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Comment by fartcannon | Hacker News Reader

I sure would think twice about hiring from Facebook. It's like hiring someone from a weapons company that targets teenagers.

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.

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I wouldn't work at a place that doctrineer. Seems like a red flag to me that the company is overly consumed with politics.

Maybe they are consumed with ethics, rather than politics. As this article (and many others) explains, Meta does not act in an ethical manner with their actions towards users, the government, competitors, etc.

Why wouldn't a future employer take that into account?

I wouldn't mind hiring an ex-FBer, the organization I represent has a very precise ethical compass. I also believe I wouldn't be able to match their salaries, theyd be on-board because they share that same vision and ethics.

If you were a weapons company (and really, most successful big IT corps are in this metaphor) and you need specific targeting (you do) then you absolutely would. Perhaps you have trouble with their moral fiber, but you would then basically be alone in the business world. Corporations hate integrity in their workers (except when it comes to keeping corporate secrets).

They're making new talent every day. No need to hire the tainted.

If you work in this field (and if you're looking at these candidates, you are at least adjacent to it) then you are the tainted. Not hiring someone else because they had the audacity to also work in that sector is hypocritical.

You're right, I was too harsh. Everyone gets the same ethical review.

Good luck explaining to your boss that you can't fill the hiring rec because, even though you found qualified candidates, you disliked the fact that they had the audacity to be employed by a tech company you don't like and so they're "tainted". In expectation it's better for the business to lay you off and get someone not ideologically possessed to do hiring, in the same way it's better for the business to not have racist hiring managers.

It is not at all similar to racism, and you should not pretend corporate dehumanising is something to be expected or even logical. These demands are wrong and we are correct to talk about them as such.

Being unable to find the best candidates because you have racial prejudices or prejudices towards anyone with prior employment at the F in FAANG are both bad for business. You have a massive systematic blind spot that will make your company less competitive relative to peers because you have a personal ax to grind.

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.

You are again enshrining (purely) fiscal motivation as expected and logical. I'm sorry, I just don't agree. I doubt you will start seeing it my way. Let's just leave it at that.

All I've said is that your ideological prejudices will cause you to have more difficulty finding good quality candidates (you are selecting against things correlated with quality) and you'll be paying more for equal quality candidates as a result.

> smaller labor force you are willing to hire and a lower quality one.

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.

Given the nebulous notion of a set of high quality talent (assume quality is a scalar and they're the people above a given threshold), it's pretty clear that:

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.

curious where do you work?

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