On the flip side, how much are morals worth if you have the opportunity to be financially free?
There's also the opportunity to work on interesting problems.
Anecdotally, of course, I know a Meta engineer at the L7 level (generally staff engineer in these large tech companies). He makes over seven figures a year, 75% of that being from stocks. The money is there.
I'm sure there's overlap like people working on AR scraping images of people's homes to build better models but they also do a ton of research where they use open datasets.
I'm curious what this distribution is.
I'm also curious what the answer is for just average programmers. Meta has like 70k employees. Surely a lot of them aren't doing interesting stuff
It's not like one day all of Germany turned evil then a few years later turned good again. Framing things like that is unhelpful. It makes evil seem cut and dry. Trivial to identify. That's what authoritarians thrive on: oversimplification. Everything is easy, it's not your fault, "it's so simple, you just..."
All that accomplishes is letting evil flourish. Gives it time to grow and set root. You're just being dehumanizing yourself.
Don't help your enemies.
Don't emulate your enemies.
I got this exact thought IMMEDIATLY (yet again) and posted on it here as well, putting my two cents in.
This is totally unacceptable for a software engineer to implement features like this simply because their company told them to, doing what the company tells them to makes them money, so they do it.
No apparent thought into whether they are creating is harmful, or caring about it.
I've given up on any anger directed towards the company itself. They will make money any way they can. Now, the engineers who actually implement it bothers me, because it is clearly not something that should be built.
To me, I don't care how much I'm being paid or how bad it would be to lose my job at that time.
I would resign before working on features like this and deal with the consequences.
I think some people also tell themselves that they'll be agents of change and fix things from within but that almost always winds up being another self delusion at worst and impossibility at best. There was a certain amount of this on display in Careless People.
In the past, people aspired to work at cool tech companies. Devs aren't lining up to work at insurance companies. I never worked in the industry I went to school for because the only jobs when I got out of school were for weapons. At this point I feel the same way about social media, I would never work at such a 'make the world as bad as you can get away with' industry.
For employees it gets normalized at the first signal that your livelihood might be affected if you don't comply.
As someone who's privacy conscious, it's an uphill battle to convince co-workers to actually follow laws instead of trying to find loopholes.
I've worked at places who collect every possible data point and distributes it willy nilly in Excel spreadsheets posted in Slack. I raised it to a CISO and the response was "all that information is available for everyone anyway via the interface". I know a German company requires you to "accept" data collection and processing in order to settle a debt. I reported this to their legal department which I personally knew a person and they said they'd "look into it ASAP" two years ago.
In the end people just roll along with it. I know this is unpopular, but the only forward I see way to prevent this from happening seems to be using courts and tightened legislation.
um, what? meta does not have an easy interview process to say the least. Ignoring recent job market madness…engineers at meta, historically, could have easily found another job that was not as sleazy. EASY. So why didn’t they?
As another commenter mentioned, it “says a lot”.
But don't ask me why. I'm a troublemaker. I bring up this stuff, I talk to the CEO, I refuse to do stuff that breaks the GDPR or other laws, I got people to scream at me for being stubborn. Other people aren't like that.
I suppose $400k comp instead of $350k (making up numbers here) is worth selling your soul for these days? These are people with options, that’s ill i’m saying.
i’ll never understand…
This is obnoxious.
The internet will be a remarkably combative place if that is the standard you set for when someone calls you stupid - it'd be a lot better to only read that into a statement if it actually gets explicitly said.
But you can comprehend them, we all can. So it's just abrasive and annoying. You can express a conversational tone without being an asshole. You don't need to act like your conversational opponents are super far out there or crazy or whatever.
Apologies if it came across as obnoxious.
If Pavlov's dog gets a big fat steak everytime it bites someone ...
Marketing/advertising is an industry dead set on convincing everyone that that (Pavlovian conditioning) is actually all there is to how it works though. I can only hope enough people wake up and grow a spine sufficient for us to start severely ostracizing and impacting those of us that keep making it easier for our fellow man to be targeted by immoral, power hungry autocrats.
If that's all you can do, then I might as well go apply at Meta right now.
>You could also stop participating in the attention economy, rewarding advertisers and paying people who show you ads. But that? That's tough. It's much easier to hope that Meta realizes what a bad, bad boy they've been and judges all of humanity like the Third Impact.
Perhaps you think I haven't sworn off that bullshit? Perhaps you think you're talking to someone who hasn't snapped the Golden Handcuffs, and drawn a line in the sand that, goddamnit, this world may be eating itself, but I. Will. Not. Be. Complicit. Nor will I make life easy or fun for anyone who is.
You ultimately decide what your legacy is going to be, and if you're willing to let yourself be bribed into the damnation of your fellow men by building machines for those unworthy or completely untrustworthy in their use of them, that's on your soul. Not mine.
I'll starve and die to ensure what I could make, that could shackle everyone, does not get made. I'll suffer privation, hardship, and pain, that those who come after me, whether descended from me or not, can at least not have to retread the exact same ground, or suffer in bondage to some tech empowered autocrat.
