- having Facebook/Meta experience on your resume starts hurting you against others who don't
- selling your company to Facebook/Meta or product on it hurts your brand and perceived to be immoral
Is Facebook/Meta the Tobacco company of our generation? The harmful effects of smoking were covered up for almost a century, much as the impact of mass remote dopamine manipulation is not as prolific.
Why would it hurt you? They're at the forefront of technical challenges of scaling an immensely popular product and developing internal tooling. These aren't necessarily applicable everywhere, but they're incredibly valuable. If anything, I think the fact that they're working at a place where a very vocal minority of their peers jeers at is a positive signal. They can withstand a snarky comment from some hipster at a party to potentially work on interesting technical challenges (money is good too).
> - selling your company to Facebook/Meta or product on it hurts your brand and perceived to be immoral
I think you're in a bubble. Facebook is a very popular brand name outside of a very vocal minority of internet commenters and tech journalists. They have a few of the most popular consumer apps in the world with 3 billion total users across the products. When you consider their products in open source like GraphQL and React, it's even more.
I get it, you don't like Facebook. But don't gaslight yourself into thinking they're some toxic entity that everyone hates and is on the verge of irrelevance
Edit: I've had a chance to think about it after a cup of coffee and I take back my comment. Everyone deserves a second chance. Everyone gets the same ethical review.
I might add that prior employment at Facebook is very positively correlated with engineering talent -- you are not just selecting against something orthogonal to engineering talent, you are actually selecting against something that indicates they are a good engineer, meaning you have a smaller labor force you are willing to hire and a lower quality one. Go tell HR and your boss that you have prejudices against people from Facebook and you are going to discriminate against them in hiring as a consequence, see how well that goes for you.
The first part is true. The second is a leap, plenty of high quality talent actively chooses to not work at FB, or happens to not work there. By not selecting from the former FB pool I have not lowered the overall quality of my labor pool. I have increased the integrity standards though.
len(set(high quality talent) - set(ever employed at facebook)) < len(set(high quality talent) - set(refuses to work at facebook))
Note that "refuses to work at facebook" doesn't select for engineering talent, while "ever employed at facebook" explicitly does, meaning the average talent in the set containing facebook employees is higher.
Given all this, you have to fill the roll (or why hire?) and you don't have infinite time (there is a cost associated with every day you've not filled the role relative to it being filled). Given those constraints, if you limit your pool due to prejudice the optimal outcome is for you to hire a lower quality person versus the situation if you were not prejudiced; if you hire the same quality person, it means you likely paid for it in another form, namely the cost associated with the role being unfilled longer.
Why wouldn't a future employer take that into account?
Anecdotally, I had a friend who used to work at Monsanto and he told me of a few very uncomfortable social encounters when people learned where he worked. It made him question whether he should find a job somewhere else. I don't think we're there with Facebook, the general public mostly seems focused on misinformation rather than privacy but who knows what the future holds.
I've never ever experienced any other popular system/service so broken.
I am sure behind it all is complex overengineered cathedral of frameworks, systems and libraries. Some of it may be even cool. But the final result is piece of shit, no matter how I look on it, no matter how many chances I give it.
Compared to quality of say various google apps is... well incomparable. So yeah, having this on resume is underwhelming, even without looking at moral topics.
It's quite bizarre that you would go out of your way to try and gaslight me that Facebook's toxicity is my own imagination.
Do you work for facebook in some way, sold a company to them or own their stocks?
* They went through one of the hardest interview loops in the industry
* They went through one of the hardest promotion ladders in the industry
* They solve all problems at huge scale out of the box
* If you aren't paying top of market and they're still interested, they're most likely financially comfortable from their years at Meta and won't be jumping ship every 18 months for a 20% raise
I'd say that's pretty attractive as a hiring manager
Even then, why do we assume they were promoted, or solved "all problems", or have some altruistic reason to make less?
The only thing we know is that they were hired by Meta sometime in the past.
Would you penalize a mechanical engineer for having Volkswagen on their resume because you read about the VW emissions scandal? Should we refuse to hire anyone who interned for politicians who were later involved in scandals?
Of course not, because it’s dumb to punish former engineers for something a previous employer did over which they had no control.
Good engineers are good engineers. Period. Trying to get revenge on a company you don’t like by forcing former employees in unrelated departments to suffer the consequences of your anger is ridiculous.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830414-800-how-did-...
"Volkswagen programmed its on-board software to detect when cars with its TDI diesel engine were undergoing an emissions test, using information from the steering, brakes and accelerator. It then tweaked the engine settings to minimise levels of nitrogen oxides (NOx)."
connecting people?
This kind of thinking, first and foremost, will only result in a culture of fear (eg: what company will be next to be unsafe on my resume?) It also is a quiet signal that certain people have given up on the long fight to change things. Changing things is hard, but it is just that - a long exhausting process. It requires patience and changing people's minds and perspectives, not by strong arming, but by aligning incentives in a direction that's better for the majority.
Why not both? They certainly are small players in a big machine, but the reality is that any engineer capable of getting a job in FAANG has plenty of other options that are less morally dubious. If they chose FAANG in spite of this they either don't believe it's immoral or are willing to look the other way for money/prestige.
I certainly wouldn't advocate for writing people off entirely based on their work history (after all, it could be that they went in not realizing the extent of the harm and that's why they're leaving), but I do think it's a factor worth considering.
Do people typically put that specific information on their resume? Alphabet employs over a hundred thousand people, 99% of them won't have looked at that at all. I personally don't work at a FAANG but I'd take the chance if I got it - the bucks are so monstrous compared to my current compensation it would be borderline unethical to not accept a position when I know how much it could help my family.
Part of the playbook of any addiction-based industry is to encourage outrage at the prospect of the product being restricted; it builds their moat and delays the resolution of the problem (allowing their revenue streams to continue for longer).
Problem is those companies start to attract people that thrive in toxic cultures, worsening the problem.
Depends if one is a React, Folly, BOLT, OCaml, GHC, clang contributor or not.
It already does. Meta is reportedly paying more to hire talent because of their reputation.[0]
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-pays-brand-tax-hire...
I'd say never. There will always be some company more than glad to hire high-merit developers without paying a premium. As a result, you know that all these Meta developers you're rejecting are going straight in the arms of your competitor. This tends to balance the market.
Yes. It is a digital pharmaceuticals drugs company and it was 'addictive' for the previous generation back then. Not so for this generation as it has no effect on them. Facebook™ and Instagram™ do not work on them anymore.
The new digital crack / cocaine is TikTok™, manufactured by ByteDance. Another generation will find another 'hit' to be addicted to once they get bored off on this one.
Rinse and repeat.