It is hard to understand the breadth of scope of the FAANGs. You read in the newspaper that Google exists to turn over dissidents to the Chinese government, but there are plenty of engineers working on making the Linux kernel more secure, or providing gigabit internet for $79/month. Should those engineers quit and go work on CRUD apps for some startup at half their salary? It doesn't make much sense, and that's why people don't do it.
(I don't know if the scope of Facebook is similar to that of Google, but I imagine it is. I submitted a patch to some open source project of theirs that collects diagnostic information from NTP servers. Are those people really to blame for targeting their product at 6 year olds? No. They just want to work on interesting projects for a great salary, and hope that whatever bigger system they're part of works out.)
Basically, it won't be effective to be an Internet Tough Guy and tell all Facebook employees to quit. They won't do it. Make their work illegal (regulate), or make their work unprofitable (stop buying their ads), and the problem solves itself.
You'd have to be living under a rock to be able to make that excuse.
For example, it is commonly parroted (even here on HN) that Facebook sells your data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28760228
So, should the graphic designers of the emoji buttons feel responsible for misinformation? The CDN/network folks keeping the websites available? The janitorial and cafeteria staff for cleaning up and feeding the "monsters of humanity" ?
Whatever helps him sleep at night I guess. I doubt history will make this distinction when talking about "legacy," as this sub-thread is.
>"monsters of humanity"
You have to realize that this exaggeration contributes poorly to the discussion, right? Are you seriously trying to satirically hyperbolize the characterization of Facebook's effects on society in order to make it seem like people are overreacting to the whole thing? This is a wild take on the matter, to me, in 2021.
Welcome to HackerNews.
We actually worked on training systems for soldiers. Technically, we didn't make things that went bang. But we enabled their use. So I didn't personally believe that we could escape the moral dilemma using that argument.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/
The short version is that a bunch of tech people are asked to design all kinds of man-traps, the buyer then combines the various traps in a shifting maze and the techies are kidnapped and dumped in the maze trying to survive their own creations.
No biggie!
I will agree that Facebook's controversies are a bit more egregious than most, but at the end of the day I don't really see how a random Facebook engineer is substantially worse than an engineer who works for Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or Lockheed Martin, or <insert large corporation here>. People just want to make a decent living, not change the world.
However, I think there's plenty of blame you can place on the decision-makers at Facebook (most of the executive level team).
It has a section called "The Smatters" where he derides Soviet Russia's intelligentsia for being cowards that would trade physical comfort in return for sacrificing their soul and morality.
This is in contrast to "Old Russia's" intelligentsia, that would canktankerously fight and even sacrifice themselves and their personal needs, just to uphold their own (many times removed-from-reality) ideals.
The former's "pragmatic nihilism" of only taking cares of one's self and one's interests is mirrored today among our society.
That's not to say I'm any better.
I, too, am a coward.
But there is something intoxicating and sublime in being unrealistic.
>I will agree that Facebook's controversies are a bit more egregious than most
So, I would posit that working at Facebook is, thus, "more egregious than most" other jobs. That's the point here. Nobody is saying that it's either work at Facebook or join the Peace Corps. I, personally, think an engineer at Facebook is contributing more harm to society than an engineer at any of the other companies you mentioned, yes. Substantially worse? Depends how we define that. But, worse? Definitely.
The Nazi SS officers also used this line of arguments during the Nuremberg trials, that they were just "following orders from above, with no choice in the matter (other than the choice to voluntarily join the SS for personal gains), just like the soldiers of the allies; what's the difference that makes them the bad guys?"
My point is, you can make big tech bucks at other places as well, nobody forces you to work for an evil corp, you choose that voluntarily. And there are other less evil places you can work for.
The Nazi soldiers tried at Nuremburg were directly murdering the Jews, and so "just following orders" led to a direct harm. However, I don't think that logic went transitive for forever; did we execute the secretaries that took phone calls in military Germany headquarters? I don't think we did, but you could argue that they helped enable all the murders.
Similarly, if a person's entire job at Facebook is to contribute to Presto or React, I don't really view them as guilty as a person who worked on all the data-harvesting stuff, and way less guilty than an executive making the decisions.
Unlike military members of the SS, their secretaries didn't really have the power to send people to their deaths or perform executions.
This is not much of a hardship for me personally, because half of a lot is still a lot. It wasn't HN that factored into my decision to leave, though, that's all I'm saying.
