I think that's a bit harsh. You may think Facebook is terrible, but it's not so clear that everyone ought to agree with you.

If someone was working for organised crime, everyone should agree that's real social ill and should be discouraged. There's enough evidence on the table, over many years, about it.

The FB story is still unfolding. We're still in the process of hearing exactly what was done, and arguments about how good or bad it was.

Changing jobs is a somewhat big decision. Let people have a little think about things before you shame them for not making the leap when you - a guy with no skin in that game - decide FB is untouchable.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we can neatly divide tech workers into good and bad. Likewise for companies. All categories are non-empty, and certain to remain so. What's the optimal assignment of workers to companies? Is it never beneficial for a good person to work at a bad company, perhaps making it less bad? Is it never harmful for a bad person to work at a good company, perhaps making it less good? Is it better to have all of the bad people concentrated at a few companies, or distributed throughout the industry?

Once you start thinking about it, I think you'll see that the Manichaean "entirely and immutably good or entirely and immutably bad" model just isn't very useful. Maybe we should talk about good vs. bad behaviors instead of demonizing (or for that matter idolizing) people - especially large groups of people in aggregate.

This is a microcosm of our political environment where when one subjectively determines the weight of harm, they attempt to objectively apply it to others. Sure, FB does immoral things. But why can't we simply recognize that people disagree about whether harm exists, whether value exists, and what weights are applied to each? As you say, this is not clear good vs bad, this is some good vs some bad and at what levels.

This is a really important point. Political movements often attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a differing value system, but that doesn't rile up your base like proclaiming the other side is evil.

I should remember this myself :)

Evil is only meaningful in the context of a value system.

Malice is will for things which are evil.

Valuing something positively is willing for it to transpire.

Valuing something negatively is seeing it as evil.

Valuing something positively that others value negatively is, therefore, exactly malice in the context of the others’ value system (it's not wrongly attributed to malice.)

Sure you have, you just have the ability to log in. ;-)

Agreed. But these same arguments could be made by many terrible people throughout history. Associating with and assisting those who do bad things is bad behaviour.

Society is incentivised to restrict people who show a tendency towards assisting destructive behaviour. We aren’t at the point where everyone voluntarily at Facebook should be seen as dirty, but we’re closer to that Enron moment than many there would like to think.

Some people have determined that Facebook is an organization that's producing bad results. Socially shaming employees, removing the status they might have hoped to acquire and spiking attrition are tools being deployed to change Facebook's behavior and the behavior of Facebook's competitors.

You might claim is that this strategy can't positively affect Facebook's incentives, operations, or effects. But nobody should be distracted by navel-gazing or fancy philosophizing.

If there are people who've found a good strategy for changing companies for the better without being exceptionally senior, i'd love to hear about it.

Facebook is a democracy-threatening, attention-wasting, extractive institution, with a deeply unethical leadership. Most tech companies are neutral -- Amazon, Microsoft, Uber etc., I assume they're doing business for profit and not social good, but they do provide value and largely play by the rules. Some other companies I would classify as "good" as they provide considerable value to society as a by-product of doing business, like Apple and Google (disclaimer: I work for Google, and I am quite happy about that).

Facebook is the only large tech company I can think of that is just plain evil. There's no other like it. It's in a league of its own.

That's an interesting thought. If carried to its logical conclusion, the 'good people' had many, many, many years to influence the direction of the company, and whatever little 'less bad' the 'good people' are doing is being completely negated by the 'more bad' that the not-so-good people are doing. So I think its fair to conclude the 'good people' are completely inept when it comes to their ability to effect any kind of meaningful change from inside of FB, and should probably leave en masse. After all, given such across-the-board ineptness, what's going to change tomorrow that couldn't have already been changed yesterday?

Facebook is going to face a massive recruitment problem from here on. To paraphrase Richard Hamming, "the only folks left there are the moral dregs".

You might be surprised. After only a year and a half, I'm rapidly approaching a point where I've been there longer than 2/3 of my peers. There has been a huge influx of new people with new perspectives and new voices. Admittedly that's weighted a bit toward the low end of the individual-influence scale, but collectively all those people can make a difference.