Sleep well, sir, in your appeasement of the Golden Calf of our generation. But know well, that the smell of it will pervade everything you do, and your cruelty and callousness, and disconcern for your fellows will come around and be repayed sevenfold. The bank account ultimately changes nothing. The world has it's way of slamming down and humbling the high just as much as the low.
Or listen to the voice inside you desperately calling out that something is wrong about all this and start doing the hard and painful, yet right thing. Make the world hurt for these bastards. Stop taking the easy way out. Set your own bars lower, and chain your avarice. Refuse their baccanal call.
Sometimes, what we don't do matters more than what we do.
You hate ads? Surveillance drives you nuts? This is the consequence of a dysfunctional government. You can protest the businesses all you want, it's their job to be apathetic. Make a big show of it, take off your flair and tell your AWS or Apple manager exactly how much all it sucks. They'll nod, write it all down on a legal pad, put it in a folder and refer to it when your next employer calls asking for cross-references. It would all make for a very touching scene of career suicide, and then your replacement can have a technical interview scheduled in by the end of the week. That is the sum of damages you can enjoy as the fruit of your protesting this company.
It's funny how much Americans care about their legacy while doing nothing worth remembering. A Microsoft employee who donates their disproportionate wage to an animal shelter is doing more to benefit the world than some shmuck who got mad at capitalism for the fly in his soup. John Carmack worked for Meta, and still has more of a legacy than every "hacker" on this site combined. If your identity is so shallow that it's defined by nothing other than the person who pays you, you have more serious issues than finding an ethical employer.
(I know this wasn't your main point.)
If understanding that it’s wrong to invade people’s privacy is incompatible with keeping your job, you probably won’t understand it.
Pretty sure this is illegal, and probably a liability e.g. if it came up in court.
I'm pretty sure if the debt itself ever goes to court, the debtor can argue that they can't even enter the website. On the other hand this company is a bit of a shitshow so good luck having the website work haha.
What they see is dollars now but not dollars later. Often these data issues can rise to the level that it could destroy the entire business. You might be called a party pooper, but truth is people like this want to keep the party going. It's hard to understand that sometimes keeping the party going means saying no. But it's just the same dealing with drunk people, say no by saying yes to something else. Like presenting another solution. Though that's way easier said than done...
Just remember, everyone is on the same team. People don't say "no" because they don't want to make more money. A good engineer says "no" a lot because your job is to find solutions. It usually sounds like "I don't think that'll work but we might be about to...". If you stop listening without hearing the "but" you can't solve problems, you can only ignore them. Which *that* is not being a team player.
We're always rushing and the truth is that doing good is much harder than doing bad or "evil". I put it in quotes because it's very easy to do things that are obviously evil post hoc but was done by someone trying hard to do good. So I find this language to be a problem because it is easy to dismiss with "I'm not a bad person" and "I'm trying to do good". Truth is that's not enough. Truth is mistakes happen. We work with asymmetric information. It only becomes your fault when you recognize and don't take steps to fix it (or active ignorance).
Sometimes things take nuance. Sometimes it takes more than a few sentences to convey. But who reads longer anyways?
But the baseline is really bad.
There's an expression: normalization of deviance.
This is where we are now. People idolize others because of their wealth, and that wealth is always gained by means which are ultimately harmful to the greater population. Even the wealthy philanthropistMS which will remain unnamed acquired their greatness by cheating and stealing. But as long as you make a great show and give it all away eventually (while living lavishly the entire time), you look good.
To me that sounded absolutely absurd and a freaking caricature, something out of "American Psycho".
Today I was just discussing with a friend how we're perhaps even more materialistic and cut-throat...
Hope is about finding and using that moral compass. To change worse outcomes to better outcomes for everyone. The “I’ll take mine” or “My group needs to win” attitude is poison to yourself and to the world, and if you don’t see that your conscience is blind or broken.
This is nothing new, in numerous books on moral philosophy and people who have been in these situations have spoken out on it.
I don't see a way out, though. I just hope we can leave a planet for the animals.
EDIT: On the other hand: the internet is already a dystopia if you look closely. Maybe it will prove to be a fad and people will go back to their lives. One can hope!
Corporations disagree, as long as your death will be profitable.
An entire generation of critics tried to appeal to a new market and money suddenly became synonymous with quality.
Naturally artists stopped caring about authenticity, sharing their beliefs. And also about the critics.
Just as music was replaced by reality shows in MTV, music journalism was entirely replaced by gossip and tabloids.
Offering customers lower prices is a way to gain more customers. Software allows for automation and efficiencies of scale. The end result will be a few big organizations that win, without cheating or stealing. (Although, there most likely is cheating or stealing due to other factors).
But I would not classify the success of most larger modern businesses solely due to cheating or stealing. It was simply being at the right place at the right time and executing correctly to take advantage of developing technologies to take advantage of economies of scale.
