Oh please. "19-year-old kids" can sign their life away to the military. They can vote in elections.

To suggest that we shouldn't allow people who are adults by every meaning of the word, voice their opinions publicly and attributed to themselves is ludicrous.

Likewise, it takes courage to put your name, face and words out there in this manner. As the OP was saying, it can haunt you. Saying they're young a naive for doing this may be true, but it's dismissive of what they've done. What they've done is something I like and respect, I wish more would say that.

It's not an issue of human rights but rather of journalistic ethics. See my other comments on this thread.

It's not unethical to accurately quote 19 year olds. This is an eccentric position you've staked out.

If you had to bet $5 on whether or not the reporter sat these kids down before interviewing them for the record and said something like, "Be advised, what you say in this article is going to be seen by every potential employer for the next 5+ years, are you ready to drop some truth bombs?" how would you bet?

I would bet that she did not...

I mean, most of the people raised on the internet have generally learned by now that anything they say online will probably show up to their potential employers. So I’m pretty sure they do realize that this might hurt their chances of working at Facebook, which is a risk they are willing to make.

I don't think they're saying the students aren't "allowed" to voice their opinions. They're making the point that this is obviously what a college student would say when asked a question like this in the current social climate. No one is saying they are bad for doing so. The point is that it's an easy, ultimately fruitless article that highlights the well-known views of a large population of young adults.

I'm a similar age group / community and this sort of perspective is not at all uncommon, and it's legit. There is no "performative wokeness" going on in my experience.

On the flip side I'm still roughly in that age group (first half of my 20s) and I absolutely did engage in performative wokeness at that age and continue to do so today. Not to the degree of interviewing with the NYT, but I definitely voice support in view if my peers and co-workers for social issues I don't really care about. Maybe people do believe in the trending issues, plenty are just playing along because failure to do so results in loss of status and respect.

With respect to the original comment, though, I agree that 20 year olds are mature enough make their views public. Sure their views may change, but that's life. It doesn't mean they should refrain from sharing their views.

I agree it's a legit perspective and I know it's not uncommon. That's not my point. My point is that the students quoted likely do not grasp the potential future consequences of their name being in the newspaper this way.

I'm twice their age and I don't either. What consequences do you refer to?

Prospective employer Googles your name, sees that you recently trashed their company (or strategic partner, or largest client), and decides to take a pass.

I think their comments will come across as arrogant and entitled to potential employers and/or colleagues who google them in the future. I think the kids are probably not that way, they're just really earnest, but the reporter did them a disservice by putting their juicy hot college sophomore takes into the ether for all of eternity.

Political discrimination in hiring and promotion is not unheard of.

These kids are computer science students from Berkeley. They're not going to be hurting for job offers. If it helps filter out dumbass employers who are going to hold their opinions about Facebook against them, so much the better.

Of course they're not going to be hurting for job offers, in general. The issue is that hiring teams at high-performing, stressed-out early stage startups (including many that are doing important work that will change people's lives for the better) can be ridiculously petty and catty in the hiring process -- especially when they're looking at 10+ qualified candidates for every new hire.

Regardless of how well these students are set up for life in general, it would still suck for them if they lost out on a great career opportunity because the people guarding the door for that opportunity, on the day that they reviewed that candidate, decided to be douchily dismissive of the fact that said candidate decided to provide overeager quotes for a NYT article back when they were a college student.

I get what you're saying, but I think people waste way too much time worrying about what hypothetical future employers might think about something.

Yes, it's possible some future employer might take offense to what they said and throw their resume in the trash. It's equally likely some other employer with an equally awesome opportunity will agree with them and admire them for having the guts to speak their mind and with 10 bland inoffensive candidates and one who was quoted in the NY Times, they'll choose to call the latter. As a bonus, they're probably going to get along much better with the employer who liked what they said.

You can't predict how some imaginary future people are going to react. Be true to yourself and let the rest work itself out. Optimizing to try and please the sensibilities of every imaginable person is both impossible and miserable.

I completely agree with you. When I was 19, I had far too many opinions and far too little wisdom.