I'll add that the majority of my colleagues at Google actively opposed the things that HN thinks is evil, and still do. You can steer things in the right direction from the inside perhaps more effectively than from the outside. You know the tradeoffs and can suggest a reasonable compromise. That's engineering in a nutshell. No doubt, Google has tens of thousands of engineers that think just like the average HN reader, and are working hard every day to steer the company in that direction. Maybe you're not satisfied with the results, but at least they're doing something about it more impactful than typing screeds and sending them into the ether.
Snide comments are useless, and posting a snide comment in response to a post literally saying that snide comments are useless is hilarious and ironic.
This statement could benefit from less certainty. According to Stoics, a non-virtuous life is not worth living. They would prefer to die rather than earning money in a non-virtuous manner.
I'm curious how you draw a line between "the bad PR" and everything else at Facebook? Are you distinguishing the media coverage of the company as a separate thing that employees have to deal with other than the actual actions the company takes, and the ramifications of its real effects on society?
If someone is "insulated from the bad PR," does that mean they are insulated from anything working with or enabling the bad actions/effects? Or just insulated from the "PR"? If the former, how could we possibly make that distinction with an organization as large and complex as Facebook? How can you be so sure that anything any given employee touches does or does not connect to the bad effects on society? If you just mean insulated from the "bad PR," then can you see why history might look unfavorably on someone who hides the greater negative effects of their actions from themselves?
Would you say the same if they were say peddling crack to kids, that hey it pays better....
If all one cares about is money, then yes, it is one's fault and the blame is correctly placed.
What’s this project and what data does it collect? Pretty much every device connects to an NTP server, so this is intriguing.
Your suggestions are even more toothless than banning Facebook engineers from the local bars and breweries
On one level it seems very alluring--pay, technical challenges, being at the cutting edge of new technology. But for me those points can't counteract the role fb has in society and what people generally think of the company.
Culture is important, and it starts at the top.
This comment lit a fire under me. Thank you.
Some of my closest friends started as work colleagues, and since I retired 8 years ago I still talk to a half dozen or so, with a couple talked with daily.
You (nor I) are not everyone, and extrapolation from our own viewpoints is very nearly always invalid.
Overall boycotting both of these companies is easy because replacement products for everything they do is plentiful, widely available and the same price. Not much sacrifice here.
Nestle is the dietary equivalent of Facebook & Cambridge Analitica. [1][2]
If this was even remotely true Facebook would have had a massive impact on its usage since its consumer based. It would seem weird that the Facebook brand is so tarnished to the point that the population would still be users but at the same time tar and feather loved ones who maintain it.
Over my career it is somewhat impressive how true this has been. Across companies that say very similar things about what it means to be an employee of X, the behavior of execs and senior leadership ripples through the ranks in obvious ways. When statements from high-level people are empty or specious, you can expect to encounter the same in your own management chain.
It only takes a moment to remember this each time a FB recruiter pings me. Couldn't I be one of the people working on solving these big problems and making XX% more while doing it? It's a false choice.
which is what exactly? if they didn't like it, they'd be leaving in droves. tech nerds are really the only ones upset about anything that FB has done/is doing.
instead, the average person looks at what they get from FB. most of them never, not once, think at about what cost. to them it is free to use, and that's all that matters. raising privacy concerns goes no where. manipulating people's emotions isn't really doing much negatively to FB either. addicts are like that though. deep down, they might actually be aware that what they are doing is not good for them, but that isn't strong enough to fight the addiction.
This was from 2019 and their public image has definitely not been improving. So to say it’s “only tech nerds” is a straight up lie.
If you asked someone about a teacher or some other adult trying to manipulate a kid, they'd obviously say that it is bad. Telling them FB is doing it with what posts they see, they don't respond the same way. They just don't get how an "al-go-rythym" can be so bad. They don't truly understand the ramifications of the hoovering up all of the data they do. They shrug their shoulders and say things like they are okay with it as long as it's not real money.
So, I stand by my stance saying it is only tech nerds that truly get what is going on here.
The mass populace is not stopping their use of FB regardless of what's in the news or what these polls say about their views of FB. From the evidence, one can only surmise that people don't truly care what FB does. Most addicts don't care what their drug dealer does as long as they can get their fix when they need it.
So now we will have
Instagram by Meta, WhatsApp by Meta, Occulus (actually Metaverse) by Meta
Ignorance is bliss.
