Newish dev doing my first attempt at a FAANG interview. Wondering if I should be trying for FaceBook as long as Im bothering to study. Had a very positive-feeling convo with a recruiter there ~6mo ago before "Meta". Sounds like it might be a negative thing to have on your resume now though?
Any thoughts?
Some people get extremely sanctimonious about the latest thing their politics or corporate "news" media or the current popular trend on twitter gets them riled up about. Of course they will never face up to the fact that the companies they work for and buy from are neck deep in politics, consumerism, advertising, influencing, the war industry, corruption, greed, etc., too.
These people aren't nearly so brave or numerous in the real world as they would have you believe though. If you personally feel okay working for a company then I wouldn't bother worrying about the opinion of hypocrites.
I do know one or two people who think and care very deeply about this stuff and they (to some degree) put their money where their mouth is by attempting to avoid and not support these things they disagree with. They are typically the last to point their finger at others.
I've been at Meta for 3+ years. I'm also interviewing. I have somewhere between 4 and 8 offers right now (not a humblebrag, just the facts). Not a single interviewer (from junior engineers to directors and VPs of engineering) asked me anything remotely like "Why are you still at an awful company like Facebook?"
The plural of anecdote is not "fact", but that's my experience: for engineers, it's still seen as a positive, or at worst, neutral.
But it’s certainly a factor when I’m reviewing resumes.
FAANG on your resume is an instant disqualification.
Honestly sounds like a bit of cope, especially if you've tried hiring in the past 10 years.
Largest? 400-1500.
Smallest? 30-70.
Compensation was highly variable.
FAANG employees are liabilities best avoided, everyone in leadership positions knows it.
Are you working in Europe as part of an old tech / non-tech company and the most you've ever made is $300k/yr or are you actually competing on the same level as big tech companies compensation wise where director+ who manages 300-500 makes $+1m/yr?
There are highly paid small places that are not FANG that still pay FANG or better, but they have really high standards. I want to know if your one of those, or one of those who as part of an ego protection cope say FANG is bad.
Now if you were a startup manager, yeah I can get why you might want to avoid FANG because you don't want people with big company habits in your small company that is trying to go fast, but usually those people say that out right, and they also tend to explicitly hire FANG types to scale their engineering org after a certain scale, because startup style stops working after your engineering org gets to a certain size.
I literally know a couple of unicorn founders in my personal life. They don’t think that. You’re full of shit and are probably a shit leader (if you’re not bluffing) if you make categorically false statements with such conviction (much like the former president).
It’s tens of thousands, tops. And let’s be honest, most of them are highly overrated.
> because they happened to work at some huge companies
Because they made the choice to work at some incredibly evil corporations. Give them some credit, they didn’t sleepwalk into their roles. They did it for that fat cash, and they sold their morals out to do so.
Jokes on them, I have the “fat cash” now and get to choose who I hire. Turns out I’m not a fan of the people who sold out.
FAANG are not incredibly evil corporations.
They are average evil, and incredibly successful.
If you are CTO at another company and you think your company is less evil, it's probably just less successful and you’re blinded to its evil by your vested interest in changing the “less successful” part.
> I haven't worked at FAANG
I doubt that.
> but I most definitely would not want to work for a company like yours.
You do you. But I make sure we pay way above average, I want the best people and the best people don’t work for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.
But I’ve definitely made mistakes, and so far every hire I’ve honestly regretted worked for a megacorp prior to me hiring them.
Given the diversity of rewarding roles available to them, the best people aren’t pressured to accept morally compromising positions.
My point is I make sure my companies pay well. I want every employee to feel like they’re robbing me.
But I also want to make sure that I have as few employees as possible.
That said I appreciate your attitude here. These companies are civilizationally damaging. It’s good to keep repeating that. I’m just not sure your approach makes sense.
Not sure what makes Netflix evil, though. Clue?
“ I want the best people and the best people don’t work for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.”
Tell me when you hire a Yann LeCun or Jitendra Malik. Your claim is random shit-talk that’s not verifiable.
in which case it isn’t selling out. It is living life as an average person getting through life
I do my best, but I fully admit I am not perfect in this regard.
> allowing for atrocities like DuPont, never buy anything with Teflon in it,
I completely agree with you here. The leadership of these corps should have faced serious jail time for C8 contamination.
> We're all in the same exploitative evil system, get off your high horse and stop judging people for being employed.
I get it, but look at it from my perspective. I have a lot of money. I can hire people based on X or Y. I have the luxury of selecting skilled, amazing people who did not work for the system. Why would I see that as a bad thing?
