unless they knew and worked directly on monetizing PII and didn't see problems with it. That's for other reasons -- there are certain things you can't engineer without having a really good idea how, where, and why it'll be used. I don't want an engineer that is blindly solving technical problems.

I'd expect people working there to know the deal a bit better, but even so they might not be directly involved with anything unethical, and even if they knew about unethical things, they might not have had an opportunity to switch jobs.

If this isn't irrational behavior, what would it take for you to be acting irrationally?

Are there other companies you'd indiscriminately never hire from? What about Google? How is their data mining materially different, in your view? What about a subcontractor for Facebook? Would you hire engineers from a startup which advertised on Facebook? If so, why are they not complicit?

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/effect-social-media-dem...

https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-t...

> More importantly, just how "indirectly" do one of those 20,000 employees need to be tied to the work you dislike before you'd acknowledge that rebuffing them is silly?

It's not their work that is important, but rather their understanding of Facebook's impact. I think it would be kind to give conscientious quitters and H-1B employees extra points as their situation varies.

> Are there other companies you'd indiscriminately never hire from? I never advocated for such a draconian policy. I was stating that having this information could help with culture fit in an ideal hiring situation (in either direction, depending on your business). Maybe these people are hired less or more in highly sensitive, privacy-related roles based on the company's prerogatives.

> What about Google? How is their data mining materially different, in your view?

Google's mission is to "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Their first value is to "focus on the user". Facebook's mission is to "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." Their first value is to "be bold".

Facebook's stated mission is to be in the business of social information. Google's stated mission is to be in the business of information more generally. Materially, this general mission leads Google to lean less on people's personal information to achieve their mission.

> What about a subcontractor for Facebook?

Direct contractors are typically employees in all but name, but if they were working for a company hired by Facebook I would think it only reasonable to take that into consideration as their will may not have been aligned with the business decision.

> Would you hire engineers from a startup which advertised on Facebook? If so, why are they not complicit?

Again, to be clear, I would hire engineers directly from Facebook so certainly I would hire their partners employees. It is one of many data points to consider when hiring. They may be complicit in Facebook's misdeeds, but still can have value to a business.

edit: grammar

Cough cough https://god-knows-what.com/2018/03/27/why-almost-everything-...

A quote from the article you linked:

> Asked what kind of control Facebook had over the data given to outside developers, he replied: “Zero. Absolutely none. Once the data left Facebook servers there was not any control, and there was no insight into what was going on. Parakilas said he “always assumed there was something of a black market” for Facebook data that had been passed to external developers.