Alternatively, you may be working very close to the issues at hand and watching traditional media distort the facts and social media lie about them may have caused you to distrust both.

For example, it is commonly parroted (even here on HN) that Facebook sells your data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28760228

My old roommate works there on a database/storage team. They are pretty insulated. He doesn't directly interface with the product-side. Sure perhaps on some level he could look at his role and say he's enabling mass collection of user data. But at the end of the day he has no interaction with the actual filesystem contents or what they mean. They're just bits flying around.

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" ?

Similarly to working at the database team of an online casino or gambling site. Personally, I wouldn’t want to work for such companies or FB no matter what salary.

>at the end of the day he has no interaction with the actual filesystem contents or what they mean. They're just bits flying around

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.

Only a few posts below this is one where someone unironically equates Facebook engineers defending their choice of employer with SS officers defending their part in the Final Solution.

Welcome to HackerNews.

More like r/news at this point.

I used to work in defence. A colleague of mine said that he didn't have a moral problem because "we didn't make things that went bang".

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.

There is this movie called 'Cube' that deals with this problem.

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.

IBM just flipped some bits for some Germans in the 1940s.

No biggie!

> It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/