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Comment by yawnxyz | Hacker News Reader

This kind of stuff puts me off from wanting to work at FB. If I got really good at working with these tools (or fell in love with this tooling), I wouldn't really be able to go back to working "in the real world"

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For me the barrier to working at Facebook is the fact their product is causing so much harm in our world, from elections to the environment to mental health to the breakdown of social capital.

I know I’ll be downvoted for taking an ethical rather than financial or technological position, but ethics matter. Especially in technology and finances.

It's also doing a lot of good. It's in the nature of any broadcasting and communications platform

Qualify "good".

"drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"

Lmao that is ridiculously unfair since you're starting with a near-universally agreed bad thing.

Better analogy augmenting yours: just cars. Accidents between cars or cars and pedestrians kill lots of people every year.

This works with every tech. Phones have made it easier to coordinate crimes. Printing press and even televisions made mass propaganda possible. There are always tradeoffs.

"driving helps a ton of people get around, but sometimes people drive drunk and kill other people, so it's definitely unforgivingly bad"

Bad enough you won't catch me working for a car company. Excellent example really.

The problem with facebook isn't that individual users sometimes do bad things on it's platform.

As much as I dislike Meta, this is a very unfair comparison.

Facebook has done a lot of harm to the world, but it also has done plenty of good.

Aside from that, your analogy is incredibly weird. Do people drive drunk to... work? Who does that?

Never actually saw the skip parent post quantify harm vs good and yet.

Ethics matters, but not everyone think that Facebook causes "so much harm in our world". At least, not more than other corporations.

It's true. Exiting FB's incredible in-house information & developer tools culture is for many people one of the hardest things about leaving. Ex-fb groups maintain lists of potential "in the wild" replacements for each tool but very few are up to the task (pun intended).

It doesn't sound different than working anywhere else for an extended time. You get used to a certain way of doing things.

I still miss tasks, five plus years later.

> If I got really good at working with these tools (or fell in love with this tooling), I wouldn't really be able to go back to working "in the real world"

SWEs need to learn new tools all the time. This shouldn't be a concern. Besides, it's not like "the real world" only use a single tool. Each company has their own tweaks, even those using open source stuff.

Big tech has _way_ better tools than what most companies use. At Amazon so many concerns were taken care of for you like:

* How do I setup a new project? * How do I build code? * How do I pull internal dependencies? * How do I publish artifacts?

Every company makes a horrible copy of these systems with off-the-shelf tools. At Amazon there were certainly flaws in the internal tools, but overall it was much better than the "real world".

I'm not quite sure if it is true that those tools are better than "the real world". There are many options for each of the steps that you are mentioned, old systems mixed with new solutions, so developers have to learn all of them and onboard to each of the system that they decided to use. While they provide some templates and scripts here and there to solve these problems, most of them are not production ready, and doesn't provide a holistic experience. I work for smaller companies before and the platform teams did a much better job to provide a unified experience across those steps.

What you are assuming those tools are completely unique and there aren't any open source alternatives, which is not the case

Isn't this the Google curse? Companies hire an engineer who was at Google and suddenly find the Google engineer is building out all the Google internal infrastructure within the new company and because You Aren't Google, it sucks.

Most (all?) of these are open source and can be used outside of Meta infra. https://github.com/facebook/sapling

> Mononoke is the server-side component of Sapling SCM.

> While it is used in production within Meta, it currently does not build in an

> open source context and is not yet supported for external usage.

You can still use sapling with existing Git repos

Unpopular opinion.

May be this is a feature not a bug? They want to filter out some Resume-Driven developers.

… lock developers into the ecosystem and prevent them leaving, since their knowledge is not so valuable elsewhere.

A bit cynical, but maybe not so unpopular opinion.

Meta as business is all about locking users to the ecosystem.

Same thing applies to most government jobs. The tech is so out of date / niche that you become un-hire-able with those skills.

Unless you hit a job on some consult firm which offers special knowledge about all these!

No see, what happens is you leave then go to some other company and complain about how shitty their tools are then build a crappy half-baked version of whatever you had at $BigTechCorp and when shit hits the fan you boomerang back to $BigTechCorp for a sweet promo and raise.

I avoid hiring people coming from places like this for reasons similar. Extends past tools into libraries and frameworks, databases and other middleware, developer and business workflows. Only knowing proprietary stuff is a handicap. Assuming that proprietary stuff is superior because the big ad companies prefer it is even worse.

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