In this specific case, I know my family and friends benefit greatly from the “free” instant communication and file transfer capabilities that Meta offers (WhatsApp). There obviously might be costs, but international communications have been made far, far cheaper and higher quality due to WhatsApp.
I can pull out usual godwin's law plug but I guess we all know what would be there. People like to feel great about themselves, its subconscious. And if slightly tilting reality in their favor can achieve that then what's the problem, right. Again, this is not a conscious decision so most don't even notice that, and who would complain about feeling better about themselves.
Old enough, when you want to see such things like these biases in people around you, its very easy once you start looking for them. I guess we really are all heroes of our own stories (but what I mention is far from uniformly distributed, some folks are really stellar human beings and some opposite)
Markets are a heuristic based around mediating between the interests of different parties precisely because the problem is computationally hard. If markets could achieve the optimality you're thinking, then top-down central planning would also stand a chance of working.
A big house, a fast car, more money.
Where else in SV are you going to go anyway? Every company does the same thing.
If you value money over other people, it's a great place to work though
"Everyone does it" is as much of a cope as "less bad". You are still covered in shit.
That's like saying mechanical engineers can only work at Raytheon or Lockheed Martin. Or biotech people can only work at Purdue Pharma.
There are companies in SV who are making products for actual users. Just look outside adtech.
Employees just want to make it to the weekend. Execs want to hit their targets. Sales dept. needs their bonuses. The board wants to pump valuations.
The PM tried shopping the task to other teams, but nobody took the bait after I raised it publicly, and both legal and the external law firm sided with me after about three months of delay.
In the meantime I raised the topic of yelling with HR but every step of the way the company made me feel like I was the one in the wrong for not complying.
I believe if I were meeker I would probably have complied right there.
Like someone mentioned below, it's unrealistic to expect people to think about second or third or nth order effects of their job. Heck, those effects are not even visible in 90% of cases.
To answer your question, the engineer at meta is just building a graph database. It takes a `void* node_data` as argument. Another is just building a kafka-clickhouse data pipeline that can transfer so many millions of `void* message`s a minute. The android engineer is just improving the percentage of requests without location data by using wifi ssids as fallback. The CEO just sees "advertising revenue WoW" in his dashboard. And so on. That it is actually being used for spying is many steps away from each of them -- OK, in the case of meta I'm sure the employees know to an extent. But it's still very different from the feeling they would get if they were doing the end-to-end task themselves.
It's the same thing with other questionable products. It's split up sufficiently across the supply chain that no one is actually aware enough of the task end-to-end.
In some cases, the same participant in the supply chain will be a supplier for something really good and necessary..but they will also be a supplier for something despicable. In this case, it is easy for everyone involved to sweep the latter under the rug.
As far as I have thought about it, there is no way to get rid of this larger problem without also losing the (unfathomably massive) benefits.
Anything these companies know, the FBI and CIA can know, without a warrant thanks to FAA702 (did we all forget about PRISM?).
The state now has leverage over almost every normal citizen, thanks to what these companies have built.
Turnkey tyranny. Built by silicon valley.
There are plenty of things you can do for money that are not (or are significantly less) unethical.
Would someone explain in plain language what is wrong with an app listening on a port for messages from the browser? It seems like a helpful asynchronous method to maintain state between browser and app.
Morality isn't a consideration.
That’s generally the case for everyone I know who works there.
- "I didn't write it, I just had the idea"
- "I didn't implement it, I just made the prototype"
- "It wasn't my product, I just fixed some bugs with it"
- "I can't track everything in these implementation updates, I just work with what I am given"
- "I didn't collect the data, I just deal with what is in the dataset"
Likewise, when we blame IBM for supplying the Nazis during WWII, we're not decrying the enthusiastic early database workers. They aren't the problem; executives without morals are.
Well, you're not. However:
Black reports that every Nazi concentration camp maintained its own Hollerith-Abteilung (Hollerith Department), assigned with keeping tabs on inmates through use of IBM's punchcard technology.
suggest that a good number of these "early database workers" were working directly with Hollerith codes on human flesh and tasked with the identification of Jews, Roma, and other ethnic groups deemed undesirable by the regime, along with military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity.
You might argue they are no more responsible for concentration camps than concentration camp guards, but these are the people punching holes in cards and filtering them with knitting needles while looking out the window at piles of shoes and gold teeth to tabulate.
workers, especially professionals, have a duty to not do that bad work, and to make sure that that bad work doesnt happen
amongst other things...
What Meta does to society is more insidious: it gets people addicted to content so it can make them eat a poison for their minds, so-called ads. Surveillance is just method of making the ads more invasive, tailored to each user individually.
That's the onramp to normalization: "If the users didn't like this, they'd stop us."
What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? You're spying on people, no? Surveilling ordinary people, not enemy combatants or foreign militaries? Perhaps a friend of a friend or even a family member? This kind of thing is so creepy and disturbing to me, not that it’s anything new…