Is it only FAANG, or are there others that you blacklisted? E.g. is MS on the list as well? How long is the list? Genuinely curious.
They might not ask you to your face to explain things like joining a company right after it got #metoo-ed, but if they care they’ll absolutely be thinking the question.
Then it’s entirely possible you work for an immoral mega corp and your judgment has been compromised by your paycheck.
Let me put it in a more blunt way you are more likely to understand. Your team is interviewing someone who was a process engineer on the deep water horizon oil spill. You’d probably feel gross hiring someone whose incompetence poisoned the Gulf of Mexico.
They did a fraction of the damage that FAANG engineers do to our society on a daily basis.
I'm seeing several of your posts here and it seems like you are making the inference "worked at FAANG" -> "horrible person", and while I have never worked at FAANG I have many friends I respect who have, and eventually left though it took some time.
It feels like you might be making an ad hominem attack here.
They are negative value add employees and I’ve yet to find a better way to filter them.
Working at Facebook as a software engineer is a choice; just like working at a bulge bracket investment bank is a choice.
The type of people that choose to work at either of these two are (more likely than not) people who do not have morals or a sense of character and values.
In my experience, being a good person only works when you're interacting with good people. If you're a good person interacting with a "bad" person, you tend to get a worse deal -- and if not alert, will unconsciously "sink" to their level, and start mirroring their behaviors in order to not get a bad deal.
Sooner or later, you're surrounded by "bad" people and have become a "bad" person yourself, simply by moral "osmosis," all because a few "bad" eggs spoiled the quiche.
I have been the type of person that naturally gravitated towards the "money money money" professions, because I did not have any strong role models to build a value system. Now that I'm out of that moral rut, I do not wish to go back. Just like an ex-addict who decides not to associate with other ex-addicts, because the chance of relapsing increases exponentially: I do not want people without any moral compass dragging me back down to their level.
I like the way things are. Things are good. Associating with Facebookers will make things bad. I don't want things to be bad.
I've tried very hard to express this viewpoint, without making value judgements, but it's moot: I have standards for what it means to be a good person, and Facebookers do not meet my standards -- so I won't associate with them. I won't hire them. And I will avoid collaborating with them.
Thank you, exactly this
Not actually true for early career SWEs, especially those that switched from a non-CS field. Because FAANG relies so much on coding puzzles, they are often the best option for someone that is self-taught without formal training. Since they often have a large recruiting pipeline, they are often the easiest places to get interviews without any connections, too.
I would also add that their ability to sponsor H1Bs is unmatched.
Everyone has good and bad in them, it's just the context you're interacting in and your own predispositions that brings out one or the other.
But no, I don't work for FAANG. I could say the same about any of my previous places of employment, none of which were even tech companies (unlike the current place).
But let's put all that aside - how does refusing to hire someone _leaving_ one of those companies improve the situation? Are you trying to establish an equilibrium where it becomes more costly in expectation to join one of those companies, because it might be harder to find another job afterwards? Good luck, I guess! I don't expect you'll move the needle much, especially given that there'll be quite a few people actively working against efforts like that.
It massively improves the situation. The kinds of people who work for these companies now are morally bankrupt. Everyone knows the score going in. They’re smart enough to pass l33t code but dumb enough to not make their own startups.
These are not the kinds of people you build groundbreaking companies with, they’re opportunistic parasites you’d do well to avoid.
I highly doubt, just based on sheer numbers and basic data, that the people working at your company are amazing humble people who care so much about the world. I doubt they are concerned with the homeless population and other disenfranchised groups. Vs in your case being all gung ho about the evils of FAANG that you are so above. The number of people who are against the current status quo enough and willing to sacrifice the comforts of their lives to fix the issue are so small. It’s not even a bad thing. That’s a hard thing to do. It’s much easier to point to a couple of big companies and say how evil they are and any one working for them.
Why is applying realistic negative values to behavior such as willful FAANG employment “judgmental”
You made the choice to work for a morally bankrupt megacorp because they paid you a crap ton of money. They paid your bills. You sold out, just own it and be a human instead of coping.
I didn’t say I have some kind of employee utopia, but we build real things that help real people and honestly do make the world a better more honest place.
> You made the choice to work for a morally bankrupt megacorp because they paid you a crap ton of money. They paid your bills. You sold out, just own it and be a human instead of coping.
