How can anyone work at Facebooks nowadays and have a clear conscience.
Is it just the salary? It is, isn't it? Just money. How depressing.
Is it just the salary? It is, isn't it? Just money. How depressing.
HN is so much of a echo chamber lately for some topics, there was a recent discussion about FB head of integrity leaving the company and the top comment and thread was a personal attack on the FB CEO's integrity without even understanding what an integrity team/dept does in these companies. I could just as well have been reading youtube comments. I see threads with some topics now and I can pretty much be sure to not expect to learn anything new or get a good discourse. Just people thinking they are better than others.
They have the power to choose not to work there.
Is one held to this standard if they are a facebook engineer? What about a FB bus driver? house keeping staff? kitchen or security staff, content moderators? contractors? Just trying to gauge the paycheck $ value at which the conscience should awaken.
It's like asking the frycook to quit his job because the CxOs lead the company to make very tasty but unhealthy food, it's so good it's almost addictive. Surely the frycook has a conscience, no? Soon all the frycooks in the world will refuse to work there and we would have solved the problem!
No, I don't think anyone should use any facebook tools either. It's perfectly doable.
The company needs to die.
If you have moral issues with a company, you should have it with all companies, regardless if one is more or less problematic. Otherwise, it’s just hypocrisy.
It’s virtually impossible for a company the size of Facebook to be free of controversies.
I'm sorry but if working for a FAANG is the only way for you to pay your bills you need to learn how to budget... How absurd.
They offer me a service which is quite useful: Keep me in some form of contact with long lost relationships I had while I lived in the UK, Germany and several cities in Mexico. I've done really good friends in those places over the years, and it makes me happy to see what's happening in their lives and even "react" to minor stuff that they post there after months of no interaction with them.
Before I had facebook (around 2004) I used to write an email every December to a list of friends I had from different places, just to make sure we had some contact. And I also used to ping them in chat (Windows Messenger), but the problem there was that the conversation was just "what's going on", "nothing here, what's going on there...." , "nothing". Whereas with Facebook, the moment one of my friends opened a tatoo place, I could write some small comment and we would "virtually hug" and exchange thoughts for a minute.
Regarding the "conscience" thing, Personally I don't see anything terrible that Facebook is doing. As long as people understand that this is the internet, and whatever you upload in ANY place in the internet is inherently public, all is fine for me.
I for one have taken interviews at Facebook with 0 intention of working for them just because they have a tough process and it is good practice. Wasting some of the time and resources of an organization that inherently evil also makes the world that much better.
Facebook said they'd prevent such errors in the future by creating an election oversight board. Despite the fact that they had four years to prepare, their oversight board took their first case... on December 1st, 2020, conveniently after the presidential election was over--and hundreds of millions of ad dollars were spent.
I'm sure that Facebook has teams working on privacy and good governance. This is basically a public relations spend for them. Their business model is collecting as much data on people as they possibly can and then selling ads based on that data. The idea that "overall the intention and effort is there" seems laughable at best.
But, as someone who seems to be an insider, do you have any information you could share that contradicts that narrative?
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/358102-franken-blasts-...
https://news.yahoo.com/facebooks-oversight-board-announces-1...
* spread of misinformation on the platform/genocide in Myanmar/election integrity - this to me is the scariest thing about FB, but also something the company is dealing with and working on and trying to get right. It's not an easy problem to solve either.
* Targeted ads - This really doesn't bother me. Tracking user interests/behavior and using it to serve ads they are way more likely to engage with, is creepy true, but also quite innovative and effective and the reason the company makes billions of dollars. It's hard for me to get worked up about showing users more effective ads. There are some interesting nuances around whether this should be opt in or opt out and giving users control over how their data is used. Some of this will be determined by laws which seems better to me then having it fall on individual companies. FB does give users control btw.
* Too much/not enough censorship - this topic is a complete shit show and no one agrees anyway on how much is or isn't enough. FB's stance is basically to remove hate speech and calls to violence and allowing anything else. I'm fine with that.
* buying out competitors like IG and What's App - it's normal for companies to do this and for the government to step in when it's too much
* Other misc. shady things - there's other things that come up from time to time. I agree that some of it is shady, but imo is standard for what you find in American capitalism: ruthless competition and cutting corners to get ahead as opposed to evil maliciousness towards users and subverting the law.