Look at the poll yourself, linked at the bottom of the article. Facebook 36% positive, 33% negative.
Of course their public image has not been improving, as there is high frequency campaign from newspapers and TV news to attack their competition. CNN in particularly has wanted to deflect blame to Facebook for all of the free airtime CNN gave Trump in 2016. However, it seems to be quite a stretch to extrapolate from 2019 survey that listed 33% negatives for Facebook.
It's 2021, if you really, genuinely don't understand the power of network effects by now then there truly is no hope for you.
I actually anticipated your diatribe, but decided against making that part of my original comment. Yes, there's "no where" else for them to go blah blah blah. However, some people do actually decide to walk away from it for their own personal health/sanity regardless of how it affects relationships from not being on the platform. We see these comments all the time about "I quit FB x years ago". I'm one of them because of what I know about FB.
Having morals does cost money.
And yes, I do think less of the 'typical' FB employee. Everyone's story is different and I'll listen, but the presumption is that working there means being OK with enabling genocide for a nice paycheck.
I used to work for Apple, but they didn't really ask my advice on how they should charge people on the app store, or how they should make it difficult to repair the phone, or how they should throttle phones if the batteries get worse. I was just a mediocre software engineer working a mediocre job that paid relatively well. Should I be blamed for all the problems listed out before if I didn't contribute to any of them directly?
Maybe, and I do think there is an argument to be made for that, but I don't think that's how most people think. Most people are relatively happy to blame the executives of a company with an understanding that regular salaried workers are more or less stuck with what they're doing.
Everyone likes to blame Facebook, but no one wants to blame themselves when they're one of the 2.8 billion using Facebook.
Everyone likes to blame oil companies, but they drive cars and have plastic all around them. I worked at an oil company for a few years. I sat near the environmental engineers who were doing their best to make it clean as possible. HN readers want to hate oil workers for doing their jobs but then turns around and still demands cheap oil.
Would you have worked for an oil extraction company, like Shell or BP?
Would you have worked for the NSA? A defence contractor? The military itself?
There are plenty of technical roles in these sectors, with (at least in Britain, where I studied) a big presence at careers fairs, recruitment events etc. But I, like all my friends, ignored them all.
Someone else I knew joined GCHQ. He was keen to catch criminals, defend British interests etc. I wouldn't do it, but at least he had considered the morality of it and decided it aligned with his own.
Working on something without any care for how it's used, or what is being built... these people deserve criticism for their complacency, at least.
The only people that will judge are other swe
Netflix has to be some saint in comparison. MS just now is starting to be a wanna-be Googlesque spy and has a history of screwing competitors over, not the people in general.
The real offense is that it's been 20 years since then and congress hasn't trust busted any of these companies that have committed way more egregious sins. Apple has your device locked down such that you can't get an app on your own phone unless it's been approved by them. The charger changes every few years so you need to buy a new one, and iphone screens crack notoriously easily. Google and Facebook are competing for who can collect more data on users, but Google's more entrenched by providing services that people need to use like email, search, internet browsers, maps, a phone. Facebook's trying to have a monopoly over your online social life.
Microsoft's brand is strongly B2B, which is lucky for them because businesses 1. have a lot of money to spend on your service, and 2. are unlikely to make very public critical statements about you the way an average Joe consumer would. It's a great position so they're doing everything they can stay entrenched. It makes sense that their biggest sins are in being anticompetitive; they hit the jackpot and are trying not to share it.
Everyone I know who works at one of these companies is a great, smart, kind, talented person -- including those at Facebook. We need better consumer protections and to break up their monopolies.
* Hard to escape Facebook's online tracking but adding this to your host file should do it https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...
** Sorry for this hyperbole, it's only sites using adsense that are guilty and adblockers work wonders.
Also, it's surprisingly cynical to say that people don't put their interests above society -- most of the people I know have taken on work and hobbies that don't maximize their personal gain, because they'd rather improve society somewhat.
Calling it $30k is wrong, but not very wrong.
Also note: “The U.S. Census Bureau also reports the median income for each family. In 2019, it was $86,011.”
(Note I didn’t double check numbers above, they were just the first I found from Google results).
The census specifically doesn’t ask for income for children below 15, so perhaps that is the meaning of the sentence above, and per capita calculation does include kids as $0 income for calculating median - although that would be weird IMHO. Unclear, and I got bored looking for exact details, so gave up quickly!
