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Comment by aerovistae | Hacker News Reader

This comment conveys to me Asperger's levels of superrational thinking and lack of empathy. "How could someone be resentful at losing their job to a nonsensical decision making process? How could someone possibly be frustrated to be shown zero gratitude for their very profitable work for someone else? I simply don't understand, on paper it is the logical outcome." Okay spock.

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I appreciate the sentiment behind your post, but in the future could we all please not conflate "neurodivergent people's difficulties in expressing empathy" with "being a jerk on the internet"?

I've had many gentle, kind, thoughtful and loving friends, classmates and coworkers who have lived with autism, and it's unfair and unkind to compare them to internet trolls. Thanks!

I think the distinction is between 'feels bad' and 'makes this post'. I totally get why someone would feel bad about this, even despite the upfront agreement and the paycheck. I don't really get the post, especially if this can impact future career prospects (I've seen people judged for less). I've had negative emotional reactions to things that were entirely my fault and acted irrationally to them, but only privately. I think the distinction here is not in his negative feelings, those are easily to empathize with, but in the post itself and how it publicly portrays those feelings.

He can feel however he likes; nothing compelled him to post it publicly for all the world to read and comment.

> How could someone be resentful at losing their job to a nonsensical decision making process? How could someone possibly be frustrated to be shown zero gratitude for their very profitable work for someone else?

He chose to work for Mark Zuckerberg. He wishes he could continue working for Mark Zuckerberg, in order to make Mark Zuckerberg richer. Perhaps you can understand why I don't have a lot of empathy.

Nor did anything compel you to read it, or post whiny comments here!

I did choose to work for Facebook. The pitch I was given seven years ago was that (1) the mission of the company is to lower costs of building community and connecting people; running an ad-funded social media platform is the means to that end. That's not a mission that is super important to me, but I can respect it. And (2) FB is the company that is investing heavily in advancing modern developer tools outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. That is a mission that is important to me.

Your statement that I wish I could continue to work for and enrich Zuck is false. I was regretted attrition.

Your lack of empathy is clear.

I don't think my comments are particularly whiny; that comes across as a "no, you" response. I'll accept callous but I don't wish you harm, in fact I hope you find success and fulfillment in your post-Facebook career.

> Your statement that I wish I could continue to work for and enrich Zuck is false. I was regretted attrition.

Perhaps you should make it more clear in the blog post that you left of your own accord. People who are not familiar with the Facebook org chart might not understand that when you say "My team — Probabilistic Programming Languages — and indeed entire “Probability” division were laid off a couple weeks ago" that you yourself are not included in that set of people who were laid off.

Perhaps you should make it more clear in the blog post that you left of your own accord.

No kidding. I just spent 30 minutes reading both Eric's blog post and this HN thread with a (very) wrong idea in mind.

> He wishes he could continue working for Mark Zuckerberg, in order to make Mark Zuckerberg richer.

He never said that this is why he wants to continue working at Meta. People do have other reasons for wanting to work there.

> He can feel however he likes; nothing compelled him to post it publicly for all the world to read and comment.

He has a blog. He can post any thing he likes, any time he likes. As can anyone here who can manage to put together a blog.

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