Almost all of this can be tuned up a bit and be used against you. Unless you’re an incredible rarity that is doing amazing selfless work. I highly, highly doubt it.
It is much easier to point to easy “bad guys” and delude one self of one’s own work not being such great stuff either. Beyond that. This is a general moral stance. I’m sure if one was to compare you overall life, principles, morals, and a good hearted person working for a FAANG, your life wouldn’t be the one coming out ahead.
At least most humbler people can see “selling out” is not binary. You have sold out too. We all have.
—
Just realized. It appears you or whomever owns the business and companies. It is so incredibly easy to point to how self serving and it being the definition of selling out to gain more from the effort of others without doing equal amounts of work and effort. And no I’m not a socialist.
When I am considering whose resume is worth a call back for, there are a variety of signals:
- Is your resume even vaguely coherent
- Do you have things on your resume that suggest curiosity and the ability to get things done
- Are you likely to stick around long enough to be worth investing in you? So if you changed jobs every 1-2 years, you're going to lose a lot of points
- If you worked at a company which I don't think aligns with good treatment of the general public, how long did you work there? Was it early in your career, or late?
I explicitly codify that the hiring of former surveillance capitalism mercenaries is a fireable offense.
“But the equity was great” is not an excuse.
Anyone sub 40 was old enough to see the problems with Facebook and steer clear.
Working for them and “seeing the light” after years of collecting the blood money doesn’t give you any points with me.
The whole "won't say it to your face" is the absolute cherry on top. If you don't talk about it, how do you know they didn't join the company out of an overly optimistic sense of being able to change things from within, then quit when reality struck?
That excuse is maybe acceptable for someone who worked at Facebook 10 years ago, but someone who is still working there in the last couple of years? You might just be an employee but you’re willfully helping well-known behaviors.
This isn’t like some revelation of fraud that employees don’t know about. Countless articles have been written about the problems with Facebook and it has been in the crosshairs of national politicians several times.
At this point taking a job at Facebook is not really any different than accepting a marketing job at a cigarette company.
And I'm above the median for software devs in my area, but in a high CoL city in Canada.
Sure, we disqualified you when you listed them on your resume. You never got callbacks and probably blamed it on XYZ. You don’t understand, there’s a growing group of us in Silicon Valley that will never hire you if you have FAANG on your CV.
Similarly, I will not go to a company if people up the chain, including my immediate boss or the CEO are ex-FB.
If the CxOs are ex-FB I cannot expect it to be an ethical company.
But, that’s me.
They just don’t get it, we don’t want them. We believe they’re evil. We see them, and their skills, as a liability and not employable asset.
You seem to have an enormous chip on your shoulder towards FAANG companies. Did you work for one and fail spectacularly, or did you just get rejected a bunch of times?
How can the number of offers be indeterminate?
Also, who says I'm a "he"? FAANG companies have smart female engineers too (not nearly enough, but we're working on it)
Assuming you're saying this as a way to effectively double the pool of people your throwaway comes from, adding a bit to the entropy. Adding more writing style sample, and on another topic, probably does more to identify you than the extra bit of entropy reduced.
Plus, Facebook-the-app is far more disliked than Meta-the-company especially now that's a formal distinction. I imagine it's still relatively cool to work on Instagram, for example.
My impression is the opposite, not just in my technical circles. Facebook is boring. Meta is (arguably) malicious.
Not with that attitude. I refuse to hire anyone with FAANG on their resume and you can all do it too.
Most of you on here are all woo woo Linux this and FSF that, but you won’t put your money where your mouth is.
I won’t hire you if you work for these assholes, and I’d love for more of you to join me.
To the rest of you: Sure, take that $300k total comp bro. Good luck working outside SV. Better be worth it.
I’ve found some incredible people that fulfill me, and that’s freed me.
I used to be afraid of what people would think if I said what I felt. Now I can say what I believe with little consequence and to be honest? Not going back.
Edit: Just realized you've left like 20 comments on this thread that are all grinding the same axe.
But I am honest.
The reason you sound salty is because you evaluate candidates based on whatever perception you have about who they are instead of trying to understand who they are.
I’m sure you don’t care, sounds like it’s working for you, so in any event congrats on finding what makes you happy!
No, I’m making very real concrete moral judgements about you based on who you chose to associate with.
Shall we look down on NASA engineers because it’s part of the US government and pulls heavily from the US military/has overlap with the intelligence services/some of its top secret projects maybe do things I’m morally opposed about?