* Leetcode style interview questions - I have no problem with this whatsoever. The goal is not to ask difficult questions that trick candidates. It's to ask medium difficulty questions and hire people who can quickly and effectively solve them. Not everyone who fails the interview is bad, but the people who pass should be decent.
* Users getting addicted to FB and IG/it makes them unhappy - I don't have a strong opinion about this topic. I don't really use the products since they don't appeal to me. They do appeal to (a growing) many and I think it's a bit presumptuous to point to those people and say "but really it makes you unhappy." I'm open to studies and scholarship that say otherwise.
I'm not sure if I covered everything the OP had in mind, since they were not specific. Probably there are some other objectionable things I missed.
It is no different than Big Tobacco putting all kinds of additives and carcigenic substances on cigarettes to get people more addicted to it.
"Users seem happy", the same can be said about smokers and tobacco. The issue is not even with the smoking per se. If tobacco companies were simply processing the plant and giving users what people have done for hundreds (thousands?) of years, it would be fine by me. The problem of Big Tobacco is in developing the mechanisms where they stopped satisfying consumer demand and artificially creating it.
Facebook (not just them, you can include actually all of Big Media) is doing the same thing to people. I'd be ashamed to work on FB, or Fox or CNN just the same way I would if I were working on Philip & Morris
It's a little off-topic but honestly the idea that Facebook is somehow the the cause of all these modern problems is pretty tenuous to me. Most Facebook users don't go crazy & belligerent from use, the effects are not at all like the consistent & universal harm of nicotine and cigarette smoke. It suggests to me that Facebook might exacerbate existing problems, but it is not the straightforwardly harmful product that people claim it is.
They don't have to be "the cause of all modern problems" to be frowned upon. Just the fact that they are part of the problem and not part of the solution is enough for me to want to get rid of it and to think poorly of anyone that wants to work there.
This is where I stop agreeing with you. It is an established scientific fact that smoking is harmful to anyone doing it. Why are you confident that social media is also harmful or goes against people's self-interest? People choose to use it; they connect with people they know on it. Is there some study I'm missing that shows social media causes clinical depression or some other adverse affect?
editing: rereading what you wrote and it sounds like your issue is not that FB is harmful but that it is purposely addictive/getting people to do something they wouldn't otherwise. Hmm...when people talk about addiction like alcoholism, gambling, drug use etc. it's always connected to adverse affects -- like overdose, job-loss, divorce etc. The addiction interferes with a person's ability carry out their normal responsibilities. People are not becoming homeless because of Facebook addition. You could make a similar argument about caffeine which causes chemical addiction to change people's behavior but is widely accepted. BTW how do you feel about World of Warcraft addiction?
WoW addiction? Bad for sure, but Blizzard does not make more money in direct correlation with the time that the people spend playing, do they? Does a 3h/day gamer makes only half the revenue of a 6h/day gamer? I guess not.
Coffee companies do the same, their goal is that you repeatedly come back to consume more of their coffee, decaf or not. The more frequently and voraciously customers consume their coffee, the more money they make from coffee sales. You think they don't also market test coffee variations for popularity?
Almost every company in the world optimizes for more; more consumption, more usage, more sales. The idea that Facebook is somehow in a league of its own for how it optimizes is clearly not true.
I am using the term in the same sense you are. People feel dependent on their social networks, their apps and even declare to feel things akin to withdrawal syndrome when they are away from their devices or haven't checked their networks for updates.
And again, the fact that "other companies do similar things" is not an excuse, less so due to the fact that Facebook has way more reach and uses technology that can amplify their effectiveness infinitely. I don't have Starbucks baristas knocking on my door offering me coffee, I do have Facebook listening to conversations inside my house because of my wife's phone.
As for "being a great place to work" or "the tech": how much of soul-less drone one has to be to look at all this shit and still think "but the tech is cool and they pay really well!"?
However that being said, if I got an opportunity to work at FB, I would.
RIAA/MPAA does not have a body count. Patent trolls do not have a body count. Ballmer's Microsoft did not have a body count.
"Not having a body count" is quite a low bar for a moral compass, don't you think?
Of course it is. FAANG is just the 1980s Wall Street of our day. I can only pray that eventually people will realize how predatory and dangerous these companies are and decline to work for them. But Ivy League/Elite Uni grads only care about prestige and so as long as working there is seen as prestigious they will continue to sell their souls.
You might possibly be able to do something as a high ranking HR person, but as a L5 engineer, the amount of cultural impact you can realistically impart isn't that big.