The same is probably true of me today, now in my 30s, but I think at least the trend is positive.

What should the age limit be for publishing snarky comments?

The same age that rental car companies have converged on for "enough" judgement to have developed.

Personally, I was ridiculously vulnerable to influence by social groups between the ages of 16 and 25. So much so, that I impulsively joined the Mormon church and threw two years away trying to convert other people to Mormonism. I also wrote an anti-Microsoft rant in a newspaper editorial, since I was so caught up in the Free Software hysteria of the time.

Fast forward 8 years, and I'm ashamed to have the name "Brigham Young" on my resume, and I work at Microsoft -- hoping nobody ever runs across the misguided crap I wrote about my employer in that local newspaper.

Several of my colleagues wish some public things wouldn't show up in Google searches for idiotic things they did because of societal pressure before their "adult" brains fully developed. They really are much more reasonable and responsible people now than they were then.

Have you ever considered that some people do things when they are 16-25 that they aren't ashamed of?

So what? I'm sure Microsoft is happy they could win over a critic like that.

How sad for you. My judgment at age 18 was perfectly fine, thanks.

By point of comparison, at age 23 Horatio Nelson was the captain of a warship and responsible for leading hundreds of men in combat. Nowadays we're way too tolerant of young people who refuse to grow up and accept the consequences of their actions.

I don't really think about it in terms of an age limit. To spell it out, my quibble is that the reporter quoted these kids by name and got them to agree to have their picture taken for publication, for a story that will likely give at least some prospective employers pause at some point.

It could also have the opposite effect and make the candidate more attractive, depending on who's doing the looking.

It totally could! If any of these kids want to work as, like, the software engineer-in-residence at a social impact VC, having this come up in a Google name search might very well be a positive.

I think that people vastly overestimate how much detective work that employers do, when hiring people.

I don't think companies are searching people's Twitter or Facebook accounts for controversial statements. The furthest that most would go is to call up a reference or talk to a previous employer.

Hiring committees don't have time to scrutinize every little last comment that someone has made.

Scouring someone's Twitter history != Googling someone's name and browsing the first page of results.

The former is overkill, the latter is done by everyone

The only people to blame here are hiring managers who think the snarky comments you made when you were 19 are in any way relevant or representative.

Why would an employer ever even see this unless their hiring practices are so broken that they think it's a good idea to go looking for this kind of thing in the first place? And if that's the case, then, sheesh, I don't even know what to say. That's so silly that it's not even wrong.

On the other hand, maybe making a public pledge will help strengthen their ethical resolve in a year or two.

That's the idea behind this pledge, for example: http://neveragain.tech/ (though I've yet to see any of the Palantir employees actually quitting)

Is it "wokeness" or just ambition? When I was 19 I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I'm pretty sure being yet another cog in a 30,000-employee machine was not high on the list.

My intended point with regard to wokeness was that college is a place where there is limited downside to screaming your carefully considered, morally pure opinions from the rooftops. People accultured to that kind of environment often don't understand how people outside the college bubble will interpret their comments.

Just because there are no downsides to screaming you carefully considered, morally pure opinions doesn’t make them any less valid. Actually, I’d think the opposite: someone who’s dependent on getting a job at Facebook is far more likely to be be disingenuous in their criticism of the company than someone who has no reason to filter their views.

People seem to have this one backwards. They seem to think only people in the worst position get to make moral statements.

Except that's the opposite of how it works. Upholding morality requires leverage and power. Any person can be broken. That's not a good measure of validity of valid claims.

How about allowing teenagers to tag photos of each other drunk or high or doing something regrettable?

How about not actually deleting those photos from your servers when the kids request them to be deleted?

The 'kids' of the late 1960s included many college students and enlisted men who were against US involvement in Vietnam.

They were ridiculed for not knowing any better, for being 'young and naturally earnest', etc., though the exact phrasing used was different.

And yet, they were right. It was their elders who didn't know better.

Since it seems you are using an argument which is structurally similar to the ones used against the kids of the 1960s, it doesn't seem like it should put much trust in it.

