That's a bit much, don't you think? This reminds me of that baseball coach who would refuse anybody from Colorado simply because marijuana is legal there.

Bias: I've refused to work on any adtech revenue business, and I've passed on opportunities at Uber multiple times due to ... moral and ethical concerns.

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

Yep. I once worked at a place that leveraged PII for profit. I won't work at a place like that again.

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.

Agreed. And besides that, I decided I didn't want to work for FB long ago, even if they somehow came calling... But it wasn't about ethics. Now it'd be about ethics, but I wasn't even aware they were doing anything unethical until now.

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.

You'll pass on a potentially excellent hire simply because of the name on their resume? You won't even expend a modicum of effort to interview the candidate or see if they're at all involved in the specific work you despise? Are over 20,000 employees guilty in your view?

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

If they continue to work for Facebook after CA it shows that they are willing to be paid an income despite the clear and studied effects of their work (directly or indirectly). There are lots of businesses that don't have the luxury of hiring for culture on issues as granular as this, but is it ideal to be able to? I think so.

What are those "clear and studied effects"? 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?

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?

> What are those "clear and studied effects"?

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

> clear and studied effects

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

For those that don't have time to read it, the article you linked debunks misconceptions about the CA privacy breach. I think the article goes to show the type of culture that allows for such a privacy breach to occur.

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.

Can you explain why?