This kind of guilt by association is pretty bad and that’s the pushback you’re seeing in this thread. Humans are social animals. No social group will be without it’s flaw and larger groups have more and larger problems. This same line of reasoning is what fuels religious and political persecution. It’s barely acceptable in sports but that’s because it’s mostly harmless and in good fun until you hit riot levels of idiocy. Heck, the big tech companies are massive. They have so many individual teams that do totally unrelated stuff to the things you might have issues with.
As for the bitterness someone else noted, it’s not that you stated your values. You went further and made the claim that these engineers would have trouble finding jobs outside of SV because of the association. That part is blatantly false on its face. They may have trouble because of niche skills that aren’t relevant elsewhere because the scale doesn’t exist elsewhere. Are there some employers who won’t hire us because of our association with some company? Sure. So? I’ll not choose companies for myriad of arbitrary reasons too. That doesn’t mean I’ll struggle to find a job overall.
As an aside, I find it a bit telling that you lump Netflix into it and then your primary complaint about the company was that they canceled a show you are attached to. That’s not even about morals and is fairly arbitrary. This is why there’s feedback that it looks like you’re salty about something unrelated and note you’ve attached a larger reason behind it based on morals.
For example, Netflix infamously pulled Hasan Minhaj’s episode on Saudi Arabia from Saudi Arabian Netflix in exchange for allowing Orange is the New Black to stay. They want to, for lack of better words, morally corrupt societies and they do not care if that means more injustice and political suppression.
Their leadership has stated one of their intentions was to promote things from western culture in other countries in order to change the culture and society there. This is blatantly cultural imperialism and an extension of US soft power projection.
The media has that addictive quality of captivating masses. I see Netflix as like a tobacco or Juul company — profoundly damaging for the groups of people they seek to captivate. And maybe a comparison to an oil company is apt; Netflix certainly pollutes in terms of the minds and behaviors of people. Time and focus and cognition spent watching their shows pushed by their algorithms entrenches their position in a world where they do not care for their negative externalities.
How do you live with yourself?
Doesn’t change what I do however. You can also just remove FAANG from your CV.
To me, your comment appears to be firmly in the latter.
If that truly is the case, hope you figure out what you are resentful about because, unbeknownst to you, it is alienating those who see such language.
I agree with your values but I would still think twice about working with you based on the comments in your history.
I’m firm, firm in my belief that the people who have chosen of their own free will to work for FAANG have made moral compromises that disqualify them from my employment.
I don’t get how this is “sanctimonious”.
These people have made some absolutely terrible life choices, and alienation is a part of the consequence package that comes with those life choices.
Side personal note: Fuck you guys for getting rid of stargate.
Although maybe it’s evidence in my favor? They have to pay people that much to keep doing what they know is wrong…
There’s lots of reasons people get paid large sums.
But, all FAANG, really? What business are you in that's so noble by comparison?
Some big companies are also big FOSS contributors. Some people even join these companies to do mostly FOSS (like Golang, AOSP, React, VSC). So if there's a contradiction there, I don't think it's that obvious for everyone.
> I won’t hire you if you work for these assholes
Actually this might be a good strategy if you have too many applicants and you pay closer to the median of the market rather than the top 10%, since such applicants are less likely to accept your offer. So better stop the process early.
If everyone who works at Facebook is blacklisted by people like you, it would just make the company a worse influence on the world because there would be noone left there to make it better. So I would prefer if good people had the freedom to try to make an impact according to their will without fear that people such as yourself will then work hard to tarnish their reputations. Thanks!
Some background:
I'm quite pro-privacy. I go to great extents to marginalize cloud services in my life. I pay for services and am, by default, skeptical of free services. I consider this core to my ethos as a person. I was raised in a decently religious household, but went to a religious school, every day, for over a decade - I'm not a fan of "morals".
I'm also a senior engineer who does most of our hiring filtering for a fairly large firm. I will interview and hire Facebookers, Googlers, Amazonians etc. They're skilled, usually in singular domains, and passionate people - thus useful. Do I agree with their ethical compasses or excuses they've made for such work as a person? Absolutely not. However, their life is not my life, and I'm sure there's judgements they could equally pass on to me about my life and experiences if I were so brazen to (publicly) pass my judgement on to them.
There's some inevitable questions that come with my view:
How do you trust them given the orientation of their ethical compass? Simple. My company (and team!) has our own ethical frameworks and principles. If they don't abide by them my judgement isn't needed - the company will terminate them.