Here's one finding

> Facebook used Onavo to conduct global surveys of the usage of mobile apps by customers, > and apparently without their knowledge. They used this data to assess not just how many > people had downloaded apps, but how often they used them. This knowledge helped them to > decide which companies to acquire, and which to treat as a threat

Here's Onavo's wikipedia page last edited in October

> Facebook has leveraged Onavo's analytics platform to monitor the performance of its competitors, > target companies for acquisition, and make other business decisions.

> Media outlets classify Onavo as spyware.

If I am following this correctly, it would be similar to Google creating a Firefox extension to enable "extra privacy," but secretly pumping the data back to Google? Or if Windows Defender sent all your web usage data and keystrokes to Microsoft?

I'm not sure how this doesn't fit the definition of Spyware?

I'm sure that things like that factored into the decision to buy YouTube, for example.

Onavo was a company that tried to sell VPN access to reduce data costs, found out that didn't make money and pivoted to selling reports to publishers and advertisers.

Then FB bought them, and treated them like an internal survey organisation. It's a shame really, Onavo could have been the Neilsen of the mobile age, in another timeline.

But yeah, people use data (especially private data) to make decisions about their business and others. News at 11.

Most ads are normal ads from legitimate businesses including a lot of small and local businesses who find it very valuable for reaching their customers and growing their business.

The recent rhetoric and news coverage acts as if Facebook is entirely full of fake news and echo chambers and political manipulation when the truth is while that stuff is happening it's a minuscule percentage of the billions of posts per day.

Ah, the old Sundar Pichai maneuver:

>"Yet, a little more than a week later, Google CEO Sundar Pichai attempted to invoke an engineering defense by arguing that Google would not need to censor 'well over 99 percent' of queries."

Does it apply to the people using its products, softwares, services?

What's the ethical threshold for using reactjs for example in this scenario?

Not sure what point you are trying to make, though.

It's garbage. Companies should employ them and pay a fair wage, but they don't.

I can't quite tell you what digital literacy is, but I know that responses along the line of "do you know how a modern microprocessor works in detail?" are silly, because many people can read and write without being historians or etymologists. And even people who can't read or write often can speak and understand a whole lot. Contrast that with some priests mumbling in Latin, with people being subject to things they aren't allowed to understand.

So maybe knowing what files are, what memory is, what a program is, having their own webspace and email, stuff like that would be a great start. And the start to that is to stop pretending that's unattainable, or that "people don't want that". If they knew what it entails in the long run, most of them would want that. And people do much more complicated things than running a website. People raise children, they drive cars, they raise and train dogs, they work in the garden, they remember all sorts of stuff about sports, and so on. Most jobs require a lot of complicated edge-case knowledge, too. So knowing what an URL or a file is, and maybe some HTML, is trivial compared to that.

If people could get 20% off on all T-Shirts for the rest of their life if they had their own website, most people on this planet would have a website before the end of the year. I exaggerate, but by how much I'm really not sure.

What does "evil" mean? Or are you just saying that the entire tech industry is evil?

If you work for Facebook and don't just clean the offices you had the choice.

Shame on everyone.

And? If you're not proud of the impact your work is having on the world, than you shouldn't be doing it. You only have one life. Why waste it on making the world a worse place?

I had an easy and well paying job working on an IT project at DHS. I left after the child separation thing started, even though I wasn't working on anything related to that. It just disgusted me to go to work every day.

Thank you!

Everyone needs to work somewhere, you know, and not everyone has much of a choice about where.

No shame in putting food on the table for your family.

Balderdash. Don't construct situations where people just shrug their shoulders and go along with morally inequitable because they're getting paid for it.

Besides, no one's throwing up their hands and saying "Gosh, I really messed up this time! I guess the only options left are working at Facebook or sucking dick under a bridge!"

But honestly, if you work at FB, you definitely have options. So no, this POV does not really apply to people at FB.

And it’s not just engineers. Cleaners, cooks, maintenance people.

Nope - visa transfers when changing employer aren't subject to the visa cap and don't have to go through the lottery. At present premium processing is suspended so it can take up to 6 months, but that's not always the case.

(as if what you describe would even be a valid excuse)