It was fair reasoning but I always thought "you are a bright engineer, you don't have to be the person figuring this out, you could be taking your skills elsewhere and hopefully the oil industry will have to settle for worse talent."

Yes, Facebook is valuable in many ways to people but do you, personally, need to be the person aiding the mining of information? If you are upset about the deleterious effects of Social why don't you work for Netflix? Or any of the other similarly compensated companies. You don't have to work for a 'social good' company but there are absolutely well paying companies out there with a neutral effect on society. Working at let's say Stitchfix or Salesforce or Microsoft doesn't make you a martyr but shit, at least it's not Facebook!

I don't think my friends are evil for working in oil but I think there are alternatives to do less evil in the world. That same MechE working on oil could find just as challenging work elsewhere. If you are a talented ChemE how about working on batteries or pharmaceuticals (even tho that industry is shitty for other reasons, the output at least helps people stay alive.)

I don't eat meat at home now but I definitely get it when I'm out at a restaurant. Eeek. Occasionally she gets all 'cmon man' but usually it's OK.

Why not say: These are people experienced with systems that work well. Maybe they can bring those workflows over and improve the company when they come here.

Not everybody wants to work at places like that, or with people like that.

What's the point in them bringing technical expertise to your environment if they poison the culture with their amorality and venality?

Money isn't everything, some of us know that, some of us don't care.

Assuming the premise, natch. :)

If you are a Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram employee, you must know by now that these companies won't change by inside forces. If you work in these companies, you are an accomplice of everything of bad that is happening in the world: from climate change apologists, the destruction of Amazon by Brazil's government, the killing of black people by American police.

Quit. Now.

Personally, I question people’s moral judgement if they work for a company I deem evil and will dissassociate with them. Why wouldn’t I? Others with different values can do differently.

If there’s a thing I’ve learned in life is that reality is extremely nuanced and passing blanket judgements like the above is almost always bound to be wrong.

This mentality is extremely dangerous because it cuts both ways: imagine companies discriminating against employees because they believe abortion is a right, or because they are strong 2A supporters or detractors.

If we go down this path, we _all_ end up losers. Attacking the employees is really not the way to go, in the end, they are the ones with the least leverage to influence anything.

Your rant is unhelpful and applies broad stereotypes and assumptions to a lot of people. You also strongly imply you've never worked at a SV company, so you don't even have first hand experience here.

Then how come only people at FB are protesting and no one else?

I would be shocked if even one of these people leave.

It’s just sanctimonious grandstanding. This is how you get lots of internet points while even further exacerbating the very same problem you’re railing against.

And that’s coming from someone who agrees with you.

In this particular instance though, I am implying that OPs righteousness, devoid of nuance and juvenile in its simplicity, is indeed wrong. And I wouldn't work at an organization whose staff was curated by such a faulty logic.

Unless this is about G attacking FBers, yeah, that has been fun to watch. As usual the FB'ers are pretty silent about everything. Couple of "hi i work for fb and want to leave what should i do" posts but that was all I really saw.

Huh, wonder why I'm worked up.

As a reader of Hacker News, it'd be quite hard to imagine you don't have at least have an understanding of some reasons to dislike Facebook or Silicon Valley. Not agreement, but at least an understanding. Every week it seems there is something posted for both topics...

The funny thing is Twitter gets roasted for taking the opposite stance... There's no winning

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23378204

Oh and phone company employees we are the worst :-)

"We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company."

That is ... literally what CVs are for.

What's so crazy about judging a resume by its contents? Why even submit one if it's not meant to influence the decision?

Last I checked that's time and time again what companies hire on based on every study, lol.

Your issue seems to not be at all with prior work history, but hiring based on ethics. Given how much that is applied to arguments here on HN that are relevant to technical work, that seems at the very least like a valid factor that can absolutely effect work.

As to your example, the big difference here is that you jumped to a conclusion about the person's activities that doesn't seem very reasonable to assume based on their employment history. The parent went company worked at -> tacit acceptance of their actions as a company (again, there's nuance here that should always be explored) -> possible negative effects on future job.

Seriously? That's pretty much the whole point of a resume, for an employer to discriminate based on work and education history.

It sounds weird when said in a negative way, but it makes all the sense in the world when you think of it "positively", like "of course companies should prefer to hire someone that worked at a top company or graduated from a top school".

I think it’s totally possible Facebook can have been censoring things that don’t break their TOS for years, individuality at FB can be punished in favor of groupthink so attacking them for company actions isn’t right, I also don’t need to like FB in any way. The world is grey.

Is CNN immoral for reporting what he says? Is my Dad immoral for telling me what he says, becuz it might lead to harm?

Don't shoot the messenger.

https://www.google.no/amp/s/www.wired.com/2016/09/norway-rig...

Or do you think that Nudity should just be prohibited and Facebook should be 4chan? Or maybe Facebook should hire 20 million people to decide picture by picture which ones are OK?

For the scale that Facebook is at, they do an amazing job of keeping the peace.

https://youtu.be/ATmQj787Jcc

Please watch this talk and realize Facebook is thinking really hard about what to allow, and how there are tradeoffs for any approach.

I feel the same at a personal level and Facebook is far from the only company on my mental list there, but with any of these it is not a categorical judgement or an immediate eliminator of someone in any situation.

But they're fine right now. And my twitter is full of people who have been laid off recently and NEED gainful employment. If unemployment were where it was 3 months ago I wouldn't have said a word, especially not this firebrand.

Take the big bucks, take the criticism.

Edit: your racial jibe has no place in intelligent discussion.

And continue doing so each day.

do fb employees think they get paid enough not to deal with the moral and ethical issues their work creates?

Do Apple users generally care about open source? Do they care about quality hardware? Are Apple users Nerds?

Sure you can find an exception, but when you compare to the majority of users, you can find similarities.

Spoken like a lover of freedom and someone who should be upvoted to the top comment.

Either way, saying that FB is bad and their devs are immoral and you would prefer not to hire them because they demonstrate their lack of backbone by not standing up to Zuck is a pretty ironic thing to be posting anonymously.