How do you listen to talk about ethics or morals from them? I don't. The great thing about ethical frameworks is they're usually set by people far above me who have a much higher view of the landscape than I do. Morals are a cathartic replacement for ethical frameworks when someone needs to feel good about themselves; thus they're pretty irrelevant when ethical frameworks are abound.
Among all your potential future interviewers, the percentage of those who would judge you negatively for a Facebook work experience is vanishingly small - be mindful of the HN echo chamber. Besides, you probably don't want to work in those places anyway. (Not that it's necessarily bad to hate Facebook, but if your manager can't separate their political belief from reviewing candidates, would you want to work there?)
It’s very challenging, but you should definitely get in and try it yourself. Move to the Bay if you haven’t done so yet, it will keep your motivation up.
Almost certainly; if not, it's not because they didn't make enough to be one. Of course, "past performance is no guarantee of future returns."
My thoughts? Screw ‘em. They aren’t worth your skill set. I’m not joking, fuck these people. The paycheck they give you won’t make you happy, what will however is not working for these scumbags.
I don't personally like the company or Zuck or some of the things it does very much, but they aren't the devil. I could say the same about probably most corporations. Where do you work that's pure as the driven snow?
It's not about 100% purity. Just not doing this one little, tiny, fundamental-to-their-entire-business thing.
It's never that simple.
What corporations are okay to work for, in this unidimensional worldview? Exxon Mobil? Philip Morris? Pfizer? Dupont? Boeing? Nestle? BHP? Fox News? Volkswagen? Nike? HSBC? Is it okay if your employer's owners or executives have appeared in the panama papers? Are or have been on the boards of FAANG companies or own stock in those companies? Are you allowed to buy Google or Apple products and use their services?
What about companies that collect and trade on the personal information and habits they collect about their customers, just not on the scale of Facebook or Google? Are they okay? Even if they would like to be able to sell more personal information but don't presently have the means to would that be okay?
So where do you work? What products and services do you buy?
Note this wasn't the poster I initially asked the question of. It was someone else just coming in and trying to tell me "it's that simple". My reply was not whataboutism, it was explaining why it's not "that simple".
And it wasn't a rhetorical question, I really want to know, from someone who does have this very simple "line", whether it's okay to use Apple or Google or Facebook services or products, whether it's okay to work for companies whose owners or executives own stock? Whether it's okay to vote for politicians who take money from them or who themselves own the stock?
This isn't whataboutism, it is exploring the consequences of this moral position.
I'd personally love to know what everyone actually works on. In real life I know people who work on guided missiles and ICBM-adjacent tech who manage to sleep well at night.
And FB-the-social-network is also great in theory: groups help you make friends and go deep into very niche interests. Without it, I would be a more normal, less interesting person. Now, with the join of a group, you can immerse yourself in a hobby even if absolutely nobody in a hundred miles shares that interest. It helps people go deeper on what they care about, thus becoming 'weirder' or a more fulfilled version of themselves. And helps people get ads they care about.
Let me give you another point of view:
Ads benefit the already wealthy corporations above small businesses that cannot pay billions for ads and add another lay on to inequality.
"Reinventing the wheel" is sometimes necessary for innovation, often called disrupting the market.
Also, I believe that endless consumerism is actually killing the planet and ads (no only banner ads but also product placements) play a huge part in making people feel insecure and less worthy just because they don't have the newest gadget.
I kinda agree on the consumerism thing, but that's more a reflection of our society than evil genius advertisers.
Putin would love to be as evil as the US or even China, but hasn't got the scratch. Russia has its billionaire oligarchs, but the US has probably a hundred times as many. China murders more innocents every day than Putin does rabble rousers in a year.
Zuck isn't Putin. He isn't Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs. He isn't even Bolsanaro, or Duterte. He would like to be.
What about Rupert Murdoch and Fox News? Anti-vaxxers are why we are still in this mess. Yet I constantly see Covid misinformation on Facebook. We could discuss the genocide in Myanmar, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook's psyops campaign against their users, etc.
Maybe Zuck isn't the devil. But he sure as hell is irresponsible at being the CEO of Facebook. If you can't tame the scale of your operation then you shouldn't be that size to begin with. The collateral damage is too significant.
> pure as the driven snow
There are degrees. There are literally thousands of places that are not Fox News, Exxon, Nestle, or Facebook. Especially in the tech world. You can't toss your resume out on the street in Silicon Valley without it landing in the lap of a recruiter. I'd start with "didn't contribute to genocide" or "didn't think a psyops campaign on our users was okay" is a good place to start. I've certainly never worked at such a place.
