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Comment by shosko | Hacker News Reader

Why would anyone want to work for Facebook these days? When you are maintaining the largest advertising stream since TV while actively destroying society's discourse, I'm not sure what redeeming qualities it has. I think the most important thing any of us can do is get away from Facebook and move towards pursuits that fix problems, including the ones Facebook helped create.

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They have some of the highest salaries, according to levels.fyi. They've also produced cool tech like React. Developers I know who work there seem pretty happy.

Plus, most people seem less concerned about the negative effects and/or basically believe they can be fixed or mitigated.

Not to mention Pytorch. Hottest deep learning framework.

Pytorch is great. Best thing to come out of Facebook IMO.

React is pretty high up there as well.

The people who believe facebook is the most evil company in the world are a fairly small minority. Most people who work at facebook believe the company is positive or neutral, and are happy to be able to work with smart people at a place that is really nice to work at, and get paid a lot for doing it. Some people have qualms about what facebook is doing - I think they move on for the most part. (Source: used to work there, left for personal reasons).

There was also a time when Facebook was just a random website run from a dorm room. Just like Facebook itself grew, so will the group of people who dislike it. And the trend can only go in one direction, because as Tim Cook said "If I were running Facebook, I wouldn't be in this situation".

>>Most people who work at facebook believe the company is positive or neutral

Yeah, you can be smart without having any guts (to demand change). That many Facebook employees still believe the company is positive or neutral is a good example of this.

My wife has been doing taxes for a few people at Facebook (including engineers and PMs) -- many of them make an absurd amount of money. (>$800k / year)

I deleted Facebook, and it’s still finding ways to annoy me.

I'm not sure if it's a fiduciary duty of an accountant not to disclose this kind of stuff, but it should be.

As long as she doesn’t associate names with those salaries in the conversation, i don’t think it’s unethical. Or she doesn’t act on those salaries and commit some kind of security fraud, it’s just a conversation.

It's no different than with an ER doctor. They can say "some idiot wearing a McDonalds uniform came in with a bottle stuck in his ass" but they cannot say "John Smith came in with a bottle stuck up his ass."

That's great for the ones that make that much, but this kind of information is what's causing Bay Area housing and rent prices to sky-rocket. I have worked with multiple engineers in two large corps and most people make anywhere between 100k and 200k.

So we should all just hide our salaries for the sake of the housing and rent prices?

No but we should be careful not to make it seem like 800k salaries are the norm.

They certainly aren't, which my original comment emoted. The reason people continue to work there has a lot to do with their absurdly high salaries.

>Why would anyone want to work for Facebook these days?

Money, maybe?

Other commenters are saying money. I think they also have a lot of people who joined as a first job, so FB is all they know, and they are not (yet?) cynical. This is true of all the other megacorps as well.

If you do front-end development then FB is one of the best companies to get on your resume, mainly because of React.

Money, FB pays better than almost anyone else.

Because deciding presidential elections around the world isn't the kind of thing one usually gets to do.

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