Here's a famous snarky comment from a then 24-year old: "Don't trust anyone over 30" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Weinberg#%22Don't_trust_a...

“I was being interviewed by a newspaper reporter, and he was making me very angry. It seemed to me his questions were implying that we were being directed behind the scenes by Communists or some other sinister group. I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.”

I think it's short cited to come out in a public forum against any employer. I imagine hiring managers are Googling candidates, news sites tend to show up pretty high in search results.

I can't imagine that would come off well.

> I think it's short cited to come out in a public forum against any employer.

I mean, if you are saying you don’t want to work there, why does it matter if their hiring managers see that? Also, just from personal experience: I’m pretty vocal about my criticisms for Facebook, but that hasn’t stopped me from getting recruiting material from them ;)

They're probably not smart enough to get in, anyway. If they were, they'd go to FB, milk that huge salary, unload their RSU's on a regular basis, save and invest, and FIRE by age 35.

Signed, a CS graduate and FB stock holder with 500% return.

Is it possible that someone smarter than you doesn’t want to work at Facebook?

There are plenty of reasons, beyond ideological ones, not to want to work there. I don’t think I have any ideological objections to Facebook, but the product itself doesn’t interest me and I’m not a user.

> I don’t think I have any ideological objections to Facebook, but the product itself doesn’t interest me and I’m not a user.

I don't work at FB but I'm sure for a product of that scale even if you don't use or care about the product itself, there may be interesting projects for you to work on.

I also don't think I'd care to work on FB the product, but I'm sure it'd be interesting to get to use Haskell to fight spam and work with Simon Marlow. They also use OCaml for some compiler stuff that I'm sure would be interesting.

Just because you work on something interesting does not absolve you of the moral responsibility you have to yourself. And just because your project doesn’t seem like it will be used in one way today doesn’t mean it won’t be used to censor people the next.

> Just because you work on something interesting does not absolve you of the moral responsibility you have to yourself.

I agree and am not sure why you think I thought otherwise.

The person I was replying to said "I don't think I have any ideological objections to Facebook" which I assumed to mean they don't see any moral problems with Facebook.

I was merely disagreeing with the idea that someone's lack of interest in the exterior facing product implies there are no interesting projects for that person in the entire company.

I don't work at Facebook... I'm probably not smart enough, to be honest, and also don't have much interest in the product either. I just bought their stock after the IPO.

>Is it possible that someone smarter than you doesn’t want to work at Facebook?

It's definitely possible, but they'd probably be working at another top tech company or finance company (think Citadel, Google, Jane Street) or starting their own company instead.

Sorry, but yes, they probably are smart enough to get in. Or capable enough, which is the real thing that the wise amongst us actually measure rather than how smart one is.

Of the dozen or so folks I know at Facebook, I'd be excited to work with about two of them again. The others are...fine. Much like the folks Google hires now. They're fine.

Once you hit a certain point, you start hiring ditch-diggers just like everybody else. Because you've got ditches to dig.

Their standards for senior hires seem to be as high as ever. They seem to be unwilling to engage in the aggressive downleveling Google does, though.

I'm sincerely happy for your success, but a self-gratifying condescension on 19 year old students isn't a good look.

I found this comment to be really distasteful. Nothing about your "signature" proves you're any smarter than engineers that choose not to work at Facebook. It just makes you appear to be mean-spirited.

Not everyone wants to min/max their life, despite what tech striver lifehacker culture wants you to believe.

Assuming that money is all you give a shit about. That seems like an empty life to me.

You're making the assumption that all smart students would want to go and make money (if smart is even a good proxy for skills among college grads).

Some are motivated by other considerations, such as impact of work and work/life balance.

People can want things other than money, like the satisfaction that their work is going towards doing something positive for the world.

What do you think you'll be remembered for after you pass?

Ask my 3 adopted children.

I hope you don’t consider your children to be some twisted karmic balance for working at Facebook.

Like I said, I never worked at Facebook. I only bought the stock!

So you've financially supported Facebook. I don't see how that's much different.

Not directly. Since I didn't buy IPO shares, Facebook never got my money, though other investors did when they sold.