I looked at your blog; you seem like a talented, driven person. Why not apply those gifts to something meaningful? Why spend your limited working years building tools for this horrible company?
What's that Upton Sinclair quote? Ah, yes: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I recognize that it might not seem fair to take this position, but understand that it's an easy one to take when I look at FB's negative effects not just on the world, but on the lives of actual people I know. It seems unlikely to me that a disinterested party could truly weigh FB's positives and negatives and think the balance is positive. But you are far from unbiased, and I hope you can at least realize that.
Facebook has done a lot of good, but IMO there is no question that it's done more harm.
And Zuckerberg is a crazy person. There are a lot of people I wouldn't want to ultimately report to, but Zuck is right next to Larry at this point.
Not a great way to argument against someone who disagrees with that point
It's hard to square that with the algorithmic feed, likes, etc, which are making the world worse every single day in favor of engagement metrics. We've known for many years how destructive these are.
Facebook and Twitter could literally make the world a better place simply by disabling those kind of features. Just remove them. It doesn't get easier than that to substantially improve the world, yet it's not being done.
I'm not sure about that. I agree that the world might be better, but I'm not sure they could just disable them. The next smaller competitor who won't will have more user engagement and grow. If something is a very effective advantage, I believe you can only remove it by coordinated action and enforce it on a global scale.
Modern weapons are terribly efficient at killing people. But if you're the only country that's removing them from your arsenal, you depend on the mercy of your neighbors.
If you don't want to make the world a worse place, you don't do it. Hiding behind such logic means you're really just virtue signalling.
And it's not like people don't like it. They "want" to be engaged, to feel anger and surprise etc, those systems work because they're catering to peoples' instincts and desires.
Incidentally, this is why Google+ failed -- it was a social network marketed to the kind of people that hate social networking :)
Wow, that's a very racist/sexist statement and you don't even leave a hint about why you think it's true. Worse, it reads like you expect it to be obvious. What about a person's gender or skin makes them "a bad demographic for social networking"?
Edit: Also presumptuous of you about the HN crowd. Where would you even get those statistics? HN doesn't collect that data.
Whatever internal discussions you're having, they're not working. I'd posit that they can't work, because FB's entire business model is predicated on user-hostile, polarizing behavior, whether anyone internally will admit it or not.
It frankly does not matter one bit what things are like internally when externally we can see the harm FB has caused, and there is zero evidence that harm is going to stop.
That being said, it’s a good idea to understand why the pay is so high (and it’s not because they’re nice people who only want the best for their employees):
You will be expected to leave moral qualms at the door. This an unwritten rule at many companies, but Facebook had to write it. That says something.
You will be expected to work for it. Hard. The people I know at Facebook easily put in 1.5-2x the hours I do at a FAANG-ish (late nights and weekends seem to be the norm), but get paid roughly 1.5-2x what I do. If that’s a tradeoff you’re willing to make, go for it. I however am making more money than I know what to do with, and thus value all the time I’m not working (hobbies, travel, side projects, etc) way more than the money I’d make from working during that time.
At the end of the day you aren’t going to singlehandedly destroy the fabric of society all that much in your first year, so you’re fine making the above sacrifices for a year or two for some quick cash then fucking off to pursue some real interests, go for it. But I sincerely warn you against sacrificing too much of your life (youth especially) and morals for money —- it really isn’t as valuable as it’s cracked up to be.
It sounds like, from reading your comment a couple times, you know what is right but are tempted to ignore that and take the cash.
It's therefore hard to see how taking this offer would not be choosing to sell your ethics for money and success, given that you could likely land a well paid job anywhere.
Usually you see someone say something like this when they're presented with truly awful options. Seeing it used to refer to a $400k comp package is a bit jarring.
And if you've made it through FB's hiring process and they've given you an attractive offer, I find it hard to believe you don't have other options that don't involve a big ethical quandary, or wouldn't if you interviewed around more.
I used to loathe Facebook and like Google. These days both seems about the same. Facebooks policy to leave people alone deeply resonates with me even though I still dislike them intensely for what they did to WhatsApp.
And for what it is worth, Facebook unlike Google hasn't insulted me for a decade with the ads they show.
As a screw in the Facebook machine, your significance is trivial. This is true regardless of your intention.
Get over the ethnical drama I would say. Big tech is about as ethnical as banks. In another word, the companies don't care, and they are probably not.
I have worked for a lot of start-ups, including several that grew to become significant giants in their segment of the internet. Facebook has been the only one I worked at where there was a group of employees whose job was to create posters to hang up in all of the offices telling everyone else how important and worthwhile it was to work at FB -- looking back I think this level of internal propaganda should have been a warning sign.
Sounds like there's nothing left to abdicate.
No normal company is going to sign _any_ contract provided by a prospective full-time employee (except perhaps if you are a sought after celebrity being hired at a VP level or above), so it would just be a waste of time and money for someone to take your advice.
Even if the hiring manager personally wanted to, there is no process for doing this. They don't have lawyers standing by to review such contracts. It would probably be hard to even find out who would have the authority to sign such a contract.
Further, retaliating against whistle-blowers is already illegal, as is ordering employees to break laws, so I don't know what additional protection you imagine you would get from such a contract.
Agreed. To take my advice, you would need to be hired as a contractor/consultant. Normal companies do this all the time.