I work at Uber, another company whose leadership historically made some very questionable decisions, and not once did I ever get holier-than-thou crap from acquaintances. And even if I did, I have enough internal perspective to appropriately call BS or disregard people who think parroting 5 year old articles constitutes having an educated opinion on the company today.
Another similar example is Microsoft. They were demonized extremely heavily a decade or two ago, but these days, claiming that working there is a reputational stain would be pretty laughable. LinkedIn, Groupon, AirBnb, etc all had negative press at one point or another. But if you work in any of those, the most common reaction is "Oh, cool!"
Every major tech company does all the same shit Facebook does, the rest are just lucky that FB takes most of the heat.
Tell me, what exactly has Facebook done that is so bad compared to Google, Amazon, or Microsoft?
> Tell me, what exactly has Facebook done that is so bad compared to Google, Amazon, or Microsoft?
You're angling to absolve Facebook here, but I'll flip that in the other direction. They all deserve a healthy serving of contempt, and frankly it's the reason why I never respond when Amazon and Google recruiters come calling 3 times a week.
https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1450000616202248193
But what separates Facebook from the others is the utter lack of shame about what they're doing, and the fact that Zuckerberg has no accountability due to the arrangement of voting shares. That makes them uniquely dangerous.
What separate's Facebook is their namesake product is too close to the source of controversy. Google's "public facing" products are things like search, YouTube, gmail, google docs. Amazon has 2-day shipping and prime video and such.
When people think of Amazon/Google they think of that first. Sure, they're doing all the same controversial with their products. But in my experience, the average non-tech person has more buffer for that, when there's a bit of separation between the brand identity and the bad behavior.
A lot of non-tech people aren't even aware that FB (Meta?) owns Instagram and WhatsApp - that's the kind of tolerance buffer that the other FAANG has for _all_ of their main products.
In this sense, the rebrand to "Meta" might actually work a bit.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc have flaws but their business models don't depend on creating conflict.
I think the news feed concept is super entertaining and a great way to keep in touch with friends.
Facebook intentionally tuned their algorithm to maximize revenue. Not happiness or customer satisfaction. Just money. At great societal cost.
Back in the days of AOL you could use Juno or whatever to send and receive email from AOL users if you weren't interested in the platform.
FB, Google, cloudflare, and a few others control way too much information flow, globally.
CNN only gets like 2 million viewers on a good day.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/technology/whistle-blower...
There is plenty wrong with FB, but this all seems like trying to pin a root cause to something b/c we need something to blame. Maybe correlation, but I don't see the causation.
Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...
Their own research shows they know the negative impacts of their platform.
Hypothesis: Instagram causes teenage girls to have a lower opinion of their bodies than they would otherwise have without Instagram.
Study: Have 2 cohorts of teenage girls rate their appearance or happiness with their bodies. The two cohorts are separated by those who use Instagram and those who don't. Run independently, of course.
This study is incredibly flawed (like the original) b/c it is self-reported happiness (incredibly subjective, ephemeral, and prone to bias) and subject to the same issues as all qualitative research. The only way to get any semblance of reliable data is with a _large_ set in each cohort. Even then, the data raises more questions than answers it provides. But, you could say after this study whether 'it seems Instagram may be harmful.'
It is also flawed for other reasons but you get the point. You don't need insider info to study the effect of something.
IOW, they are not equivalent. I'm sure we can glean something from those studies, but to get an answer to the question we're asking now, you'd need a better study than Facebook's own.
[edited for clarity]
I actually know of no study that conclusively attributes a cause to suicide, so this point is moot in both directions. Do you?
And that aside you're not forced to work for FAANG. Plenty of small companies around who do good work in healthcare or what have you, or national security, the defense sector and other public sectors desperately looking for engineers.
Plenty of work to do that is more meaningful than getting kids to click on ads.
here's a pretty extensive article about it, no idea where they advertise these.
https://www.reuters.com/business/amazon-hire-125000-workers-...
I honestly don't think so. Were all ex-Enron employees considered unemployable or even immoral? How about Union Carbide or tobacco concerns?
I also think it’s naive to assume reputational stigma won’t weigh in on hiring decisions.
3 years ago I was seeing a lot of candidates with Uber resumes. It wasn’t surprising that they were trying to leave, but it was surprising it took them so long. I would wonder if they were unable to get hired elsewhere.
I always did my best to give a fair interview but it’s possible bias crept in.
I have not worked for Uber, but my experience at other big tech companies is they're viewed fine too for engineering talent.
