Well, we know how much your morals cost, then.
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).
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.
But there is something intoxicating and sublime in being unrealistic.
>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.
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.
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.
Unlike military members of the SS, their secretaries didn't really have the power to send people to their deaths or perform executions.
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.
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.
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.