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> are insulated enough from the bad PR to not feel bad about it

You'd have to be living under a rock to be able to make that excuse.

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" ?

>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.

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.

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.

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

No biggie!

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.

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

> 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/

Ha. Yes. I was just going to write this (in reply to jacquesm's comment above, and also in reply to his parent commenter):

"No, it's that Upton Sinclair quote about salary that is the reason", but you beat me to it :)

When will people learn? Always look for the motive.

As they used to say (and maybe still do) in detective novels, "cherchez la femme", which is French for "search for the woman", i.e. the reason why the crime (of passion) was committed.

Well, we know how much your morals cost, then.

You're missing the point... completely. Until unethical behavior doesn't pay dividends, people will engage in that unethical behavior. Ostracizing them to any degree less than the sex offender list offers fails at 'making it not pay dividends'.

Snide comments are useless, and posting a snide comment in response to a post literally saying that snide comments are useless is hilarious and ironic.

Give me a break. Most of us aren't dropping everything to go join the Peace Corps, we want to live a comfortable life, and by no coincidence, most of us work for assholes. Nearly any sufficiently old company has its share of controversies (this includes startups, they're just smaller so they're not as publicized).

I will agree that Facebook's controversies are a bit more egregious than most, but at the end of the day I don't really see how a random Facebook engineer is substantially worse than an engineer who works for Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or Lockheed Martin, or <insert large corporation here>. People just want to make a decent living, not change the world.

However, I think there's plenty of blame you can place on the decision-makers at Facebook (most of the executive level team).

Have you read Solzhenitsyn's "From Under the Rubble?"

It has a section called "The Smatters" where he derides Soviet Russia's intelligentsia for being cowards that would trade physical comfort in return for sacrificing their soul and morality.

This is in contrast to "Old Russia's" intelligentsia, that would canktankerously fight and even sacrifice themselves and their personal needs, just to uphold their own (many times removed-from-reality) ideals.

The former's "pragmatic nihilism" of only taking cares of one's self and one's interests is mirrored today among our society.

That's not to say I'm any better.

I, too, am a coward.

I mean, I said in a sister thread that I do think there could be an argument that me working for an awful corporation does enable them and I am at some level responsible for their actions, but I don't know that it's realistic to expect someone in the corporate world right now to drop everything and only work for ethical people right now...our entire society is somewhat based around us working for evil corporations.

I agree that it's unrealistic to expect.

But there is something intoxicating and sublime in being unrealistic.

Nobody is asking for that burden or level of effort, just not people literally out to actively exploit... everyone.

But that's just an easy argument that keeps the status quo. In a western society today may be impossible to escape some big "evil" corporation, but there's a major difference between having no choice to participate in the system and willingly choosing to work for said corporation. In the case of Facebook someone who works there may not be directly responsible for its actions if they're not at a very high level but they are directly condoning them by working for Facebook and helping further its mission.

I would absolutely give you a break if you don't join the Peace Corps. I won't give you a break if you choose to take a lucrative job at Facebook. This is not a black-and-white issue.

>I will agree that Facebook's controversies are a bit more egregious than most

So, I would posit that working at Facebook is, thus, "more egregious than most" other jobs. That's the point here. Nobody is saying that it's either work at Facebook or join the Peace Corps. I, personally, think an engineer at Facebook is contributing more harm to society than an engineer at any of the other companies you mentioned, yes. Substantially worse? Depends how we define that. But, worse? Definitely.

>I don't really see how a random Facebook engineer is substantially worse than an engineer who works for Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or Lockheed Martin, or <insert large corporation here>. People just want to make a decent living, not change the world.

The Nazi SS officers also used this line of arguments during the Nuremberg trials, that they were just "following orders from above, with no choice in the matter (other than the choice to voluntarily join the SS for personal gains), just like the soldiers of the allies; what's the difference that makes them the bad guys?"

My point is, you can make big tech bucks at other places as well, nobody forces you to work for an evil corp, you choose that voluntarily. And there are other less evil places you can work for.

I knew this was going to come up because this is the internet, but I don't think this line of reasoning applies to every arbitrary Facebook engineer.