As for non-engineers most of my family/friend group views facebook/similar very positively. Facebook remains largest social media by a ridiculous amount. Nearly 3 billion MAU is something no other social media company comes close. They certainly have negative sentiment too, but there are tons of people happy with them. I have worked at one company that some friends did show negative view and that was tiktok (mostly because of china concerns). Tiktok as worse then facebook in perception and even for tiktok it was still mild thing. It was never a job concern with both of them I found myself in demand anyway.
"every company does bad things and therefore they're all equally bad, phew, now I don't have to leave my cushy $300K FAANG job where I push microtransactions to little kids" is not very convincing.
It comes down to greed and prestige; that's all.
Facebook didn't start off targeting 6yos. Once you go public, you're on a treadmill to keep delivering profits for Wall Street. So who's to say that the new startup you join will continue to be this angel who does no evil?
"Tragedy of the commons" much?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
> the idea that "they can easily just get a job somewhere else!" is a fallacy.
Actually in today's tech driven world, this isn't hyperbole. There are more than enough opportunities for talented technologists to find opportunities outside of Facebook.
Even then, I'm not evening actually alluding to those companies - I'm talking about other tech start-ups, smaller companies, etc.
I can't take your comments seriously anymore. This isn't true by any stretch of the definition of "significantly less". Please do some basic research: https://www.glassdoor.com/research/jobs-companies-2019/
#1. The pay is very close to top in the industry, hedgefunds/netflix pay usually more.
#2. Getting to work on products/features that are used by millions and sometimes billions of users, not many companies can offer that to a candidate.
I personally am hounded by their recruiters but will never work there due to moral objections about their leadership and their companies effect on society. That being said I am not judging people for working there, everyone has a free choice to make and some people may not have my convictions and there are many great people who do work there.
Do you know anyone at FB? I know several engineers at FB, and it's a fallacy to think they can't easily get offers from many top startups, and other FAANG companies.
Arguably it's so much worse to work at FB, because if you can work at FB, you can clearly work at many decent companies that aren't doing this sort of stuff.
I am sorry, but funding random shows that people might not like as Netflix does is quite below the "evilness" meter of setting up ways to target 6 year Olds.....
The fact that you are even trying to equate these as being anywhere the same, at least in my eyes strongly strongly undermines your capacity to make moral judgments
People making weapons are not smug do-gooders. It is pretty clear what a gun or cigarette does to people.
> Or fossil fuel companies.
Views move slowly. Hopefully Facebook will be viewed as the asbesthos or lobotomy of the early 21st century.
For reference, I'm a dropout and therefore struggle with abstract algorithm problems like the ones they dump on you to solve in 30-60 minutes in interviews. I certainly can solve them, just not in that kind of timeframe, but that is now a common expectation in order to achieve a certain level of (mostly unrelated) problem solving and income.
Regarding peers, first, if it becomes an issue just take it off your resume. Second, don't work with those people. Go somewhere else that pays well and work with other mercs instead of people working for free soda to save the whales.
As to future generations, as long as you take responsibility for it your grandkids will think it's pretty bad ass.
Kids: Grandpa, what did you do for work?
Grandpappy: Well, kids, let me tell you about the time that grandpappy came up with this algorithm that reduced obesity in America by several points and made millions doing it. Big Ag wasn't happy about it, but dietpills.com loved it.
Kids: Legend.
I suspect it might be like that. A small percentage of people would nix you, but you would never know. Compared to something like the porn industry, which I've heard is death to a resume.
As for peers, what exactly is your obligation to them?
well clearly there aren't better opportunities because no one is loyal like that - they would have obviously quit if there were better opportunities.
Edit: sp
I do not equate Facebook engineers with actual Nazis, but what seems more likely to happen to me is something analogous to the "Clean Wermacht" myth. I think anyone who isn't directly and publicly implicated in especially egregious actions is going to have all the deniability and technical skill they need to remain an attractive hire in most cases.
With the agency most tech workers have, the behaviour of their employers really reflects on on the employee.
Then retire after 5 years
edit.
Or maybe quit to other faang after years
In order for Facebook engineers to be judged by future generations:
- there would have to be future generations
- they would have to have accurate information about what Facebookers have done
- they would have to live in functioning democracies where accountability is possible
The result of Facebook/Meta's efforts, intentional or not, will be to prevent any of these eventualities from coming to pass.