I don't think he's the devil either. I do know the nature of their game though. It's to divide people. They're doing a great job of it.
> Anti-vaxxers are why we are still in this mess. Yet I constantly see Covid misinformation on Facebook. We could discuss the genocide in Myanmar, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook's psyops campaign against their users, etc.
I’ve always made sure to hit top-tier pay and a FAANG entry on your CV is an instant disqualification.
Being mediocre is easy.
I’d rather have 2-3 expert engineers making 2x pay than 10 mediocre engineers making 1x pay.
There is a sweet spot where you can scale with one expert in each domain, and if that “expert” is well compensated they can replace an entire engineering dept.
I know 2x is still ridiculously high, even 1x is a very reasonable amount to live on, but 2x doesn't compare to 5x.
The problem is that, you sound like are expecting me to respect you.
You sold out, sure you got some more cash for your trouble so congrats I guess. I just want you to be honest about what you did.
It's not like that in most of the world.
In many places even senior software engineers have to choose between:
- nasty companies (advertisement, finance and trading, faangs, real estate speculation, cryptocurrencies, gambling and worse) that provide a living salary and provide a decent working environment
- few ok-ish companies that can offer a low salary, very unremarkable conditions and stability
- start your company or consultancy and make 0 money
- regret working in software and open a grocery store
- be unemployed
Let’s say your skill is worth $125k avg.
I’m not exactly interested in the people who can be that, and there’s a lot of them. I want the people who can make me feel like $250k is a steal etc.
Meta is better than Alphabet about that, though.
Experience:
- You spent those two years becoming very skillful at some language where you can express invariants/constraints neatly, and know how to structure programs in something like Java, or modern C++ (OCaml, Scala, Rust, whatever, is fine)
- You are the kind of person who spent those two years with very little time road-blocked, i.e. every time you got stuck you found a way out.
- You have a conceptual understanding of low-latency
Lots of people do find the comp attractive, so I find that leading with it hits poor outcomes, so sadly I won't post a job link, but you can either email me and I promise to respond or you can stick something in your profile and I will look tomorrow.
I'm probably not the right fit for the job, I'm happily a lowly kernel developer with 20 years experience on half the salary and not in SV/SF. But I do appreciate the answer and maybe your post leads to a mutually beneficial arrangement with someone here.
Didn't work out for other reasons but I was embarrassed.
Although as another aside, I know some kernel devs who do very low level work for HFT. You're not in Chicago or NYC so maybe you're not in that game. Or at least you're happy to keep a healthy distance from the coalface.
In which way does it transpire during interviews / once they join your company?
It's not what you want to do with your life, but I've had jobs at suspect places while I was getting established (Palantir) and lots and lots of others have too. It's better than having worked somewhere people haven't heard of (ie above replacement value) and much better than having worked somewhere with a reputation for doing poor technical work.
Rather than focusing on how an association with FB would be viewed on your resume -- you may want to ask yourself whether that company lives up to your own moral standards, and whether (just to yourself) you would feel proud of yourself for working there.
Many people have come to the conclusion that it is an extremely cynical and unethical company:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Criticisms_and_contro...
And that even aside from the specific episodes of abusive behavior, that its core product is basically toxic:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036519/facebook...
Meanwhile, some of the founder's behavior in his early adult years can best be described as nakedly sociopathic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg#Early_years
Whether any of this matters to you is ... up to you. But it is definitely a question you may want to investigate before you start working there -- rather than after you've signed the dotted line.
Being as asking your recruiter or your interviewers these questions -- isn't likely to get you very far.
I can't see that affecting someone's employment.
Your points are why someone shouldn't vote for Mark for president not why someone shouldn't take a job.
... acted like a sociopathic in some people's opinion?
What's with the attempt at dissimulation here? The issue is what the guy did. Not "some people's opinion" of what he did.
I can't see that affecting someone's employment.
I can't see how the founder's ethical standards (expressed not just through what they did 16 year ago, but in the present day) wouldn't affect your experience working at their company.
The fish rots from the head, as the saying goes.
Why stop at facebook. Throwing chairs should make Microsoft a dead zone. Steve behaviour at Apple in the 80s should force you to return your iphone. Oracle, Amazon are not angels either.. Many of those small places are much worse..
So we're going in circles now.
Any and all issues raised about a company's ethical behavior in the current day (for example, outsourcing to suppliers with deplorable labor practices) are equivalent to stories of a founder's poor interpersonal skills from decades ago, in your view.