The Nazi soldiers tried at Nuremburg were directly murdering the Jews, and so "just following orders" led to a direct harm. However, I don't think that logic went transitive for forever; did we execute the secretaries that took phone calls in military Germany headquarters? I don't think we did, but you could argue that they helped enable all the murders.

Similarly, if a person's entire job at Facebook is to contribute to Presto or React, I don't really view them as guilty as a person who worked on all the data-harvesting stuff, and way less guilty than an executive making the decisions.

>did we execute the secretaries that took phone calls in military Germany headquarters? I don't think we did, but you could argue that they helped enable all the murders

Unlike military members of the SS, their secretaries didn't really have the power to send people to their deaths or perform executions.

Isn't that what they are doing? There was a story not long ago about a lady in her 90s who was a secretary at a death camp at 18. She's being dragged to court.

It's here: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-96-year-old-nazi...

As long as a lack of money is able to present a serious danger to one's quality of life, health and well-being, money will always win over not having/getting money.

> money will always win over not having/getting money

This statement could benefit from less certainty. According to Stoics, a non-virtuous life is not worth living. They would prefer to die rather than earning money in a non-virtuous manner.

Stoicism is the philosophy of aristocrats and emperors. Marcus Aurelius could afford to deride money in a way a middle class person can not.

Epicletus was born a slave and was also stoic. Stoicism is a great philosophy, and not just for the rich

You might want to reference the Cynics instead, since it's a bit easier to be stoical when you already have money, power and status, as another poster pointed out.

I appreciate the personal evaluation. I worked at Google for about 6 years, and left to make half as much money working on open source software. I can't find a single thing that HN would disapprove of, except maybe banning all the cryptominers that appeared all at once after our product was discussed here ;)

This is not much of a hardship for me personally, because half of a lot is still a lot. It wasn't HN that factored into my decision to leave, though, that's all I'm saying.

I'll add that the majority of my colleagues at Google actively opposed the things that HN thinks is evil, and still do. You can steer things in the right direction from the inside perhaps more effectively than from the outside. You know the tradeoffs and can suggest a reasonable compromise. That's engineering in a nutshell. No doubt, Google has tens of thousands of engineers that think just like the average HN reader, and are working hard every day to steer the company in that direction. Maybe you're not satisfied with the results, but at least they're doing something about it more impactful than typing screeds and sending them into the ether.

>People work at Facebook because they offer among the highest salaries, and are insulated enough from the bad PR to not feel bad about it

I'm curious how you draw a line between "the bad PR" and everything else at Facebook? Are you distinguishing the media coverage of the company as a separate thing that employees have to deal with other than the actual actions the company takes, and the ramifications of its real effects on society?

If someone is "insulated from the bad PR," does that mean they are insulated from anything working with or enabling the bad actions/effects? Or just insulated from the "PR"? If the former, how could we possibly make that distinction with an organization as large and complex as Facebook? How can you be so sure that anything any given employee touches does or does not connect to the bad effects on society? If you just mean insulated from the "bad PR," then can you see why history might look unfavorably on someone who hides the greater negative effects of their actions from themselves?

> I think the blame is misplaced. People work at Facebook because they offer among the highest salaries, and are insulated enough from the bad PR to not feel bad about it.

Would you say the same if they were say peddling crack to kids, that hey it pays better....

If all one cares about is money, then yes, it is one's fault and the blame is correctly placed.

> open source project of theirs that collects diagnostic information from NTP servers

What’s this project and what data does it collect? Pretty much every device connects to an NTP server, so this is intriguing.

I don't understand your point. Are you saying that things like Linux and NTP servers can be used by an evil organization, therefore people who work on them are partly to blame for the resulting evil? If so, I disagree. There is a pretty clear line between working to improve the Linux kernel and working to get more children and teens to use Facebook.

No, the opposite, that many of the people working for evil organisations are not doing evil stuff, but instead maintaining kernel drivers or whatever, and they don't concern themselves with how exactly the money that pays their salary was generated.

He is talking about engineers employed by Facebook who are working on linux kernel.

I've never bought an ad on Facebook, and yet it continues to run, and Facebook won't comply to non-US laws, and will almost certainly have a large influence on whatever regulations are put in.

Your suggestions are even more toothless than banning Facebook engineers from the local bars and breweries

Facebook won't comply with non-US laws? Are we talking about the EU or China?